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A review by mburnamfink
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
5.0
Starship Troopers is a science fiction classic, a great military coming of age, and simply an incredible book.
You know the story. Boy joins space marines, learns how to use exotic weapons, meets interesting aliens, uses exotic weapons on them, becomes a hero. The story opens in media res, with a heart pounding combat drop and raid onto a planet held by the Skinnies, a secondary alien power. We meet the surface of the book: powered armor, atomic rockets, jump jets and flame throwers. But unlike a lot of military science fiction, this book is not about the battles. It's about the making of man, in high school, boot camp, barracks-room bull sessions, officer candidate school, and finally combat command.
I've never been in the military, but I read way too many combat memoirs and histories, and everything about war in Starship Troopers strikes me as exactly true, from the importance of building up esprit de corps, to the burden of command and the confusion of battle. It's a brilliant execution of the premise of "what does it take for infantry to survive on the modern atomic battlefield", and one that has inspired more than a few real military research programs in powered exoskeletons.
But Starship Troopers is so much more than that. It had been a while since I'd read it, and two things that I'd forgotten is how excited Johnny Rico is about everything. His enthusiasm for his world is infectious; you really want to see what happens next. Second is how taut the writing is. I don't think there's a single misplaced word in the first hundred pages, and the rest of the book slackens only slightly. This is Heinlein at the height of his powers as a wordsmith.
This book is controversial politically. I wouldn't go as far some people in calling it fascist, but Heinlein delivers body blows against some of the core conceits of liberal democracy, like universal voting and social work. Due to the basic flaw of an imbalance between authority and responsibility, society broke down in the late 20th century, helped along by a global war between an American-Anglo-Russian alliance and China. In the wake of this catastrophe, society was rebuilt by committees of veterans, which after several centuries has stabilized into a franchise granted by federal service. Service is probably military, but could be anything from hard labor terraforming to "counting the hairs on a caterpillar by feel." Anything to make it clear that the franchise is dearly bought.
This book is determined to drive through its core thesis that the only thing that matters is survival, but that the instinct to survive is best harnessed to moral sensibilities for the common good. That's the core ethos of the Mobile Infantry, in their extreme esprit de corps and mantra that "everybody drops, everybody fights." It seems to work, their organization is lean, self sufficient, unbelievable destruction, although I wonder how well it would hold up to the messy ambiguities of counter-insurgency and pacification rather than a war of extermination against the perfect communism of the alien Arachnoids.
This strong philosophical grounding separates Starship Troopers from its imitators, which postulate a universe of war without asking why. A second thing that's interesting is the lack of a gun fetish, aside from the Marauder Suit, which is mostly sketched at (you wear it, it's tough and can fly and has atomic rockets), there's very little of the overwrought descriptions of destruction that characterize the genre. As the book says, there's no such thing as a deadly weapon, only deadly people. Juan Rico is probably the nicest deadly person in fiction.
You know the story. Boy joins space marines, learns how to use exotic weapons, meets interesting aliens, uses exotic weapons on them, becomes a hero. The story opens in media res, with a heart pounding combat drop and raid onto a planet held by the Skinnies, a secondary alien power. We meet the surface of the book: powered armor, atomic rockets, jump jets and flame throwers. But unlike a lot of military science fiction, this book is not about the battles. It's about the making of man, in high school, boot camp, barracks-room bull sessions, officer candidate school, and finally combat command.
I've never been in the military, but I read way too many combat memoirs and histories, and everything about war in Starship Troopers strikes me as exactly true, from the importance of building up esprit de corps, to the burden of command and the confusion of battle. It's a brilliant execution of the premise of "what does it take for infantry to survive on the modern atomic battlefield", and one that has inspired more than a few real military research programs in powered exoskeletons.
But Starship Troopers is so much more than that. It had been a while since I'd read it, and two things that I'd forgotten is how excited Johnny Rico is about everything. His enthusiasm for his world is infectious; you really want to see what happens next. Second is how taut the writing is. I don't think there's a single misplaced word in the first hundred pages, and the rest of the book slackens only slightly. This is Heinlein at the height of his powers as a wordsmith.
This book is controversial politically. I wouldn't go as far some people in calling it fascist, but Heinlein delivers body blows against some of the core conceits of liberal democracy, like universal voting and social work. Due to the basic flaw of an imbalance between authority and responsibility, society broke down in the late 20th century, helped along by a global war between an American-Anglo-Russian alliance and China. In the wake of this catastrophe, society was rebuilt by committees of veterans, which after several centuries has stabilized into a franchise granted by federal service. Service is probably military, but could be anything from hard labor terraforming to "counting the hairs on a caterpillar by feel." Anything to make it clear that the franchise is dearly bought.
This book is determined to drive through its core thesis that the only thing that matters is survival, but that the instinct to survive is best harnessed to moral sensibilities for the common good. That's the core ethos of the Mobile Infantry, in their extreme esprit de corps and mantra that "everybody drops, everybody fights." It seems to work, their organization is lean, self sufficient, unbelievable destruction, although I wonder how well it would hold up to the messy ambiguities of counter-insurgency and pacification rather than a war of extermination against the perfect communism of the alien Arachnoids.
This strong philosophical grounding separates Starship Troopers from its imitators, which postulate a universe of war without asking why. A second thing that's interesting is the lack of a gun fetish, aside from the Marauder Suit, which is mostly sketched at (you wear it, it's tough and can fly and has atomic rockets), there's very little of the overwrought descriptions of destruction that characterize the genre. As the book says, there's no such thing as a deadly weapon, only deadly people. Juan Rico is probably the nicest deadly person in fiction.