buffoonery's Full Review: Robert A. Heinlein - Starship Troopers
My guess is the most of the population’s exposure to the title Starship Troopers is the silly if entertaining sci-fi film of the mid-1990’s in which a rock faced Casper Van Diem and top-heavy Denise Richards fought scads and scads of spiders from hell. It had some good bits, yes, but on the whole, not one of your better examples of the genre.
What most people don’t know, however, is that the film was based on the controversial 1950s novel of the same name. Why controversial? Answer: read below.
Robert A. Heinlein is arguably the most important science-fiction writer of the 20th century. The winner of numerous Hugo awards (science fiction’s highest literary award), he wrote an enormous number of short stories and novels ranging from his Future History to juvenile novels of the 50s to his very well-known Stranger in a Strange Land (“I Grok Spock”, anyone?) and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. A Naval Academy graduate and engineer by trade, Heinlein’s work combined believable science with an extraordinary imagination. In his later years, he turned to politics and, now, he is often mentioned in the same paragraph as Ayn Rand for his libertarian political and social views.
Starship Troopers was supposed to be issued as another book in the juvenile series, but Scribner’s rejected it because of its controversial politics and subject matter that seemed too mature for adolescents. One can read this book on two levels, then: one as a straightforward exemplar of military science fiction in which the spaceship-borne Mobile Infantry shoots up and is shot up by arachnids from Klendathu, and another as Heinlein’s creation of a society and ethos in which citizenship is dependent upon military service and we don't care if you like it or not!
The novel begins with a quite thrilling episode in which the Mobile Infantry cause assorted mayhem in a city inhabited by the “Skinnies”, a civilization that may be allied with the bugs so they’re getting a taste of things to come. Rockets, missiles, flamethrowers and other stuff that goes “boom!” rock and roll everywhere and it’s enough to make one want to enlist.
Switch scenes and we see the protagonist, Juan “Johnny” Rico, living his rich-kid existence in Buenos Aires. He enlists to impress his girlfriend, and we then go through a long training camp sequence in which we are introduced to the ways and means of the MI, the only trade that the underqualified Johnny could get himself into. More stuff happens, and to make a long story short, Johnny, who by now has drunk the kool-aid, is sent off to Officer Candidate School.
It is here where Heinlein’s politics really emerge. He provides justification for citizenship predicated upon service and, in doing so, a society that is not exactly in congruence with modern notions of a liberal democracy. Moreover, some folks were unimpressed by his apparent juxtaposition of a military based Earth society at war with the communistic bugs. I always thought this was a bit of an overreaction, because the war scenes in the novel are clearly the U.S. Marines vs. the Japanese on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and I would have thought the comparing the Japanese to a bunch of spiders would be kind of offensive.
At any rate, the book certainly works as science fiction and does its job in raising controversy, if nothing else. As a military kink of guy, I found the lengthy discussions of military techniques, organization and weaponry to be quite interesting as was his ahead-of-his-time advocation of an all-volunteer military. Indeed, my main criticism of the novel would be that there is way too much talk and not enough action and I mean way too much talk. However, we can be happy that there are now not one but three Starship Troopers movies in release, and that makes me sleep well at night.
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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