"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.
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.
"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.
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:"
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.