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Summary: Going on 40 and still in great shape!
Review: More than any other of Heinlein's works, this book as generated a flurry of extreme reactions, ranging from calling it an immature mish-mash of a juvenile adventure and political clap-trap to unmoderated praise. For the record: In this reader's humble opinion, this is one of the best ten books of the century. Heinlein lays out a society whose foundations differ vastly from ours, one where status is actually based on service. Does anybody recall that a politician was once supposed to serve the public, instead of his own pockets or his favorite special interest group? Well, the author certainly does -- and is not afraid to say so, back in 1959. "Starship Troopers" and Haldeman's "Forever War" are the definitive SF works dealing with war and the societies waging it; don't miss them.
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Summary: An unpopular portrayal of the truths of life; service 1st.
Review: Many things are unpalitable to our free senses when we are young. As we grow up we must admit that we tend to be self centered. As we grow older we find this form to be contrary with our inner growth. Sometime along the way we learn that service to others, teamwork and discipline are absolutely necessary. No book has ever so unashamedly stated these basic facts in such plain english. It is the language of the simple foot soldier. He has not changed since his service to Caesar. Many people in todays "do your own thing" society will take offense at Mr. Heinlein's notion that they may be lacking in some areas, that they need to give of themselves to be qualified to receive; this is truth, simplicity and a plan laid down from the beginning of our exhistance. We simply forgot it...
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Summary: Not so arguably the best Sci-Fi novel ever written
Review: 1) READ THIS BOOK 2) Skip the movie. It does not feature the use of Power Armor, a key component in the warfighting capability of the Mobile Infantry in the book. Without it, there is no "Mobile". 3) Possible the most misunderstood (or simply misread) sci-fi novel ever written. Read it and THINK. I find it amusing that it has offended idiots on all sides of the political spectrum ("Heinlein's a Fascist! No, he's a Communist! No, a Libertarian! No, a Liberal, a Right wing-nut...") What counts is that he was one of the finest authors the U.S. ever produced. 4) I envy those of you about to read this book for the first time. It forever changed my way of looking at the world, as it has done for many others. Enjoy!
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Summary: Exciting, with interesting view of the future.
Review: Starship Troopers was a very exciting book. It gave a very interesting view of the future. The idea of a government, that instead of jailing people, had them beat or killed sounded very harsh but effective. I liked the way Heinlein told about the alien races and how the humans had gotten in wars with some and allied with others. His descriptions of the battles and the futuristic army equipment was great. The way he told about the main character's father rejecting him, and how his mother's death brought them back together was very realistic. The human invasion of the alien colony towards the end was a great way to end the book.
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Summary: The power of this book
Review: Ask yourself: how may other 30 year old Science Fiction novels could generate MORE THAN 100 reviews here? (Heck, look at the huge number of 30 year old SF novels that are long gone, forgotten, and out of print). Heinlein was at his best when pushing, prodding, and shocking the complacent ol' grey matter of the reader into thinking. Here it is quite obvious that he has done it again.
Love the book or hate it, but read it and think about it. Somewhere, RAH is smiling.
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Summary: A wonderful introduction to Heinlein.
Review: Starship Troopers, was my first ever experience with reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein and what a welcome I have received! Beyond the story of the young soldier who chooses to serve out of having not much else to do, Starship Troopers brings into conversation a great deal of social commentary that is appropos even to our modern world. This was truly a wonderful welcome into the world of Heinlein's imagination. Because it was relatively short, it caught my attention and was able to hold it for the entirety of the novel. I have a tight schedule, but I found I could always make time for such an entrancing piece of fiction.
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Summary: Lamest classic ever?
Review: Mission Brief Starship Troopers is not about powered armor. If you want a story about fighting bugs in powered armor, check the amazon.com additional reading list for Troopers and skip the novel itself. Or read the chapters I, XIII and XIV as a moderately engaging short story about a young man fighting in a big interstellar war against a faceless enemy. However, if you like political philosophy and groove on, or love to hate, Nietzsche, Lenin, and Buckley, read the whole book. If you do read it, you get . . . The "Classic" Troopers seems to have been a very influential book. Aliens is Troopers without the moral philosophy, the powered armor, and the Navy. "Everybody drops". Star Trek is Troopers with Roddenberryesque soft-headedness and no Marine Infantry - the Navy (aka StarFleet) has gotten its way with things, and the dirty ground wars are kept to a minimum. Troopers society is a lot like Trek society in many ways. I can almost see Roddenberry sitting with a well-thumbed copy of Troopers, building his own shiny happy version of the Federation. Troopers society is multi-ethnic. It's open to members of quite a few religions. It's got opportunity for poor people and wealthy people alike. But it is not multi-cultural. Everyone who matters has the same socialization. Troopers society is characterized by a hegemonic military culture which holds all the real power. StarFleet is way subtler than the Federal Service, but the concept of the superiority of the gentleman officer citizen is the same. Classic Trek, during the reign of Gene, could have been stolen rant for rant from Troopers. Pilot Babes and Comfort Girls Women officers in the contemporary U.S. military can't rise as fast or high through the ranks as men because they can't serve in combat. It seems women in the Federal Service still have the same problem, centuries later. They appear to be prohibited from serving in the M.I. and thereby aspiring to the highest military rank, Sky Marshall. This is odd, because Heinlein's women are put on the front lines in combat, when they are sent to retrieve their manly counterparts from their manly predicaments. Heinlein never explains why women capable of fighting on the front lines, capable of sustaining higher g forces than men, and capable of guiding fast, complex machinery more accurately than men, aren't also better than men at fighting in powered armor. My guess is this is mathematically provable, so why doesn't the M.I. boot camp and recruiting strategy take this into account? After all, the author states that if your armor gets hit bad enough to disable, you almost always buy the local back forty unless someone else picks you up. There doesn't seem to be much call for stripping down and knifing bugs, hand-to-hand, or humping hundred-pound packs fifty miles. And, while it's implied that men can be pilots, there are clearly no pussies in the M.I. Maybe that really stands for "male insecurity", or just "military incompetence". Women are the most obvious example of Heinlein's fuzzy logic (this is also true in Number of the Beast). His instructors may spout off about how military service is the only way to ensure a person is a true citizen, but, as the protagonist/narrator Juan Rico states, the only good reason to fight is women, not country. The same book, written now, would no doubt be more direct about this, and call them, huh huh, babes. But Heinlein is oh so unprintably cagy, he lets slip only one reference to the inevitable prostitution rings ("fleshpots") catering to our officer gentlemen. Uh, Robert, can we have a real female character please? For that matter, can we have some characters of any sex or species? Mein Kampf Most of the book centers on Heinlein's concept of scientific morality, and the preposterous idea that joining a male-only fraternity based on loving your M.I. buddies more than anything else will make you a better citizen. That he never gives moral weight to the actions of the protagonists compounds his fallacies. Of course, grunts just follow orders when they go around nuking stuff. But, like, orders from whom? Their officers. And they just follow orders too. But from whom? The politicians, of course. And who are they? In Heinlein's world, the politicians are military men. So Heinlein denies his own pet gunslingers the blame-the-politicians strategy that has served officer gentlemen and their admirers so well throughout history. The author's complete inability to emotionally invest the reader in anything his characters do, especially when they're nuking cities and wantonly destroying people's lives for no apparent reason, makes his limb-hanging pseudo-moral political rhetoric all the more repugnant. It's ironic Heinlein criticizes Marx for not getting it right, when he is making the same mistakes he claims Marx did. The Really, Really Bad Novel Heinlein's style in Starship Troopers is that of a competent political essayist. Overall, Troopers is a lot like Moby Dick, but without the beautiful use of the English language or the extra 600 pages. It's a spartan, barren, humorless, ugly rant. The characters are from Central Casting's War Department. The ships, planets, boot camps and other settings are fully generic. The novel glorifies soldiers without making them into heroes we can care about. It wallows in gear-head army talk of all sorts without being inspiring, clever, or clear. It never lets us appreciate either the scope of the events it deals with, or the insularity of the soldier's life, on a visceral level. The book is summed up for me by the protagonist's reaction to his mother's death. What reaction, you say? Well, there you go. From a literary perspective, Troopers demonstrates a grade-schooler's inability to show rather than tell. When the reader is not suffering interminable political speeches and helpful summaries by the narrator, the battle scenes that bracket the novel read like a commander's log book. If you want to visualize what is happening, break out your lead miniatures and your military encyclopedia. Perhaps Heinlein is not up to the demands of a first person narrator. His protagonist's voice is never well developed or consistent. Instead, Juan Rico spouts the same kind of rhetoric his commanders do, interspersed with unimaginative descriptions of things. There's no vigorous use of vernacular, and the elegant exposition Heinlein lavishes on his political diatribes is not applied to the rare moments of real-time first-person action. What makes Troopers worthwhile for the student of science fiction literature is the political and cultural morass through which Heinlein's skinny imaginations wander, and the very fact of the book's fame and influence. It gives one pause, almost as much as . . . The Spanking Fetish Heinlein's moral philosophy seems to hinge on the need for repeated spankings of young children. Funny, I always figured my code of conduct was based on empathy and understanding. Poor Bobby boy, did your parents spank all the poetry out of you? Or are you just too hung up fantasizing about whipping one of those spandex-clad pilot babes to spin a good yarn? Moments of Glory There are a few good conversations and some well-thought-out military detail buried in this critter. A more mature writer, possibly even Heinlein himself (yeah, right), might have gone easy on the pages of political rhetoric and shown us more in the resulting skeleton. Even characters from Central Casting have some potential, and if one of them had been developed beyond a well-worn stereotype, or into a powerful symbol, the novel might have been worthwhile. A few details, like playing the transport ship's fight song to summon its passengers, were almost good enough to rise up and grab me, but they were lost too quickly in the tumult of rhetorical battle.
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Summary: Don't make the mistake...
Review: I just finished reading all of the reviews posted as of this date for Starship Troopers. They were very nearly as entertaining and illuminating as the novel. One thing for us all to remember is that we shouldn't make the mistake of confusing what an author thinks or believes with what he/she writes. I have read all of RAH's novels and 80% of his short work and I am prepared to say with great conviction that I don't know for sure which of the political/social ideas put forth in his work are really his and which are from the land of what-if. That is the point of science-fiction after all, isn't it? To wonder what it might be like if...and then to tell the story as you see it. As with any author, there will be those who feel that RAH is dated, too mild, simplistic long winded, etc. Others will find that that in the unstated sentiments, the un-answered questions, is the true worth and value of this story. This fine tale causes readers to look within themselves to provide meaning. Those who can't, or perhaps don't like what they see, will not enjoy this book. If however, you enjoy the voyage of the mind. If you like to take part in the story and in so doing posess it for your own, This is a tale of great value indeed. As we should not err in believing that we know an author because we have read their books, do not suspect that you know this book because you have read these reviews. Read it yourself and decide.
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Summary: Comments on others
Review: I would like to adress the RAH bashing that has gone on. First of all, the book is a fluffy version of one of Heinlin's greatest novels. There is a great depth, and making people think about what they are reading has not been a crime. They suggestions are wonderful, giving you a sense of acomplishment even if the thoughts are as easy as 2+2. RAH is a wonderful writer, and from what I have heard from friends, a wonderful person. Let him Rest In Peace. His work is classic, he would not have won Hugo and Nebula awards if he was a bad writer.
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Summary: Starship Troopers
Review: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlin is a wonderful interpretation of the life of a soldier set into a future where humanity will fight a foe more deadly that could ever be imagined. Johnnie Rico tells the story of his rise to the rank of Liutennant and the command of the platoon through flashbacks and combat. He is faced with chalanges that would daunt most, and overcomes them. This book gives you a true feel for what life might be like if this vision would have come true.
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