Publisher's Synopsis
From the moment Jerry Blaine blasted off from Earth to compete in the Armstrong Classics, famed throughout the Solar System, his space ship, the "Last Hope," was obviously jinxed. Was it just bad luck? Or were the villainous Martians working against him, laying a trap for him at every turn? It was 2170 and the year of the eighteenth Armstrong Classic, the interplanetary rocket race that covered immense orbits and touched on every planet inhabited by man. On its outcome hung the prestige of each rival world. Mars had won the three previous Classics by what Earth considered unfair trickery, and the saying went that "only a fool would enter such a race and only a genius or a Martian could win." But Jerry was neither a fool, a genius, nor a Martian; he was only a boy of seventeen who never thought of becoming a rocket-race jockey until he accidentally found he was one!
Jerry's courage and daring as he fights his way through space, testing the very fuel that had killed his father; his clashes with wily Martians who would stop at nothing to gain first place for the glory of Mars; his near crash-landings; his terrifying experiences on odd, airless worlds combine to create a yarn that will keep readers spellbound from start to finish. Thrilling in its predictions of a world to come, vivid in its descriptions of uncharted space, ROCKET JOCKEY has a flavor of authenticity that only time can dispute.
Lester del Rey (1915 - 1993) was an American science fiction author and editor. He was the author of many books in the juvenile Winston Science Fiction series, and the editor at Del Rey Books, the fantasy and science fiction imprint of Ballantine Books, along with his fourth wife Judy-Lynn del Rey.
