With his father dead and his stepmother marrying a man he detests, Max runs away from home, taking his late uncle's astrogation manuals.

At the guild's headquarters, Max is disappointed to find that he had not been named as an heir, but he receives his uncle's substantial security deposit for his manuals.

When Eldreth "Ellie" Coburn visits her pet, an alien, semi-intelligent "spider puppy" that Max has befriended, she learns that he can play three-dimensional chess, and challenges him to a game.

When Max detects a critical error in his real-time calculations leading up to a transition (an instantaneous jump to another region of space), neither the captain nor Assistant Astrogator Simes believe him, and the ship becomes lost.

Vastly outnumbered by the natives, the humans are forced to attempt a perilous return to known space by reversing the erroneous transition.

[2] Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised it for its "good character-development, rousing adventure-telling, and brilliant creation of several forms of extra-Terrestrial life".

[5] Surveying Heinlein's juvenile novels, Jack Williamson described Starman Jones as "a classic example of the bildungsroman pattern" and noted that "with its bold symbolism, the book makes a universal appeal".

Despite "coincidence and occasional melodrama" in the plotting, Williamson concluded that "the novel is a fine juvenile [which] reflects hopes and fears we all have known".

[6] Damon Knight wrote[7] that in Starman Jones Heinlein is doing something more than just earning a living at the work he does supremely well: he's preparing a whole generation – the generation that will live to see the year 2000 – for the Age of Space that's as real to him now as it will be, must be, to them.Although Heinlein rarely permitted dramatic adaptations of his work, he authorized Douglas L. Lieberman to stage Starman Jones at the Goodman Children's Theater in Chicago.

In 1974, Avon Books published the script as part of the anthology Contemporary Children's Theater edited by Betty Jean Lifton.