January Books 8) Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein

[nwhyte]

Continuing my read of the Hugo winners - I thought I'd be doing Leibowitz, but this arrived via Bookmooch and is next in sequence.

Well, it's a classic but very much of its time. It is a Bildungsroman about Juan Rico, who volunteers for the spaceborne infantry and grows up fighting for humanity against the alien Bugs. The writing is pacy and

Comments

[andrewducker]

I seem to remember there's a bit in the Moral Philosophy classes where the tutor says that their way of life isn't _better_ - it's simply how things ended up, and it _works_. I therefore took it as a "Here's one possible future society that is clearly not dystopian." rather than Heinlein's utopia.

[alacsony]

Heinlein was a Republican, after all. And his Coventry seems to be the closest one get to the Political Right in SF.

>The first and simpler one is sex: there basically isn't any

Verhoeven certainly couldn't accept it -)) His adaption is so hilarious that I didn't venture reading the original book

[tchernabyelo]

Verhoeven does a great job of undermining the political philosophy, though, portraying Earth as a fascist state and the press as pure propaganda.

I was too young to notice Heinlein's politics when I read "Starship Troopers". But I was given "The Day After Tomorrow" (not the movie) to review in the 80s, when I was briefly revewing for Fantasy Advertiser in the UK, and that was the most horrendously racist thing I'd ever read.

I haven't read a Heinlein books since.

[nwhyte]

In fairness to Heinlein's more enlightened younger self, his politics changed in his lifetime - he was fairly lefty before the Second World War, and Starship Troopers was written in defence of Eisenhower (who apart from Ford was probably the least harmful Republican President of the last century).

Heinlein's defenders insist that the racism of "The Day After Tomorrow" was part of his commission from John W. Campbell and that RAH actually ameliorated it. In which case the mind boggles at what the original version must have been.

[alacsony]

>he was fairly lefty before the Second World War

A Trotskyist past is a must for a true Neo-Con -)))

only veterans of the armed forces are full citizens with the right to vote,

[saare_snowqueen]

This is not a new concept. In ancient Greece, only men who had done their military service could vote. The word 'polities' means both citizen and one who has done his military service.

Re: only veterans of the armed forces are full citizens with the right to vote,

[fjm]

And I was going to add: the French concept of liberalism assumed that conscription was what kept the army on the side of the people.

[nwhyte]

This is of course the opposite argument to Heinlein's - he has citizenship restricted to ex-soldiers, rather than military service as a duty attached to (universal) citizenship.

[fjm]

Not quite.

In Heinlein's world anyone can join the military. The military is not allowed to turn them down. So no conscription, but certainly equal access to rights.

[captainlucy]

I always thought the sort of military in "Starship Troopers" owed more to Soviet wartime thinking than to any accepted American thinking; in wartime, women showed themselves at least as capable in piloting their aircraft as men (I remember reading an article years ago that averaged the total number of kills by Soviet male and female fighter pilots, and the women were slightly higher). The lasting relationships between the comrades came across as just an extension of the Brotherhood of the Battlefield seen in so many war movies and "Boy's Own"-style stories.

As for the politics, it's really been too long since I've read the book (I wanted to read it again around the time the movie came out, but then I saw the movie and it just killed my will!) but I remember at the time I read it thinking that in a way, having to earn the right to vote makes a certain amount of sense, especially in the militaristic society Heinlein described.

[seawasp]

The movie had about as much to do with the book as... well, as "Quark" had to do with "Star Trek". Voerhoeven took the names and not much else.

[fjm]

Heinlein may have known about the plans to train women, although the actual test happened a little later (see here: http://space.about.com/od/spaceexplorationhistory/a/mercury13.htm).

[saare_snowqueen]

The Soviet Army and today's Russian army were and are extremely misogynistic. It was in Finland that women fought for and won the right or serve in combat and THAT was in the 1990's.

[zdover]

I don't know how much Heinlein you've read, but if you haven't read a good deal of it, then let me recommend his later works to you.

These are all the books starting with Time Enough For Love (1973). In those books, Heinlein confronts his fascism. This is done most entertainingly in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), when Colonel Campbell confronts Lazarus Long at the headquarters of the Time Corps.

Heinlein shows himself to be no social conservative in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, going so far as to have his main character engage in a bisexual orgy in which that main character (at least) kisses a gay man on the mouth.

Heinlein's mania for public service seems to me to derive from Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondor".

As an American, I am embarrassed by Heinlein's politics. It is to his credit that his character was admirable though he worshiped militarism.

[seawasp]

Let me counter-recommend the later works. RAH's later stuff went from passable to Absolutely Abysmal. He always had a talent for writing good prose, which only abandoned him in the final book (To Sail Beyond the Sunset) which had the tragic distinction of being the ONLY Heinlein novel I had to FORCE myself to finish.

As an American I am mostly embarrassed by people who get embarrassed over author's politics -- many examples of which are only partial or distorted reflections of the author's ACTUAL politics, since they're in a story and serving the story's purposes.

His best works were short stories (Future History); his best novels probably Double Star, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Puppet Masters, and his "juvenile" novels, especially Citizen of the Galaxy and Have Spacesuit: Will Travel.

[zdover]

And I counter-recommend the juveniles. I think they're one-dimensional and dull.

I agree that Double Star and The Moon as a Harsh Mistress are good.

As an American, I get embarrassed by people who get embarrassed by people getting embarrassed by an author's politics.

[nwhyte]

I'm with seawasp on this, and indeed Heinlein as a whole deserves a longer post. But basically I think all the work from Time Enough for Love on is deeply flawed, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset particularly awful. And the juveniles got me hooked on sf in the first place when I was 13.

I don't think that Americans have a monopoly on daft politics, and I don't really understand why you feel you should take any responsibility for Heinlein's views because of the accident of shared citizenship!!!!!