panguitch's Full Review: Robert A. Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein, 1959
Juan Rico just went with his friend to the recruiting office to offer moral support. He didn't plan on enlisting. But a pretty girl from school is there, signing up to be a starship pilot. And, well, before he knows it he's joined the Mobile Infantry, a kind of interstellar paratroopers.
He was supposed to take over the family business. Now his father won't speak to him. It's almost a relief to leave for Camp Arthur Currie. But boot camp is more grueling than Rico ever imagined. He hardly has time to notice that a war has begun. Until he gets out, receives his first assignment, and starts seeing action. Compared to the alien "Bugs" they're fighting, his drill sergeant was a teddy bear.
You might expect a book like this to focus on the Bugs, with lots of action sequences. In fact the action comes only intermittently, and the Bugs only get significant screen time at the end. Drill sergeants, however, occupy center stage for most of the novel. This book isn't about an interstellar war, it's about an interstellar military.
Patterns of Force
It's entertaining to read about how Rico and the Mobile Infantry drop onto enemy planets from orbit, bounce around in their high-tech power armor and blow things up. Quite a bit of attention is given to the details of their technology and tactics. But Starship Troopers is surprisingly light on plot. It's more like a memoir, a window on this militaristic society through Rico's experiences.
Remember those episodes of the original Star Trek where Captain Kirk &co would discover a planet peopled by futuristic Nazis or imperial Romans? That's kind of what the world of Starship Troopers looks like. Only veterans are granted citizenship and the right to vote. Criminals are flogged in public. For that matter, soldiers who transgress military regulations are also flogged, sometimes only after their secretly soft-hearted superiors finagle their way around situations that would normally require the soldier's execution.
Rico himself is flogged for an error in judgment during simulated combat. But the torture of boot camp and the harrowing of combat obtain a positive, virtuous aspect in his mind. More than the bond of brotherhood he fervently feels for his fellow soldiers, this sense of virtue, of civic duty, looms over the entire novel. It's explored in depth during philosophical discussions with drill sergeants, officers, and through flashback lectures from Rico's History and Moral Philosophy class in high school.
The Philosophical Soldier (and Reader)
These mentors preach a right-wing doctrine that is sure to repel some readers. The solution to juvenile delinquency is corporal punishment. Duty must never be shirked: "If it has to be done, a man--a real man--shoots his own dog himself." And war is justified in a lengthy discourse on the legitimacy of violence in dispute resolution, as evidenced by the whole of human history.
My own reaction to Starship Troopers is complex. As a conservative much of the thinking resonates with me. At the same time it makes me queasy. It goes too far, becoming caricature. For instance, while I agree with the criticism of Western democracy and its unbalanced emphasis on individual rights to the neglect of individual responsibility ("people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears"), I find frightening the idea that only by military service can one prove the subordination of one's own interests to those of one's society, and thus merit citizenship. Nor do I believe humans are analogous to dogs and must have moral instinct beaten into them.
Of course, just because Heinlein wrote these arguments doesn't mean he believed them fully. But he certainly treats his near-fascist world with sympathy--you can hardly write from the perspective of a dedicated soldier without portraying his profession positively. It's this positive tone that so infuriates certain readers, those who might not blanch at extending sympathy to the most depraved character, but for whom the sympathy Heinlein extends is offensive.
As Damon Knight explains, "To a dedicated pacifist, 'War is horrible!' is a basic premise and is interpreted literally. It follows that no recognizably human being could be a professional soldier. But professional soldiers exist. Therefore they must be essentially depraved and brutalized people."
Controversy, Legacy, and the Audacity of Thought
Heinlein certainly does not give equal time to the opposition as he lays out his Spartan utopia. But neither is he as simplistic as some critics would have it. The novel unavoidable feels militaristic because it is the first person perspective of a professional soldier. But while Heinlein, a peace-time veteran, inarguably romanticizes this men-out-of-boys military, he also makes clear that the government runs the military, not vice versa, and Rico and his fellow boots are not warmly received when they go on leave in the bars of Seattle.
Starship Troopers has been criticized for being sexless, a vestige of its original positioning as a juvenile novel, which positioning leads to debates about the appropriateness of placing in children's hands what Dean McLaughlin described as a "book-length recruiting poster." The book can also be seen as chauvinist, but while women aren't allowed in the infantry they do pilot ships in combat. In any case, I felt there was nothing undue given its era of publication. Still, it's a very male book, one that almost begs for psychoanalytic reductionism.
A cornerstone of military SF, Starship Troopers popularized the concept of power armor, advocated an all-volunteer military, and foreshadowed the military doctrine of "shock and awe." But chunky polemics occupy the bulk of its pages. Anthony Boucher, the founder of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, complained that the novel was moralizing and lacked both story and character (the serialized version appeared in that magazine a year after Boucher stepped down).
I agree that the plot is a weakness and the military father figures blur together. But if science fiction is the literature of ideas, it strikes me as strange to complain that Heinlein dwells too much on the ideas. In fact I think that Starship Troopers does what the best science fiction ought to do. It pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions with what, to some readers, is an alien point of view, and forces us to form our own opinion of its arguments. It deserves more than to be dismissed with one-word labels.
"What's wrong with advocating that war is noble, beautiful, and necessary? I agree wholeheartedly, any such view is pure horse apples. But I will not go along with the 'liberal' contention that no one has a right to advocate the eating of horse apples." - Poul Anderson
For a classic debate among SF luminaries over Starship Troopers, check out: http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/PITFCS/pitfcsintro.html
This controversial classic of military adventure by New York Times bestselling author Heinlein is back--the story of a young recruit of the future who...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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