Starship Troopers

By -
the cover of my dopey copy
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

Here's a Vintage Sci-Fi month title that really took me a while to get around to.  I've had it for a year, but I'm not big on military SF so it was hard to get started.

Starship Troopers turns out to have almost identically the same plot as Space Cadet did, except that it's for an older audience and plays with a different political system. Here, we have Juan Rico, a wealthy young son of industry who decides, almost on a whim, to enlist in the military after graduating from high school. This is a couple hundred years in the future--humanity has spread out to many planets--and only veterans are allowed to vote and be full citizens. Anyone can serve a term in the military; they will find a job for you no matter what your capabilities are, but only a fairly small percentage of the population joins up to serve the two-year term. Juan joins up during peacetime, but humanity soon finds itself in a war for survival with the dreaded Bugs--extremely intelligent hive-mind insects looking for planets to colonize.

Most of the story consists of a detailed explanation of Johnny's military training, from boot camp to officers' school. There is very little actual plot. He's a soldier in the infantry, and it sounds very much like mecha manga, with each soldier in a suit that makes him into a one-man tank. Heinlein plays around with ideas about freedom, government, and war. As far as I can tell, Heinlein was given to toying with different systems just to see what would happen, and this is one of them. I thought it was pretty clear that these were not Heinlein's own ideas; he's just doing a thought experiment. In the middle of the book, the teacher that provides most of the political philosophy gives a little speech that makes it clear that he has no understanding of the ideas in the American Constitution as any modern American would understand it. I don't mean that Heinlein was spouting ideas that he would have considered to be completely wonky, but Starship Troopers is not a clear reflection of his political values, whatever those were.  I wouldn't know.

It was a pretty fun read if you like the occasional foray into military science fiction. Military stuff is not usually my cup of tea, but Starship Troopers is a pretty major classic and I wanted to see what it was about.  Apparently the movie (which I have not seen) uses the title and the bugs, and not much else.




Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more