"Imagine a book in which every speech is “You Can’t Handle The Truth,” except Jack Nicholson is actually in the right, and also we’re supposed to want to fuck him." I had to stop reading when I got to this point because I was wheezing with laughter. It's easy to be caustic when writing about bad fiction; your relative restraint here makes your criticisms land even harder.
My main thought about this book, and its "I'm a fucking weapon" ethos, is that we really did do Isabel Fall dirty - this really does read like "...Attack Helicopter" minus the irony.
If the borrowed copy I was reading (first printing, sprayed edges) wasn't worth hundreds of dollars (because speculative bubble) it would have been thrown for sure at "Violence"
I gotta say... I think that you missed the entire point of Starship Troopers, the book. As did just about everyone else, especially including Verhoeven.
The training and military action sequences were there as window-dressing: The guts of the book, and the entire thrust of the whole work, was a rumination on citizenship and what the proper relationship should be between state and citizen.
It wasn't military commentary so much as it was social commentary...
The military porn part of the novel wasn't there to argue for militarism as such, but more as a theme arguing something similar to what Jean Larteguy had to say about his ideal army:
“I'd like to have two armies: one for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their general's bowel movements or their colonel's piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.”
“The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.”
Heinlein's Mobile Infantry were clearly the second sort; thus, the "impossible efforts" he highlighted.
The near-impossible training standards were also straight out of the Bible, specifically Judges 7:5, where Gideon was spoken to:
"Then the LORD said to Gideon, “There are still too many people. Take them down to the water, and I will sift them for you there. If I say to you, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go. But if I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” So Gideon brought the people down to the water, and the LORD said to him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues like a dog from those who kneel to drink.” And the number of those who lapped the water with their hands to their mouths was three hundred men; all the others knelt to drink..."
A main point that many miss reading the book, if you actually managed to get through the glitz, you'd have discovered that the Mobile Infantry and Navy were both tiny fractions of the actual way people earned Citizenship in his *fictional* system. You got that through *Federal* service, which could be anything from military service to terraforming a planet for settlement; anything that was public service did the trick.
There was one paragraph I remember particularly that had someone describing a hypothetical paraplegic, deaf, dumb, and blind person wanting Citizenship, and the characters discussing it concluded that the Federation government in that case would have to find a job for that person counting caterpillar fur for a couple of years, or something.
The whole point of Heinlein's idea here wasn't some Verhoeven-esque Fascist uber-state, but the idea that citizenship was something that should be *earned*, and not necessarily through military service, either. The "boring bits" of the book, which focused on the character teaching Moral Philosophy, went over that extensively.
The really disturbing thing is how well Heinlein's work from the 1950s managed to describe our times "before the great war" correctly, talking about crime, juvenile delinquency, and the general chaos. It's so damn prescient as to be an outright prophecy, right down to the international power blocks forming around us.
I don't think people read this book closely enough. The powered armor and the military stuff is mere gravy; the real meat is in the social commentary, which is frighteningly on-brand with what we're going through, right now. The military had this book on multiple reading lists for years, going back to the 1980s, and it wasn't because of the sexy powered armor and the nuclear hand grenades. It was because it did an excellent job of discussing a lot of the key issues in the military-civilian relationship, and offered some solutions.
Which did *not* include any such thing as "votes for military veterans only". You earned the franchise through *service*, and the only caveat was that that service had to be challenging and onerous enough that you didn't get it casually. Multiple times, Heinlein made the point that the military was actually a small minority of the post-service Citizenry.
All it really was was the "hard way" of doing things.
I don't blame people for not getting the point of the book, but before you start saying things about it, you really ought to go through it and make sure that it actually says what you think it does because you read someone else that said those things about it.
It really isn't that much of a militaristic book, when you get down to it. It's more a commentary on citizenship than anything else, and uses the military window-dressing to lure readers in. The lessons there are not necessarily the ones you pick up from most reviews; the ones that came out when the book was published are laughably erroneous. This is very much not a book you want to learn about from the Cliff's Notes version or the average reviewer, because nearly all of them got it entirely wrong.
And, as Heinlein said more than once, there's a technical term for people who mistake an author's characters for the author's actual opinions on things... And, that technical term would be "Idiot". Heinlein is a fascinating and flawed character; he wrote amazing stuff, but dear God, did he have some sexual issues that are only clear in hindsight. The fact that he was on the periphery of the whole Walter Breen fiasco? Highly disillusioning, and when coupled with the themes and actions in several of his books, ya really have to wonder what was going on there. I mean, the whole incest shtick in "Time Enough For Love" and some of the other ones he did in his later years...? With regards to MZB and Walter Breen's extracurricular activities?
It's like a much earlier version of the "Oh, John Ringo, no..." thing, but with some sad real-world connections.
Oh, and as a secondary point... Heinlein was never a *soldier*. He was a *sailor*, specifically a commissioned graduate of Annapolis. He left the service in the late 1930s because he picked up a case of TB while on duty and was medically retired. As a counter-factual, postulate what the world of science fiction would look like had he not contracted TB and gone on to fight in WWII. He'd have likely been positioned properly to have attained fairly high rank by either mid-war, or certainly by the mid-1950s.
This is important because there are a lot of subtle cultural differences between naval and land combat forces; for a former navy guy, he didn't do a bad job anywhere along the length of his oeuvre, but there are some fairly subtle "tells". He's also all too prone to the standard trope of using an officer character as POV. Although, Lazarus Long serves as a counterpoint, in that most of his described military experience is very low-level.
1) Thank you for the correction about Heinlein's service. I've fixed that passage and credited you in the footnotes.
2) Regarding the novel itself: yes, I've read it, and no, not the Cliffs Notes version. I sympathize with you, as many people do tend to exaggerate its alleged views and misunderstand its appeal for fans (I think I mentioned that the '59 reviewers were hyperbolic in retrospect).
However, I don't think it's correct to say the military/violent stuff is less important than the classroom discourses. Both are essential parts of Heinlein's novel: the military action is visceral, and the debates are philosophical/ethical. I think Heinlein is much better at the former, and find the discourses too staged and overly-perfect to be compelling (i.e. Heinlein has a teacher dunk on a strawman student/s, cites the fictional success of the fictional government as proof of some universal principle about humanity, cites some famous quote, repeat).
I stand by my overall assessment of the work as being extremely militaristic -- or whatever one calls that weird sensation of being excited, compelled, and fascinated by violence and the human beings who maximize their ability to withstand and inflict it. Heinlein reiterates throughout the novel that citizenship should mean wagering one's life, and the teacher Dubois tells Johnnie that he's undergoing the equivalent of spiritual enlightenment by becoming a soldier. Is the tone of reverence tempered with logic and historical rationale? Yes. Is it still there? Yes.
TBH, I don't think there is a good word in the English language for what I think Heinlein was trying to achieve with the book. And, he may not have been trying to achieve it, either... I could well be projecting my own views into my reading.
There's "militaristic" in the sense that you've got the shiny baubles, the weapons, the elaborate uniforms, and you're basically playing parade-ground dress-up dolls with the men. And, they're loving it, as well; it's the same sort of elaborate posturing that you see with primitive tribal cultures amping themselves up to go do something to the neighbors, all the posing, all the boasting... All of that BS.
That's militarism. Militarism at its worst, most destructive. The sort of thing that the ancient Greeks put in the purview of Mars, the "Mad God of War".
English lacks a word for the diametric opposite, that expresses the same thing without the baggage of "glory". The sort of thing the Greeks put into the purview of Pallas Athene, "just war" and strategy. The sort of thing Larteguy was getting at with his second paragraph that I quoted, and what I thought Heinlein was trying to get across... Not the rah-rah aspect of war that you hear from all the loony-tune children that're enamored of it all, but the sort of quiet restraint and careful consideration of conflicts and how to win them that you get from the burned-out veteran from the middle ranks. I'm not sure how you'd express that, but the fact we don't have a word for it would indicate a certain deficiency in how our culture looks at wars and how to fight them... An essential immaturity and failure of serious purpose.
It's the difference between Pompey the Great and Cincinnatus. Pompey, Caesar, and all the rest? Glory hounds, seeking political advantage from battlefield success. Cincinnatus, on the other hand? Did what he had to do, went home to his farm, and farmed. Didn't set himself or his successor up as a divine autocrat, didn't build out a cult following, didn't enrich himself.
Mars versus Athene. Wanton destruction as opposed to carefully considered violence applied in order to achieve a specific thing, and then not taken any further once that thing was achieved.
My read of the book spoke to me in the voice of Athene, not Mars. It's particularly clear in that first chapter, where they're going in to raid the Skinny city; they could have just bombed the place from orbit, but instead deployed troops in an attempt to apply just enough violence to make a political point such that the Skinnies would change their allegiance. Which they did, per the novel.
Were Heinlein trying to make the point from the view of Mars? Then, they'd have destroyed the planet, the way a lot of other authors do with their protagonist cultures. This emphasis on purpose and restraint is why I don't find the book particularly "militarist"; if anything, it's an argument for fighting wars in the spirit of Athene rather more than the militarist spirit of Mars.
Of course, your mileage may well vary. I spent the majority of my adult life as a serving soldier, and a lot of the impetus for that came from Heinlein and his views on responsible citizenship in a republic. The man wrote disparagingly of Empire and Imperial personages in general, and was more an admirer of Cincinnatus in his work. Or, at least, that's the thing I took away from it.
I honestly think there's a hell of a lot more to "Starship Troopers" than what you get out of it on a glancing surface read. One of the big things I got out of it was to do a lot of further reading, and I rather wish that Heinlein had either included a bibliography or, at the very least, suggestions for further reading.
I won't say it is his masterwork, because it isn't. But, I will say that it provoked more thought and more research out of me than you'd think such a "juvenile" young adult book would. There are a lot of reasons it was included for as long as it was on the various professional reading lists. I kinda doubt it is still on any, in this sadly diminished age.
Hey -- Thank you for your service, and for all the background info you've provided on Heinlein and military culture here, especially the classical perspectives. Have you written about it elsewhere (or might you, on Substack)? I'd love to check it out. Hope you have a happy holidays and a good new year.
I'm actually thinking about it, TBH. I've long been annoyed at the usual expressed tropes in popular fiction regarding the military. Especially in "Military Science Fiction". Just like with police procedurals, the really aggravating thing is running into those tropes so often that you can damn near write the next chapter of the novel or the next scene of the movie while you're still reading or watching.
And, very, very little of it rings true to my experience of real life, either. Like, almost nothing...
"Imagine a book in which every speech is “You Can’t Handle The Truth,” except Jack Nicholson is actually in the right, and also we’re supposed to want to fuck him." I had to stop reading when I got to this point because I was wheezing with laughter. It's easy to be caustic when writing about bad fiction; your relative restraint here makes your criticisms land even harder.
My main thought about this book, and its "I'm a fucking weapon" ethos, is that we really did do Isabel Fall dirty - this really does read like "...Attack Helicopter" minus the irony.
That's an amazing point about "Attack Helicopter"! I hadn't realized it, but it's so true.
I absolutely lost it at "She is rechristened 'Violence' "
It is interesting how while literature has accepted "War is Hell", it usually gets presented as "War is Hell :smiling devil emoji:"
Black heart/drooping rose/dragon emojis
If the borrowed copy I was reading (first printing, sprayed edges) wasn't worth hundreds of dollars (because speculative bubble) it would have been thrown for sure at "Violence"
I gotta say... I think that you missed the entire point of Starship Troopers, the book. As did just about everyone else, especially including Verhoeven.
The training and military action sequences were there as window-dressing: The guts of the book, and the entire thrust of the whole work, was a rumination on citizenship and what the proper relationship should be between state and citizen.
It wasn't military commentary so much as it was social commentary...
The military porn part of the novel wasn't there to argue for militarism as such, but more as a theme arguing something similar to what Jean Larteguy had to say about his ideal army:
“I'd like to have two armies: one for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their general's bowel movements or their colonel's piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.”
“The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.”
Heinlein's Mobile Infantry were clearly the second sort; thus, the "impossible efforts" he highlighted.
The near-impossible training standards were also straight out of the Bible, specifically Judges 7:5, where Gideon was spoken to:
"Then the LORD said to Gideon, “There are still too many people. Take them down to the water, and I will sift them for you there. If I say to you, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go. But if I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” So Gideon brought the people down to the water, and the LORD said to him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues like a dog from those who kneel to drink.” And the number of those who lapped the water with their hands to their mouths was three hundred men; all the others knelt to drink..."
A main point that many miss reading the book, if you actually managed to get through the glitz, you'd have discovered that the Mobile Infantry and Navy were both tiny fractions of the actual way people earned Citizenship in his *fictional* system. You got that through *Federal* service, which could be anything from military service to terraforming a planet for settlement; anything that was public service did the trick.
There was one paragraph I remember particularly that had someone describing a hypothetical paraplegic, deaf, dumb, and blind person wanting Citizenship, and the characters discussing it concluded that the Federation government in that case would have to find a job for that person counting caterpillar fur for a couple of years, or something.
The whole point of Heinlein's idea here wasn't some Verhoeven-esque Fascist uber-state, but the idea that citizenship was something that should be *earned*, and not necessarily through military service, either. The "boring bits" of the book, which focused on the character teaching Moral Philosophy, went over that extensively.
The really disturbing thing is how well Heinlein's work from the 1950s managed to describe our times "before the great war" correctly, talking about crime, juvenile delinquency, and the general chaos. It's so damn prescient as to be an outright prophecy, right down to the international power blocks forming around us.
I don't think people read this book closely enough. The powered armor and the military stuff is mere gravy; the real meat is in the social commentary, which is frighteningly on-brand with what we're going through, right now. The military had this book on multiple reading lists for years, going back to the 1980s, and it wasn't because of the sexy powered armor and the nuclear hand grenades. It was because it did an excellent job of discussing a lot of the key issues in the military-civilian relationship, and offered some solutions.
Which did *not* include any such thing as "votes for military veterans only". You earned the franchise through *service*, and the only caveat was that that service had to be challenging and onerous enough that you didn't get it casually. Multiple times, Heinlein made the point that the military was actually a small minority of the post-service Citizenry.
All it really was was the "hard way" of doing things.
I don't blame people for not getting the point of the book, but before you start saying things about it, you really ought to go through it and make sure that it actually says what you think it does because you read someone else that said those things about it.
It really isn't that much of a militaristic book, when you get down to it. It's more a commentary on citizenship than anything else, and uses the military window-dressing to lure readers in. The lessons there are not necessarily the ones you pick up from most reviews; the ones that came out when the book was published are laughably erroneous. This is very much not a book you want to learn about from the Cliff's Notes version or the average reviewer, because nearly all of them got it entirely wrong.
And, as Heinlein said more than once, there's a technical term for people who mistake an author's characters for the author's actual opinions on things... And, that technical term would be "Idiot". Heinlein is a fascinating and flawed character; he wrote amazing stuff, but dear God, did he have some sexual issues that are only clear in hindsight. The fact that he was on the periphery of the whole Walter Breen fiasco? Highly disillusioning, and when coupled with the themes and actions in several of his books, ya really have to wonder what was going on there. I mean, the whole incest shtick in "Time Enough For Love" and some of the other ones he did in his later years...? With regards to MZB and Walter Breen's extracurricular activities?
It's like a much earlier version of the "Oh, John Ringo, no..." thing, but with some sad real-world connections.
Oh, and as a secondary point... Heinlein was never a *soldier*. He was a *sailor*, specifically a commissioned graduate of Annapolis. He left the service in the late 1930s because he picked up a case of TB while on duty and was medically retired. As a counter-factual, postulate what the world of science fiction would look like had he not contracted TB and gone on to fight in WWII. He'd have likely been positioned properly to have attained fairly high rank by either mid-war, or certainly by the mid-1950s.
This is important because there are a lot of subtle cultural differences between naval and land combat forces; for a former navy guy, he didn't do a bad job anywhere along the length of his oeuvre, but there are some fairly subtle "tells". He's also all too prone to the standard trope of using an officer character as POV. Although, Lazarus Long serves as a counterpoint, in that most of his described military experience is very low-level.
Hey Kirk --
1) Thank you for the correction about Heinlein's service. I've fixed that passage and credited you in the footnotes.
2) Regarding the novel itself: yes, I've read it, and no, not the Cliffs Notes version. I sympathize with you, as many people do tend to exaggerate its alleged views and misunderstand its appeal for fans (I think I mentioned that the '59 reviewers were hyperbolic in retrospect).
However, I don't think it's correct to say the military/violent stuff is less important than the classroom discourses. Both are essential parts of Heinlein's novel: the military action is visceral, and the debates are philosophical/ethical. I think Heinlein is much better at the former, and find the discourses too staged and overly-perfect to be compelling (i.e. Heinlein has a teacher dunk on a strawman student/s, cites the fictional success of the fictional government as proof of some universal principle about humanity, cites some famous quote, repeat).
I stand by my overall assessment of the work as being extremely militaristic -- or whatever one calls that weird sensation of being excited, compelled, and fascinated by violence and the human beings who maximize their ability to withstand and inflict it. Heinlein reiterates throughout the novel that citizenship should mean wagering one's life, and the teacher Dubois tells Johnnie that he's undergoing the equivalent of spiritual enlightenment by becoming a soldier. Is the tone of reverence tempered with logic and historical rationale? Yes. Is it still there? Yes.
TBH, I don't think there is a good word in the English language for what I think Heinlein was trying to achieve with the book. And, he may not have been trying to achieve it, either... I could well be projecting my own views into my reading.
There's "militaristic" in the sense that you've got the shiny baubles, the weapons, the elaborate uniforms, and you're basically playing parade-ground dress-up dolls with the men. And, they're loving it, as well; it's the same sort of elaborate posturing that you see with primitive tribal cultures amping themselves up to go do something to the neighbors, all the posing, all the boasting... All of that BS.
That's militarism. Militarism at its worst, most destructive. The sort of thing that the ancient Greeks put in the purview of Mars, the "Mad God of War".
English lacks a word for the diametric opposite, that expresses the same thing without the baggage of "glory". The sort of thing the Greeks put into the purview of Pallas Athene, "just war" and strategy. The sort of thing Larteguy was getting at with his second paragraph that I quoted, and what I thought Heinlein was trying to get across... Not the rah-rah aspect of war that you hear from all the loony-tune children that're enamored of it all, but the sort of quiet restraint and careful consideration of conflicts and how to win them that you get from the burned-out veteran from the middle ranks. I'm not sure how you'd express that, but the fact we don't have a word for it would indicate a certain deficiency in how our culture looks at wars and how to fight them... An essential immaturity and failure of serious purpose.
It's the difference between Pompey the Great and Cincinnatus. Pompey, Caesar, and all the rest? Glory hounds, seeking political advantage from battlefield success. Cincinnatus, on the other hand? Did what he had to do, went home to his farm, and farmed. Didn't set himself or his successor up as a divine autocrat, didn't build out a cult following, didn't enrich himself.
Mars versus Athene. Wanton destruction as opposed to carefully considered violence applied in order to achieve a specific thing, and then not taken any further once that thing was achieved.
My read of the book spoke to me in the voice of Athene, not Mars. It's particularly clear in that first chapter, where they're going in to raid the Skinny city; they could have just bombed the place from orbit, but instead deployed troops in an attempt to apply just enough violence to make a political point such that the Skinnies would change their allegiance. Which they did, per the novel.
Were Heinlein trying to make the point from the view of Mars? Then, they'd have destroyed the planet, the way a lot of other authors do with their protagonist cultures. This emphasis on purpose and restraint is why I don't find the book particularly "militarist"; if anything, it's an argument for fighting wars in the spirit of Athene rather more than the militarist spirit of Mars.
Of course, your mileage may well vary. I spent the majority of my adult life as a serving soldier, and a lot of the impetus for that came from Heinlein and his views on responsible citizenship in a republic. The man wrote disparagingly of Empire and Imperial personages in general, and was more an admirer of Cincinnatus in his work. Or, at least, that's the thing I took away from it.
I honestly think there's a hell of a lot more to "Starship Troopers" than what you get out of it on a glancing surface read. One of the big things I got out of it was to do a lot of further reading, and I rather wish that Heinlein had either included a bibliography or, at the very least, suggestions for further reading.
I won't say it is his masterwork, because it isn't. But, I will say that it provoked more thought and more research out of me than you'd think such a "juvenile" young adult book would. There are a lot of reasons it was included for as long as it was on the various professional reading lists. I kinda doubt it is still on any, in this sadly diminished age.
Hey -- Thank you for your service, and for all the background info you've provided on Heinlein and military culture here, especially the classical perspectives. Have you written about it elsewhere (or might you, on Substack)? I'd love to check it out. Hope you have a happy holidays and a good new year.
Reciprocal greetings in kind... :)
I'm actually thinking about it, TBH. I've long been annoyed at the usual expressed tropes in popular fiction regarding the military. Especially in "Military Science Fiction". Just like with police procedurals, the really aggravating thing is running into those tropes so often that you can damn near write the next chapter of the novel or the next scene of the movie while you're still reading or watching.
And, very, very little of it rings true to my experience of real life, either. Like, almost nothing...