Jovian n. 1

His notion is to mount a great mirror upon the earth, and give flashing signals to Mars and Jupiter. He thinks that if these are repeated regularly, in batches of a certain number, the Martians or the Jovians, as the case may be, will come to discern that they mean something, and will return them; and that thus a code will be eventually agreed upon, so that we may talk across the solar system just as we do across a field.

Now, let us suppose ourselves philosophers come, we will say, from the planet Jupiter, on a mission intrusted to us by the Jovians, to examine and report upon the nature of the creatures which people the four inferior planets, Terra, Venus, Mercury, and Mars.

If the Jovians and the rest have been able to quit their planets, they have probably succeeded in discovering the invisible sides of their satellites.

In other words, it is a full description of the Jovians.

Barclay was a type of man seen rather rarely on the minor planets. He was a Jovian.

No Jovian had ever visited another world in the System, and vice versa. They were neutrals with a strict mutual code of hands off with all other planets.

I was knocked out the first time when we finally put the eetees—Venerians and Martians and Outer Jovians—into the Grand Assembly. But the nonhuman peoples are still there and I came back.

The robots are taken by the Jovians to be humans, and prove so superior to the Jovians that the Jovian superiority complex crumbles.

The thematic essence of ‘Call Me Joe’ is the stepwise transformation of the protagonist’s consciousness from that of a human inside the body of a Jovian to that of a human become a Jovian on a psychological, moral, and even spiritual level.