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Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein

Hugo 1960

Semi-autobiographical and billed as Heinlein's most "controversial" book, Starship Troopers has a few good moments but falls short on many counts.

Short on action, long on polemics and soap-box oratory in praise of war and militarism. While writing this, RAH must have suffered a severe case of nostalgia for his time at the US military academy. He remembers with fondness the rigors and discipline when "happiness consists in getting enough sleep" while going on and on justifying and praising warfare.

The story itself mainly happens in the first and next-to-last chapters. These parts are actually quite good but unfortunately only include about 20% of the book. Orson Scott Card may have taken up where Heinlein left off though and developed "Bugs" here into the "Buggars" in Ender's Game.

The value and meaningfulness of the military, the virtue of peacefulness vs. aggressive self-defence are important issues every society must grapple with. Interweaving them more into the story could have been more effective - the long philosophical discourses only distracted from the meagre action and made the book seem more like a newspaper editorial than a science fiction classic.

The military logic is convincing to a point but goes too far and is not confirmed by experience. If the cause of violence in society is parental permissiveness and negative cultural attitudes toward spanking and flogging, why is there less crime in communities where permissive attitudes are more prevalent?

Some points of view are quite extreme. He calls forbidding corporal punishment in schools as "pre-scientific, pseudo-professional nonsense" and accuses child psychologists of having a "vested interest in disorder". To remember in the story that these "permissive" attitudes caused the fall of western civilization undermines believability. To imagine and idealize a society governed only by veterans of wars ignores history and examples like Nazi Germany.

On a more positive note, Heinlein keeps his sense of humor and intersperces intriguing tidbits of folk wisdom like, "Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort." Also a good morale building, empowering statement for military types.

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