Starship Troopers

If you're like I was a few weeks ago, your familiarity with Starship Troopers is based entirely on the 1997 film of the same name, an underrated alien shoot 'em up largely eclipsed in pop culture history by the likes of Independence Day and Men In Black. For those unfamiliar - or for those merely looking for a nostalgia kick - here's that movie's trailer:

Awesome, right? The thing is, while plot elements from the movie more or less follow those in the book, the "adaptation" could not be farther from the original novel in a tonal or thematic sense. The movie - and you can't really glean this from the trailer - was a scathing satire against the modern military, and how we send young and passionate but totally gullible people off to distant places to die horrible deaths all for questionable and vague reasons. The film lampoons the inherently fascist nature of the military during wartime, right down to the heroes being dressed like Nazis and both their patriotism and their bloodlust being comically over-the-top. In hindsight, it came about five or seven years ahead of its time, since the late '90s were fairly light on international conflicts involving the West, whereas by 2003 the U.S. was involved in two unpopular wars. I bring all of this up only to set up the starkly contrasting viewpoints and morals offered by Robert A. Heinlein more than fifty years ago.

Starship Troopers the novel presents a utopian futuristic interplanetary society in which only war veterans can vote. All other citizens - civilians, if you will, termed "residents" - retain all kinds of other rights and freedoms seen in the free world today. All military service is purely voluntary; there is no conscription and terms of service are not mandatory for anybody. Most people choose not to join up, preferring the comfort and safety of civilian life to the benefits of the full citizenship earned only by war vets. It's an interesting concept, I have to admit. I could type out an internal debate over the pros and cons of such a society for dozens of paragraphs, but I'll leave it to you to have your own thoughts about such a society. The book spends some time depicting combat scenes on hostile planets, and it does a fine job of all that, but the real meat here is the training and indoctrination process experienced by the protagonist. Heinlein delivers what are clearly his own thoughts about the way a military and a society should function in an ideal world, and there are some obligatory potshots thrown in at the 20th century for allowing people to become too soft and too undisciplined. In the (1959) book's alternate future, the world fell into chaos and disarray somewhere around the 1980s when juvenile delinquents ran amok with no respect for authority, when communistic ideals became too widely embraced, and when the public put too much faith into immoral and corrupt scientists for guidance and governance. Okay, so what I've just described sounds like horribly cheesy right wing speculative fiction, but I swear Heinlein makes a more articulate and compelling case for his military-centric philosophies than I just did on his behalf.

I guess my real point here is that for a book that came out more than 50 years ago, this one's loaded with some ideas that are still considered fairly controversial today. Exceptionally rigorous boot camp; women on the front lines; suffrage reserved solely for servicemen... the list goes on and on. But one aspect of Heinlein's book that's no longer controversial at all - but was back in 1959 - is the idea of an entirely volunteer-based military being superior to one made up of conscripted citizens. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam were all fought by American soldiers forced into service by their government, while that idea seems incredibly foreign and archaic nowadays.

Starship Troopers wasn't a perfect book. A lack of characterization left the 330-page "story" feeling more like a political essay than a science fiction novel at times, and certain plot elements - like when the protagonist becomes his father's superior officer after his father enlists later than he does - feel kind of unnecessary and out of place with regard to the big picture. Still, I highly enjoyed reading it and I can honestly say that it opened up my mind to new world views and philosophies I'd probably have dismissed pretty quickly before. And isn't that the most important thing good literature can do?