Starship Troopers (Paperback)

I don't want to delve too deeply into the politics of this novel. Some have pinned a fascist connotation on it, but I try to examine this future society philosophically. Only those who serve in the military can vote, but the vast majority of people choose not to serve and live happy lives as civilians, so I don't see anything fascist about this society. What intrigues me most, and it is this that sets this book apart from the vast majority of science fiction, is Heinlein's thought-provoking ideas about ethics, morality, duty, responsibility, etc. Mr. Dubois, Ricco's high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy (a required course for all) gets in the ring and dukes it out with Plato, John Locke, and a host of other political thinkers. He argues that man has no natural moral instinct; morality is acquired by the individual and is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. If an individual is not taught the lessons of living in society, he will not learn that the basis of all morality is duty. In this way he criticizes the democracies of the late twentieth century and explains their ultimate failure. The promotion of the idea that certain natural rights are necessarily due each person caused young people to neglect their duties--by concentrating on the rights they think are due them. Liberty and freedom must be earned and paid for, and democracies failed because they did not understand this basic tenet. These kinds of ideas are the source of most of the criticisms directed toward Starship Troopers. I found many cogent arguments in the novel; criticism of democracy is not an endorsement of totalitarianism. Many would agree with some of the ideas Mr. Dubois puts forth (and which find their way into various places elsewhere in the book), but any agreement or disagreement should be purely intellectual. Great fiction is supposed to make us think deeply about important concepts, and Starship Troopers succeeds admirably in that regard.

Thus, Starship Troopers provides science fiction fans the best of both worlds. On the one hand, we have the well-told, gripping story of one man's military journey from boot camp to battlefields of war light years away from home, replete with several intense combat scenes. On the other hand, we have ideas of a political and philosophical nature laid out extremely well by the author, which is all but guaranteed to make you seriously think about society, government, and warfare. In the end, duty and responsibility are stressed if not glorified, and I find nothing at all subversive in that. Heinlein tells a fascinating story, and he makes you think, whether you want to or not. Few are the writers who can claim such lofty credentials.

(Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier took incredible liberties with, and sometimes even directly contradicted, the book on which their film is 'based'. It's a fine film on its own terms and I think it's been unjustly maligned. But it's not this novel; it's the next round in an ongoing dispute with this novel. And whatever else the movie has going for it, its _military_ action is incompetent to the point of silliness.)

I've been reading Heinlein for nearly forty years now. I don't think this is one of his best three or four novels, and it's never going to be one of my personal favorites either. Nevertheless, it _is_ a genuinely great work of SF and raises issues that genuinely deserve to be raised.

Whether you buy Heinlein's own _answers_ is a different matter. The 'arguments' presented by the characters in the novel are mostly aimed at straw men. ('My mother says violence never settles anything', indeed.) This is perhaps forgivable since so much of Heinlein's positive case is so good. But I'm not persuaded that the society he imagines in this novel would be as functional as he seems to think.

At any rate, its essential socio-political point -- that authority and responsibility are a coordinated yin-yang pair and an imbalance between them puts the world out of whack -- is extremely well taken. (It applies more broadly, too.)

Its account of what it means to be a human being (as opposed to an economic animal) is darned good too. And this is where the real meat of the novel lies.

You see, the _story_ here isn't about the war with the Bugs; it's about Juan Rico's coming of age. As a character (not Rico) remarks at one point: 'I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man.' If you grok that, you'll grok the novel. (Yes, Heinlein tells this story in the context of military service, but its theme applies much more widely. And lest you think the novel is too autobiographical here, note that Heinlein -- a Navy man -- locates his story not in his own branch of the service but in the 'poor bloody infantry'.)

The stuff about the Bug War is a different deal. This aspect of the novel was very much a product of the anticommunism/Cold War era; I don't think it's survived all that well and I'm not even persuaded it was all that terrific at the time. But it's background, not main plot -- and at any rate Heinlein is surely right that a cap trooper in the Mobile Infantry isn't going to be involved in setting the Federation's diplomatic policy; Rico's own story doesn't depend on whether the politicians are 'right' to send him into combat.

One of Heinlein's greatest, then, but not the absolute cream. Anyway, don't get scared off either by the movie or by comments from readers who didn't grok it. Whatever you think of the Old Man, he was no fascist.