In this monthly series reviewing classic science fiction books, Alan Brown will look at the front lines and frontiers of science fiction; books about soldiers and spacers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
When examining military science fiction, all roads, at one point or another, lead to Starship Troopers, written by Robert A. Heinlein in 1959 and rooted in his service in the U.S. Navy. So much has been written about this book that it’s a bit intimidating to approach it as a reviewer, but in re-reading it for this series, I found something I can add to the conversation. While the book holds up even better than I expected, there are a few things in it that a modern audience might not appreciate. All fiction reflects the time in which it was written, and while I am not quite old enough to remember the world of the U.S. Navy in the 1930s, I am old enough to have seen remnants of that era during my own youth, and my service in the Coast Guard, which started in the 1970s. So let me proceed in putting some aspects of the work in context for modern readers.
I first encountered Starship Troopers, in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, when I was in high school. Despite the anti-military sentiments of the time, I was determined to join the military. The biggest inspiration for this decision was my father, who served in World War II as an Army engineer, and continued his service afterward in the Army Reserve. I read a lot of military fiction and non-fiction, which only reinforced my interest. I was also inspired by comic book characters like Captain America and Nick Fury and his Howling Commandoes. When I first saw the Berkley Medallion paperback edition of Starship Troopers on a shelf in the store, it wasn’t the cover that grabbed me—it was one of those abstract covers by Paul Lehr, heavy on atmosphere, but not very representative of the contents. The bug-like aliens looked more mechanical than biological, and the human figures around them looked very static and passive. But I recognized Heinlein’s name, the cover copy grabbed my attention, and I soon found myself reading a book like no other that I had ever encountered.
Heinlein, referred to as the “dean of American science fiction writers” on that paperback copy of Starship Troopers, needs very little introduction to the readers of this website. His military service is an important touchstone when examining Starship Troopers. Heinlein graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929. He served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, and on the destroyer USS Roper. His Navy service, however, was cut short by illness, and he received a medical discharge from the Navy for tuberculosis in 1934. He started writing SF in 1939, and was a favorite of editor John Campbell, often appearing in Astounding Science Fiction. He was extremely popular in the field until his death in 1988. Along the way, he garnered quite a bit of popular and critical attention: his fiction was often on best seller lists, won award after award, and broke into the mainstream with stories in the Saturday Evening Post.
Among his output were a series of juvenile SF novels for Charles Scribner’s Sons. These books often put their young protagonists into serious and adult situations—and along the way, Heinlein and the publishers clashed over their content. Starship Troopers, written in 1959, had been intended by Heinlein to be another of those juveniles, but the changes the publisher wanted proved to be too much for Heinlein, and he parted company with Scribner’s. He sold an abridged version of the story, “Starship Soldier,” that appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in two parts, and Putnam soon published a hardcover edition in 1960. Heinlein himself was surprised when the book won the Hugo Award in 1960, despite the controversy it created within the SF community.
For those who might need a refresher, Starship Troopers starts with the hero, Johnny Rico, in the midst of an attack on an alien world. This bit of action helps whet our appetite, as we go back in time to meet the hero as a shallow and not very admirable young rich kid who joins the military largely as the result of peer pressure. He lives on a future Earth where the franchise is limited to those who have done a hitch in the military, or equivalent civilian service. He doesn’t think it had any impact, but a mandatory course in school, “History and Moral Philosophy” (H&MP), clearly had an influence on his decision to sign up. Rico ends up in his last choice for a service assignment, the Mobile Infantry (MI), which fights in powered armor suits that could each take on a contemporary tank battalion, if not two or three. He goes through basic training, finds himself well suited for the MI, and starts working his way up the enlisted ranks, until he is convinced to apply for Officer Candidate School. Here he attends more H&MP classes, learns more about the service, and more about why and how humans wage war. As the book ends, he is serving as an officer in one of the biggest operations in the war so far. Along the way, especially in the scenes that are set in those H&MP classes, we get large doses of philosophy and concepts that, if he doesn’t necessarily espouse, Heinlein clearly wanted us to think about.
While Starship Troopers is very much of the “officer” variety of military SF, concerning itself more with philosophy and strategy rather than action on the front lines, it is an unabashed tribute to the enlisted personnel who do the work, the fighting and the dying. It is dedicated not only to one sergeant in particular, but to all sergeants everywhere. The MI is a lean and idealized military organization, with a bare minimum of officers, where everyone fights, and the officers lead from the front. Every officer must serve in the enlisted ranks before becoming an officer. Even the society at large, where you have to work for your rights, suggests the influence of enlisted personnel. Every officer seems to be guided by the advice my father gave me on the day I was commissioned, “Take care of your troops, Al, and they’ll take care of you.” You can see Heinlein taking aim at the elitism of the Navy he served in, and going out of his way to hold up the rank and file for some positive attention.
Women are also given positive attention in the book, though the role of women in Starship Troopers might seem a bit archaic to modern readers who are used to a military where women fill a wide range of roles. In the novel, women have separate roles from the men, and are allowed to serve as naval officers only because of abilities inherent in their gender (a dated notion in and of itself). While women might be found in uniform in Heinlein’s day, their service was limited to reserve status, and shoreside clerical duties. For example, until 1973, the year I joined the Coast Guard, there were no women in Coast Guard active duty service. All were limited to service in a women’s reserve that went by the acronym SPARS. Women were not allowed into the Coast Guard Academy until 1976. But soon thereafter, women began to serve afloat, and all sorts of “firsts” began to occur, including women in command at sea. Those women faced a lot of resistance from an organization that had been exclusively male for generations. The traditions and customs of the service, and even its daily language and slang, did not easily adapt to the presence of women, and in those days the statement, “a woman could do that better than you,” would be instantly taken as an insult. In light of these realities, Heinlein’s portrayal of women commanding naval vessels was, in its day, shockingly subversive.
Heinlein also went out of his way to portray a military where people of all colors, nationalities, and creeds served without prejudice; a world where all are treated equally, and the only race that matters is the human race. This stood in stark contrast to the Navy of Heinlein’s day, where sailors were segregated and given different duties based on race. Cooks and stewards, for example, were almost exclusively people of color, usually either blacks from the U.S. or Filipinos. Filipinos could serve in the U.S. Armed Forces because of the status of the Philippines as a U.S. colony, and later commonwealth. The practice of limiting blacks to certain ratings and duties ended with an Executive Order from President Truman in 1948 that desegregated the Armed Forces, with equal rights not being granted in society at large until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Filipino segregation to specific ratings continued until 1973, and as late as the end of the 1970s, it was possible to go to sea (as I did) with a galley crew almost entirely made up of Filipino personnel.
First person novels often have a moment near the beginning where the protagonist is given an opportunity to describe themselves. I call them “mirror moments,” because one of the common ways this happens is for the protagonist to look into a mirror and give a description that the reader can lock onto. In Starship Troopers, however, that moment doesn’t come until the end, when Johnny mentions that the language of his home was Tagalog, a language of the Philippines. Heinlein obviously wanted the reader to be exposed to the idea of Johnny Rico as a capable and heroic character before revealing this fact, thus confronting their preconceived notions. As a Naval officer of his day, Heinlein would have been waited on and served by Filipinos. By making a Filipino man the hero of his book, he was making a powerful statement against the prejudices of the day.
Now, before you think that I’m advocating Heinlein as a model of enlightened thinking, we need to look at some other aspects of his future society. He portrays in a positive light a government established by a military coup, with a justice system based on brutal corporal and capital punishment, with franchise limited to a few. During compulsory political indoctrination the U.S. Declaration of Independence is mocked, among other “quaint” ideas, and students are told that morality is not inherent in humans, but learned. Another negative aspect of Heinlein’s future society was its embrace of the harshest aspects of Darwinism, with population pressure being seen as the cause of all wars, and survival of the fittest being the only guiding principle of humanity’s interactions with the “Bugs.” I am pretty sure that it’s here we find the material that caused Heinlein to part company with Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The world of the 1950s was a time of great uncertainty. The euphoria after WWII had given way to cynicism after the stalemated Korean War. The triumph of capitalism over communism was by no means expected or guaranteed, and any questioning of the Founding Fathers was met with distrust. Older, harsher forms of justice were giving way to newer, more “scientific” and “humane” methods of punishment, incarceration and rehabilitation. But while I would argue with the morality and desirability of the solutions Heinlein puts forward in Starship Troopers, his projected society does a good job of illustrating some of the weaknesses of the culture of the U.S. in the 1950s. Unlike the society portrayed by Heinlein, however, ours has reached the 21st Century without global war, and without collapsing under its own weight. We have pursued a different path regarding criminal justice since then, doubling down on the system of the 1950s with our zero tolerance sentencing policies and mass incarcerations, a path which many are now questioning. Relations between different races, creeds, and nationalities are fraught with difficulties. We are far from having a functional world-wide government or even a consistent rule of law, with low-level conflict seeming to be a constant in world affairs. We have found no perfect system of government, but instead keep muddling along as best we can.
Heinlein lived at a time when technology was totally transforming warfare. As a youth, he would have had the opportunity to encounter Civil War veterans who’d lived at a time when warships fought under sail, and horses were not only vital to the cavalry, but the backbone of army logistics. He saw technology transform the battlefields of World War I into a static, grinding war of attrition. And as a young naval officer, he served aboard one of the world’s first aircraft carriers, experimenting with new technologies that would further transform warfare during WWII. That war saw technology create conditions where maneuver warfare predominated, with fluid battlefields and rapidly shifting front lines. With the development of the atomic bomb, there was a time when the world wondered if warfare might be obsolete, but the Korean War showed that conventional wars could still be fought in the midst of a nuclear stalemate. Heinlein was at his best in his portrayal of the Mobile Infantry, a force whose name illustrated its strength, the mobility that allowed units to be inserted from orbit anywhere on a world, and move quickly around the battlefield, projecting firepower that ranged all the way from anti-personnel to nuclear weapons. The weapons, tactics, and mobility of the powered armor is a military member’s dream come true. And Heinlein was adept at explaining this technology, letting us first see it in action, and then detailing how it worked in a matter of fact manner. It is no surprise that Heinlein’s powered suit is often mentioned whenever advanced technology on the battlefield is discussed. His portrayal of military gear that would fit into the context of an interstellar war was spot on.
There is another aspect of Starship Troopers that has influenced military science fiction to this day…and unfortunately, it is not a positive influence. That is the presence of the dreaded expository lump, a period in which the narrative grinds to a halt while the author stops to explain something about politics, or strategy, or tactics, or weapons systems. Military SF authors love their technology, and since the technology often impacts the story, such explanations are often required. Heinlein always had a tendency to have older characters in his stories, often educators, who lecture at the protagonist, and the History and Moral Philosophy classes in Starship Troopers took this tendency to an extreme. Heinlein was highly skilled and able to keep his readers onboard during these explanations—a level of skill that is unfortunately not always present in those who have followed in his footsteps.
For good and ill, Starship Troopers has been a template, or touchstone, for all military SF that followed it. Even if authors disagree with the philosophies Heinlein espoused, they find that their works are in dialogue with Heinlein’s work. At its best, this novel made people think. It was very compelling, and easy to read, but there was a depth to it that previous SF war stories had lacked. In the end, Starship Troopers proved not to be a “juvenile” story in any way, shape, or form. Instead, it was a sign of maturity for the field of science fiction, a sign that the genre was growing up beyond its roots in pulp fiction, and becoming a forum for serious extrapolation and adult discussions.
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for five decades, especially science fiction that deals with military matters, exploration and adventure. He is also a retired reserve officer with a background in military history and strategy.
“students are told that morality is not inherent in humans, but learned”
How, precisely, is this a controversial notion?
Mr. Brown, I’ve somehow managed to miss your series of retro-reviews until now, so I’m now happily catching up. Thanks for writing them!
@1 Almuric, it depends on what one puts under the heading of “morality”.
The taboo against incest, for example, seems to have biological roots. Others around, co-operating with others, lying, sharing resources, etc all seem to be present in other species as well, which implies a biological basis to some of the ways we behave towards one another.
This is the book I recommend to anyone I meet who’s thinking about enlisting in the military. Not because of the politics or the fighting, but because of how it depicts the mental journey recruits go through during basic training. At least for me, the hump Heinlein talks about was real, although I hit it much sooner than Johnny did.
One year before you, I was commissioned in the Marines, a path largely influenced by “Starship Troopers.” It’s been a long time since the last read – time to rumage through my bookshelves again. Thanks for the push.
#1 @almuric – It’s not controversial to anyone who has raised children. :) Some people forget this and start to think that we are born with an innate sense of right and wrong. In the 1960’s in particular this was a popular belief.
A nice review. I know there are those who strongly dislike ST, but I found it to be well worth reading and entertaining to boot.
@6/Nick31: I’ve raised children, and I’d say that empathy and caring about others are innate. Does that count as morality?
I always felt this was kind of a sequel to Space Cadet, so I never really understood the critics who faulted Heinlein for supposedly holding the views that characters (especially Dubois) in Troopers espoused.
But regardless of whether I agree with the H&MP and regardless of the infodumps, Heinlein so effortlessly draws me in that they are in no way speed bumps for me to enjoy this novel. I think this (or maybe Stranger in a Strange Land) was the last time Heinlein was able to make me swallow a lecture and like it.
This has been on my TBR for a long time. I’ll have to look for it …
@@@@@ 3 phuzz, no: no other species has a taboo on lying because no other species uses language; or so far as we know any symbols at all. Many, probably a majority of, scientists would argue that to claim animals make moral choices is anthropomorphism at its most extreme. I interpret Alan as meaning the millennia old religious concept later adapted by the Enlightenment (esp Kant) that we humans have an inherent sense of right and wrong based in our reason. So Heinlein’s approach would set off alarms in the postwar period with its almost a social Darwinist approach, so painfully soon after WWII which of course was set off by a group holding social Darwinist ideas.
@8 vinsentient
The problem is not that Heinlein created Lt. Col Dubois, or that he had Dubois defend the Federation’s system. It’s that Heinlein writes the dissenting characters as strawmen whose only role is to pathetically attempt to disagree with Dubois before he effortlessly defeats them. Apparently, none of the Federation’s dissidents took debate class in high school.
@1,3,6,7,10 Thanks everyone above who gave Almuric a taste of how the source of human morality can be debated–a picture is worth a thousand words. Myself, I’ve always thought that both nature and nurture have a place in forming human behavior. I am reminded of a lecture Heinlein gave at the Naval Academy back in the ’70s that ended up being reprinted in Analog (I found it online here: http://www.nowandfutures.com/large/RobertHeinleinSpeechAtAnnapolis.pdf), which in addition to talking about the craft of writing and the nature of SF, was a good rumination on the subject of morality and patriotism.
@2 Thanks for the kind remarks about the review series. I enjoy writing them; with so many good ones to choose from, my biggest problem is figuring out which book to write about next!
@8 I had missed Space Cadet until recently; my local library didn’t have all the Heinlein juveniles on the shelf when I was growing up, and I only got around to reading it last year–another book where Heinlein drew heavily on his experience at Annapolis.
I got to say all the praise for this novel leaves me mystified. It consists mostly of lectures where some reasonably interesting ideas are presented in a very simplistic way and all kinds of strawmen are built and demolished with ease by the author. The main character is completely lacking in personality. All officers in this future military are totally selfless, extremely dedicated to their job and super competent which will never happen under any system because of human nature.
And despite all the pages dedicated to political lectures and discussions the novel never even attempts to answer some of the most obvious objections to the political system it proposes. Like “What is stopping the richest people from lobbying, buying politicians and ruling from behind the scenes as they do now in most of the world”?
I haven’t reread Starship Troopers in a long time, but I have read it multiple times. I remember one time (the first time?) being surprised and delighted by the lack of long descriptions of battle. That’s not my kind of miltary sci fi; I don’t want to read a written action/adventure movie where I have to try to picture what’s going on.
Perhaps you have to have a specific perspective to get this one: reading it in Britain when I was younger I found parts of it so alien that they might as well have been written by a giant lizard from another star. Anyway, here’s some of the debate other authors had around the time of release: http://www.panshin.com/critics/PITFCS/pitfcsintro.html
I only read it last year. It’s very hard to read now, especially after the Veerhoven film, not to think that the adoration of a fascist state is satirical.
I haven’t reread Starship Troopers in a long time, but I have read it multiple times. I remember one time (the first time?) being surprised and delighted by the lack of long descriptions of battle.
I’m surprised by this comment: as the OP notes, the entire first chapter is a long and detailed description of a battle, and there are two other battles described in detail – the (catastrophic) raid on the bug homeworld, and the successful raid to capture bug leadership. For a short book, that’s quite battle-heavy.
And that first chapter is startling to modern eyes. The “battle” it portrays is a raid deliberately intended as “a demonstration of firepower and frightfulness” to terrorise a civilian population by targeting their cities, infrastructure and even churches. Go through it one of these days and count how many war crimes the narrator commits in a thirty minute period.
Thanks for this. It’s one of the most even-handed reviews of a Heinlein novel I’ve read. People seem determined either to love him or hate him, united by a burning desire not to allow anyone to fall between those two extremes. Granted, I love him irrationally myself, but I also see his flaws. This is a nicely balanced view of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. I do think it’s the weakest of his Hugo-winning novels, but the other three are pretty great, so that’s good enough for government work.
a1ay has a point about the amount of battle in the book. I don’t care for most modern MilSF for just that reason. However, those books slip into weapon pr0n. Heinlein gives us one very good infodump about the powered suits and then mostly lets it go at that. His battle scenes are about the fighting and the people doing the fighting. He cared a lot more about beings than technologies and that shows. That’s why his expository lumps are more readable than those of his inferior modern imitators.
@11 I remember reading this and getting whiplash every time the story came to a screeching halt for one of Col. Dubois’s lectures that just felt like the author getting on a soapbox about some aspect of modern life that he found disagreeable and how it should be fixed in the future.
I also remember being particularly squicked by Dubois’s lecture about corporal punishment, his justifying of flogging for any number of criminal offenses, and most particularly, the apparent implication that kids in the 20th century not being spanked by their parents somehow led to the collapse of the old society and the rise of the Federation. Him going on at such length about spanking sort of creeped me out about why Heinlein might be so obsessed with it.
@18 John Arkansawyer
Heinlein’s characters are just as robotic as the armored suits and weapons that other authors spend their time and attention on. We never get any real detail on Johnny Rico’s relationship with his father or mother, and the work’s “romance” is slim to nonexistent. Rico’s only real relationship is with the Mobile Infantry, which is Always Right, and which he uncritically loves. Every soldier in the Mobile Infantry is either a paragon of humanity, a naive young civilian waiting to be molded into a paragon, or a strawman who exists to make a point about the importance of obedience. We see exactly one dissident with the MI’s ranks, and he’s whipped and thrown out for insubordination. Heinlein just can’t tolerate the existence of a single competent soldier who disagrees with the party line.
@19 RussellH
People like Colonel Dubois exist, of course. It’s just that in real life, they don’t easily win every argument. Sometimes their opponents have the basic sense to hold their own in debate. Seriously, flogging as a silver bullet for crime? The Middle Ages featured flogging, racking, and violent dismemberment for a wide range of offenses, and Europe was hardly a model of peaceful, law-abiding behavior during that time.
@13 “What is stopping the richest people from lobbying, buying politicians and ruling from behind the scenes as they do now in most of the world”? I would submit that the character of Johnny’s dad, a very rich and powerful man who was dismissive of the value of the right to vote as an individual, shows that Heinlein had thought of that issue.
@15 @17 I know what SF_fangirl means. Some books go overboard with the combat side of things. If you are going to accurately portray the military, along with the “hurry up” of combat, there should be a fair amount of the “and wait” side of things! ;-) And a1ay, while I myself was a bit uncomfortable with their lack of concern for collateral damage, and the targeting of civil infrastructure rather than purely military targets, I myself don’t think the troopers’ actions in that opening scene rise to the level of “war crimes.” Your comment did start me thinking, however, about how international law shapes our view of conflicts, and the fact that conflict with alien races would probably involve opponents with very different ideas about limits and constraints in those conflicts.
@15 Thanks for the link to those fascinating essays. I had heard echoes of that discussion over the years at various SF conventions, but it was interesting to see the original documents. And interesting hear how alien the viewpoints in the book were to someone “across the pond.”
@18 Thanks for the kind words.
@19 Yeah, the unabashed support for corporal punishment is a bit off-putting, to say the least.
while I myself was a bit uncomfortable with their lack of concern for collateral damage, and the targeting of civil infrastructure rather than purely military targets, I myself don’t think the troopers’ actions in that opening scene rise to the level of “war crimes.”
I’d have to disagree, actually.
“It’s a demonstration of firepower and frightfulness. Our mission is to let the enemy know that we could have destroyed their city” – The attack is not directed at a military target, but at a civilian target – a city – with the aim of causing terror in the civilian population. That’s a war crime.
“You’ll take no prisoners. You’ll kill only when you can’t help it. But the entire area we hit is to be smashed.” In other words, cause as much indiscriminate damage as you can. Even in an attack on a legitimate military target, this would violate the principle of proportionality and would be a war crime. Here there isn’t even a legitimate target that he’s aiming at.
found that I was going to pass about a hundred feet up over a flat-roofed warehouse or some such by the river . . tossed a bomb behind me as I stepped off the building and acros the river. Deliberate destruction of a civilian target for no military advantage.
I had spotted a juicy target and I wanted to get it before somebody else noticed it — a lovely big group of what looked like public buildings on a hill. Temples, maybe . . Not only are civilian targets protected, but cultural property (like religious buildings) is specifically protected. Our hero hits a civilian religious site in the middle of a city with a tactical nuclear weapon.
Right now I was trying to spot their waterworks; a direct hit on it could make the whole city uninhabitable – Deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure of this kind are war crimes.
There was something up there at the proper range -waterworks or whatever, it was big. So I hopped on top of the tallest building near me, took a bead on it, and let fly Indiscriminate use of weapons in a civilian area with no military targets, and the weapon in this case is, again, a tactical nuke.
I’m a bit disturbed that you think any of that is ambiguous, actually. Do they not teach you about LOAC in the Coast Guard? Didn’t any mental or ethical alarms go off when you were mulling over whether it might be legal or not to nuke a church in the middle of a city?
I’m skeptical of the idea that what we now understand to constitute a war crime in relations among human nations would be the same thing that constitutes a war crime several centuries from now in relations between humans and others.
@22 and @23 You raise some excellent points, and have supported your conclusions well. As I said, I myself was uncomfortable with the actions portrayed, and yes, I am familiar with the laws of armed conflict. But we only have the personal viewpoint of one trooper to draw upon, and very little idea of the larger context of this engagement. It is hard to make a definitive judgement based on a snippet of fiction.
@22 a1ay, @24 JohnArkanswayer, @25 AlanBrown
It’s important to remember that Heinlein is writing relatively soon after the Second World War. The Western Allies (I’m not going to even start on the Soviets) regularly conducted military operations that were certainly war crimes in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and were absolutely considered war crimes by the Western Allies when they had been on the receiving end. Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…
Obviously, I’m not defending Heinlein, but he had good reasons to believe that the “good guys” in future wars would be willing to break the laws of war and attack defenseless civilian populations. No one behaved ethically in WWII if it benefited them to break the rules; the moral difference comes from the fact that the Western Allies committed war crimes to win the war, while the Axis Powers practiced genocide and slavery as a matter of principle.
His real delusion is that the Mobile Infantry would be unwilling to kill or abandon their own soldiers. Rico tells us that the Mobile Infantry can’t just novabomb the bug homeworld because the bugs have prisoners of war. Twelve American POWs died in Hiroshima, and Truman still would have dropped the bomb if he’d know they were there. The idea that the Mobile Infantry “can’t abandon their own” is particularly absurd; they’re in a war against aliens who dropped an asteroid on Buenos Aires. The lives of a relative handful of soldiers, who promised to die for the Federation, really don’t matter very much by comparison.
One of the things I’ve always loved about Heinlein is his insistence that mores and customs are culturally determined and not eternal or universal. Over the years, I’ve found it charming to realize how blind he was to that fact in so much of his own work.
The Western Allies (I’m not going to even start on the Soviets) regularly conducted military operations that were certainly war crimes in the context of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and were absolutely considered war crimes by the Western Allies when they had been on the receiving end. Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…
I’m not sure about this second part. Certainly the Allies did, or condoned, actions by their allies which they considered war crimes when done by the Germans. The Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson pointed out “The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”
But was the area bombing of cities such as London by the Axis really considered a war crime by the Western Allies? I don’t think it was. It was not among the charges brought against, for example, Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, at Nuremberg.
I’m skeptical of the idea that what we now understand to constitute a war crime in relations among human nations would be the same thing that constitutes a war crime several centuries from now in relations between humans and others.
Oh, definitely. But under LOAC as presently understood, assuming that the Skinnies count as people, Rico commits several very serious war crimes.
His real delusion is that the Mobile Infantry would be unwilling to kill or abandon their own soldiers. Rico tells us that the Mobile Infantry can’t just novabomb the bug homeworld because the bugs have prisoners of war. Twelve American POWs died in Hiroshima, and Truman still would have dropped the bomb if he’d know they were there. The idea that the Mobile Infantry “can’t abandon their own” is particularly absurd;
Ah, but if you remember, the Federation’s actual founding myth, the story on which it bases its legitimacy, is a refusal to leave prisoners behind. In one of the classroom scenes there is a discussion of a war between the West and China which ended with several tens of thousands of Allied POWs still in Chinese hands; and it’s implied that this betrayal is what led the returning veterans to mount their coup. So it makes sense that they would be irrational on this particular issue.
And, from a Doylist point of view, it allows Heinlein to have scenes of infantry combat,rather than just lots of bugs being nuked from orbit (which is the only way to be sure).
I’ve always been mystified by the critical approach to this novel. Have read it at least three times; once, around 1970 when I was a young teen snapping up everything Heinlein wrote; again, after the movie came out to see where all that violence came from (not from the book, which featured little in comparison); and again a few years ago, when I decided to get serious about my lifelong passion of SF.
All three times it struck me the same way: merely an interesting story about the making of a soldier. That’s it. Stranger in a Strange Land was Heinlein at his subversive best, and this never really comes close to me. Sure, it’s good, entertaining, educational, all that. But hardly worthy of all the critical attention it receives. But, I am the person who Mark Twain was addressing when he wrote his introductory words to Huck Finn. Any attempt to find anything meaningful is pointless – and often, daft – when it comes to fiction. Just enjoy the story, and keep our egos out of the way.
@a1ay
By using the word “crime” you are explicitly saying that the actions were violation of law. So, you are assuming the laws regarding military action in this futuristic fictional war are the same or similar to ours.
It is entirely possible in that future other civilizations/races refuse to accept any rule of law in war and would attack civilian targets at will. You would have to imagine that the human military would then reciprocate.
I look forward to the day when people can admire Heinlein’s work, especially this one, without having to hedge their praise.
@27 John Arkansawyer, @28-29 a1ay
The reason that Goring wasn’t charged with area bombing at Nuremberg was the same reason that Donitz got away with unrestricted submarine warfare; the Western Allies sometimes felt uncomfortable charging people with war crimes that we had openly committed. Soviet war crimes didn’t count, since no one expected them to be civilized. After Admiral Nimitz testified about American use of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific, that charge against Donitz was dropped. We still got him for using slave labor to build submarines, though.
Back in 1939, London ferociously denounced the German terror bombing of Rotterdam as an unimaginable war crime. By 1944, the Western Allies were torching German cities as a matter of policy. If we hadn’t been in a position to bomb German cities, we would have hanged Goring for his terror attacks in a heartbeat, just as we would have convicted Donitz of unrestricted submarine warfare if it hadn’t been a vital tool in the Pacific theatre.
From what I can tell, much of the Law of Armed Conflict dates from the Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Western Allies would have been major violators if those additions had been in force during WWII. The LOAC states that noncombatants may not be made the targets of a direct attack, and the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo violate that rule on an extraordinary scale. Everything Rico does in the attack on the Skinnies, from the terror attack on a civilian population to the use of atomic weapons, is something that the Western Allies did in WWII. There’s no particular military value in using firebombs on Tokyo, and in many raids we aren’t even trying to hit factories or military bases. We’re doing just what the MI are doing in Starship Troopers; destroying buildings and killing civilians to terrify an enemy nation’s population into surrender.
a1ay, you’re right about the founding myth. I forgot how important that is to them. However, this kind of belief is easily exploitable. What happens if the Bugs put Federation POWs on all of their major warships? Is the Navy going to hold their fire because they can’t risk killing their own men? Destroying the warships (or nuking the Bug homeworld) doesn’t technically “leave prisoners behind”, any more than calling in an artillery strike on a position that’s being overrun abandons the soldiers there. It’s the kind of loophole that smart people find when their enemy starts exploiting their society’s fairy tales.
@GreyFreeman: That strikes me as a very odd desire. Why would I not want an accurate view of my favorite SF writer? If I’m not seeing the flaws, only the virtues, I wouldn’t be reading carefully.
And I see no reason to single this one out in such a manner. There are many better Heinlein novels, including all three which won the Hugo, at least three of the juveniles, both the other adult fifties novels, the first one, and at least three of the later novels. And then we have the shorter fiction, which is almost all better. This is a enjoyable, thought-provoking book. I like it a lot. But it’s no Door Into Summer.
Your mileage may vary. I urge you to admire this work with unhedged praise. After all, it’s a free country.
@ 34. JohnArkansawyer
Perhaps it’s because I have come around to the wisdom of many of what are now commonly agreed to be his crackpot ideas. In particular, his idea of the franchise being tied to service seems like bloomin’ genius to me. I think it’s not too much to ask for people to ante up before being allowed to play. It’ll never happen as those who already have it will never be willing to actually *pay* for it, but I like to dream.
Ideas like that tend to get Heinlein called a “Fascist”. My knee jerks every time I see that.
@GreyFreeman: That’s certainly one of the ideas Heinlein wanted to stimulate discussion about. I’m glad to see it worked.
@35 GreyFreeman
For someone who had such a negative view of the general population’s ability to make good decisions, Heinlein had an astonishingly optimistic view of his small elite’s ability to remain uncorrupted by power. There are many, many historical examples of a limited voting franchise, and none of them have ever worked out for the people who couldn’t vote. Whether they did it by race or class or gender or profession, whether they were born into it or “earned” it through serving the state, the result was always the same; voters became a distinct class, separate from and superior to the nonvoters, and they abused their political power for economic gain and social status. Since nonvoters held no political power, they could be robbed, mistreated, and discriminated against with impunity.
If you dislike the word “fascist” so much, you should think of a better term to describe a society that believes the army can do no wrong, insists that unlimited expansion is a sacred principle of racial survival, and loves torturing criminals.
Almuric, it would be controversial to anyone of the Christian faith which dictates that the natural laws are written on the hearts of men. It’s also a basic concept of the framers of the American Constitution that men are created equal with rights endowed by God. This implies that we all intuitively know the difference between good and evil and we know when we are violating the natural rights of another man. The idea that there is no universal truth, moral relativism, is a modern concept, and counter to the majority of history.
@dptullos: Authoritarian is a more accurate word than fascist. Fascist has an exact meaning that doesn’t fit this.
I’d also say–just as a personal matter–if I had a choice between a year in jail and a severe whipping, I’d take the whipping. It’s very possible in a few hundred years jail will be seen as cruel and unusual punishment and whipping will not.
I don’t think ‘unlimited expansion’ fits the situation in that novel. It’s clear that the strong preference of the government is to make the Skinnies into allies. That would presume not expanding right over them. I think Heinlein struggled with this question enough that, by the last phase of his writing career, he stopped creating alien races in “this” universe and only put them in unlimited multiverses where they could mostly co-exist with humans. That’s a pity, because Heinlein wrote really neat aliens.
As for the ‘army can do no wrong’ part, keep in mind this book is written in the voice of a very enthusiastic, freshly-minted second lieutenant. Heinlein didn’t use a lot of unreliable narration, but he might have done so here. Or not. I wonder.
@@@@@ 37. dptullos:
There are many, many historical examples of a limited voting franchise, and none of them have ever worked out for the people who couldn’t vote.
I think it’s disingenuous to compare Heinlein’s model to the various racist and classist versions that preceded it. In his world, anyone could elect to take on full citizenship. Anyone.
Given a choice, I’d take the decisions of an electorate populated by people who have proven themselves willing to sacrifice for the community over one made up of people who happen to been born there. Any day of the week.
@40 I never got through the book. There are other ways to get the franchise beside military service?
‘Cause any modern (or SF) military isn’t going to want anyone to enlist. Even with conscription, there are still significant classes of people who shouldn’t allowed to join if the military is to be any good.
Whatever I believe of Mr. Heinlein’s view of the general population’s ability to make good decisions I don’t base it on Starship Troopers. Larry Niven suggests a term for folks who attribute the character’s ideas to the author. In the context of current events I am not myself impressed by the general population’s ability to make good decisions but that is a discussion for another day. Kettle Belly Baldwin steered Friday away from the world where a self selected elite (see Gulf) in fact made the decisions.
However I know beyond dispute in the context of Starship Troopers that “his small elite” is neither particularly small nor particularly elite – assuming Mr. DuBois is factually correct about the fictional context of course but picking and choosing unreliable narration from unreliable narrators makes discussion pointless –
@noblehunter: Yes. Federal Service involved a variety of activities. They weren’t all military. They weren’t all dangerous, either. Some were tedious or strenuous. There wasn’t much detail given about that, just enough to make the point and go on.
@GreyFreeman: True that many versions of the limited franchise handed it out selectively, and that Heinlein finessed that by making entrance available to everyone. But power does tend to corrupt, especially when it has no checks on it. Note that the founding of this system involves some veterans banding together and killing others. Are we certain the right choices were made? We are getting the story from someone invested in the system, a system total enough that most power is held by it.
The other thing is that, to put skin in the game, everyone who enters is given a fair chance of facing–and dying in–combat. How much war, on a continuing basis, would be required to provide that sting? Heinlein had a point about the willingness to fight being a socially useful characteristic, but if you don’t have enough fighting going on, how do you get the sort of selection he was looking for? Simply being willing to risk one’s life isn’t the same as the willingness to fight.
#41 As early as page 19 of one edition:
In the context of the book Starship Troopers there is a war on. Troopers are drawn from the entire human space – Ship’s Sergeant Jelal (Jelly) is from Iskander. Much of the service is explicitly otherwise:
@ 43. JohnArkansawyer
“Simply being willing to risk one’s life isn’t the same as the willingness to fight.“
I’d be willing to argue that, as an indicator of deserving full citizenship, it is. You never know when the next one will break out. Besides, Heinlein was okay with non-military service, and so am I. Really just looking for a solid sign of selflessness that everyone can aspire to.
@44 That sounds like the premise for a farce. It has been the set-up for one, notably The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross; though with a very different justification.
@39 John Arkansawyer
Thanks! “Authoritarian” is a better word than “fascist”, since the latter implies a dictatorship, while the former describes an society that exalts the power and authority of the state over the personal freedom of the citizen.
The criminal isn’t the only person being whipped; if a minor commits certain kinds of crime, his father can be whipped along with him. Rico specifically comments about that form of punishment during one of his classes with DuBois.
At several points throughout Starship Troopers, Rico mentions that the Federation is ideologically committed to unlimited expansion. “People that don’t breed are replaced by people that do” is one of the rationales. In a universe where interspecies relations are fundamentally Darwinian, the Federation always has to expand to new worlds or be wiped out by people who do. Their “alliance” with the Skinnies is based on terror; Rico takes part in the raid that smashes a Skinny city as a means of “convincing” them to change sides. Many empires have subject peoples, but they’re never treated as equals or allowed to forget who’s in charge.
You’re right that Rico is a brand-new second lieutenant with a man crush on the Mobile Infantry. However, none of the experienced veterans around him ever criticize the Mobile Infantry, the Federation, or any of the Federation’s political parties. There is no politics in Heinlein’s utopia, just perfect ranks of identical veterans, free from any of the ferocious political debates that characterize most democracies. Every one of the veterans agrees that the Federation is the best imaginable government, that it couldn’t be improved in any way, and that none of its policies should ever be criticized.
@40, 45 GreyFreeman
“Anyone could elect to take on full citizenship. Anyone.”
That is to say, anyone who serves in a limited number of careers determined by the existing ruling class. Anyone who follows orders, toes the line, and accepts the idea that “sacrifice for the community” and “do what your sergeant says” are synonyms. If they refuse to slaughter their way through alien cities on command, if they question the Federation’s authority, they will be whipped or hanged, and they will certainly never be allowed to enter the citizenry.
The duty of a soldier may be obedience; the duty of a citizen is independence. Once you allow the state to decide what is “selfish” and what is “selfless”, you aren’t really a citizen anymore. By Heinlein’s standards, none of America’s civil rights workers would qualify as “selfless”, since they didn’t obey orders and work for the state. No matter how brave they were, no matter how many times they risked their lives, they wouldn’t qualify because they wouldn’t do as they were told. The police officers who terrorized them, however, might well receive citizenship; police work can be dangerous sometimes, and they obeyed their orders.
Whenever we discuss the idea of a selective franchise, the question I ask is “Who selects?” Angels do not descend from on high to reward brave, selfless souls with voting rights. A government bureaucracy judges applicants to determine whether they are virtuous enough. Since obedience is the first quality that they test for, what they are really deciding is whether the future generation of citizens is conformist and loyal. It’s a fascinating system, which permits democracy among those people who are incapable of being citizens, and denies it to those who might use their vote to change the existing order.
If someone was to risk their life in an uprising against the Federation, would they be worthy of citizenship? They’re certainly brave enough to fight against the Mobile Infantry, and they’re clearly willing to take responsibility for the civic good by laying down their life to change the system. But the Federation is uninterested in independence and defiance and imagination, the virtues of the citizen. They prefer the kind of people who accept the party line without question, obey their superiors, and leave active service without any dangerous ideas that might actually cause them to threaten the proper order of things.
#48 -I’d say an extreme but basically accurate reading of Starship Troopers.
The prior discussion omits such things are Navy Corpsmen who exist precisely because they are not Marine Riflemen but who are welcome and more than welcome in any company of fighting men. I knew an 8th Air Force Navigator who, when daylight bombing was killing lots of Americans in the air and in sudden impacts with the ground, turned down pilot training because although he wanted to support the war effort and had no hesitation about risking his life he didn’t want to be directly responsible for killing when he was able to accept that most everybody is indirectly responsible.
That said Mr. Heinlein did suggest the possibility that there might be qualifications for full citizenship. In another place he suggested maybe the ability to quickly solve easy quadratics. He suggested that folks who objected to the franchise in Star Ship Troopers write their own story maybe motherhood as having hostages to fortune and so a stake in good government.
I have no doubt that Mr. Heinlein and his family (Lawrence? spelling long service army) including Ginny whose service as a Wave officer was longer than Mr. Heinlein’s own, did believe that giving orders comes after learning to take them. Star Ship Troopers is and always will be a Scribner’s juvenile in origin and tone. Much the same theme of buildingsroman and growth can be found in other science fiction by other writers for ex this:
Comparing the training for command as described by David Drake above with Tom Kratman’s writings in other places. As with Dr. Pournelle Mr Heinlein has often been accused of liking and wanting what he merely suggests as realistic and is often warning against in If this goes on… fashion. There is a case for training for command. Given that all government rests on force and ultimately on the illusion of force there is a case for the executive learning to take orders before starting to give them. Maybe another way is better but the story of Juan Rico is a fine story and a hypothetical. Try Jo Walton’s equally fine or maybe farther seeing by standing on the shoulder’s of giants Thessaly trilogy for another example of building an ideal state. The Federation of course is nowhere presented as ideal merely pragmatic and good enough to survive.
The Bugs stood back safely to throw rocks at Earth. The Federation military responded by putting boots on the ground on the Bug homeworld to show them just how horrible war can be face to face.
You want to massacre our civilians, obliterate our cities with your cowardly dropping of rocks? We’ll do it back at you, up close and personal and show you all the horrors of war you were too scared to face. If it takes exterminating your species to make you quit, so be it.
I’ve always thought that Heinlein’s ‘earn the franchise’ idea had some merit and could stand to be examined more closely.
I live in South Africa, where voters have shown that they are willing to vote for whoever promises them the most grant money, the best jobs, more RDP houses. Or, they vote ANC because that’s what their parents believe is the right thing to do, or because they continue to believe the grandiose promises made by the ruling party, who has had more than twenty years to prove that they can run the country effectively, but have proved only the opposite. The most recent elections have shown that, to take an example not entirely at random, even in a town where the ANC-run government has failed to provide basic services to the point where actual riots – with gunfire and tear gas – erupted, the people of that town will still vote into power the same incompetents they were demanding resignations from not three months ago.
I like to believe that a system where a citizen has to earn the vote (not necessarily though military service, some form of volunteer community service or serving on the police force or something like that would probably be the way to go, considering that we can’t afford to pay the soldiers we already have and don’t really need any more) would make people value it more, or at least ensure that the people with the right to vote end up being the people who care and are affected by the issues facing the society.
@50 Gregg Eshelman
The Bugs are written as a hive mind species. Individual “soldier” Bugs do not appear to have any sense of fear for themselves. They aren’t scared, actively prefer to fight “up close and personal” where their vast numbers give them an advantage, and don’t feel that war has any horrors for the expendable soldier caste.
You say “cowardly”, I say “effective”. Dropping rocks on a city full of civilians is certainly morally depraved, but neither the Federation nor the Bugs seem to care about ethics. The only difference is that Bug strategy is apparently developed by intelligent, analytical minds, while Federation strategy is apparently written by soldiers who have been drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid. If they copied the Bugs, the war would be over already.
@51 jaggedrain
South Africa has one of the most corrupt police forces in the world. Giving a limited franchise to your nation’s cops would be like handing the United Wolves Union the keys to every henhouse in the country. They’re bad enough when everyone can vote; if they were part of a smaller ruling class, I can’t begin to imagine what South African cops would be capable of.
Volunteer community service is a good thing. However, you say that a large part of your country’s voters support the ruling party out of habit or because they believe their promises. These people might sign up for community service, do good work, and then make bad political life choices. Caring doesn’t automatically make people smarter or more analytical.
“I live in South Africa, where voters have shown that they are willing to vote for whoever promises them the most grant money, the best jobs, more RDP houses.” The role of government is to create circumstances in which their citizens can have better jobs, education, health care, and housing, among other things. I’m not sure why you think a government promising to improve the quality of life for its citizens is a bad thing; should voters support a party that promises them less grant money and worse jobs? The problem here is that the promises haven’t been kept, and possibly that some of them can’t be kept, not that people like the idea of a government that does things for them. Why would they pay taxes to a government that didn’t do things for them?
If South Africa becomes a more functional country, it will be because the voting public makes better choices, not because the nation adopts a limited franchise based on something other than skin color. If the general public chose a government that you trusted to create a limited voting system, that would be proof that the public was capable of managing their own affairs without needing to limit the vote. If the general public elected a government that you didn’t trust to devise a limited voting system, then any system they created would be worse than the current universal vote. Either way, the only way forward is to convince people to be better citizens, not to create some kind of benevolent patrician class that can be trusted to look out for the interests of the powerless. We all know how that story ends.
@48:
But the Federation is uninterested in independence and defiance and imagination, the virtues of the citizen. They prefer the kind of people who accept the party line without question, obey their superiors, and leave active service without any dangerous ideas that might actually cause them to threaten the proper order of things.
I think the character of Ted Hendrick disputes that claim. Hendrick spoke openly about his reformist ambitions (how he planned to go into politics and change the system after his term of duty), and there was no indication the Federation tried to squash his ideas or that Hendrick was considered an anti-social deviant for wanting to change the system. (The other recruits all seemed to identify with him. Sergeant Zim indicated he personally liked Hendrick and thought he was one of the safe ones. And Captain Frankel didn’t even know who Hendrick was which shows Hendrick was not on any kind of watch list for being a potential subversive.) And while Hendrick was ultimately drummed out of the service, it was because he admitted to striking a superior officer (something that is not going to be tolerated in any plausible military organization), not because of his political ideas.
@49 You make very well a major point that had always bothered me about the “service for voting rights” aspect of Federation society. If it is to be utterly “fair,” it would have to provide equal access to service of some kind for all members of society, regardless of intelligence or physical fitness. And, assuming that most people would want the franchise, how does the government somehow find jobs for all of them?
Since I get the impression that the Federation is most likely “libertarian” in its economics, how do they pay for all those jobs without exacting heavy taxation on citizens?
And, if there are in fact some form of limitations or restrictions on service based on physical and mental condition, this would most likely mean a permanent “underclass” of non-citizens whose rights (if any) would only be guaranteed at the sufferance of the voting class. And, again, since social-welfare, as we see in the novel, appears to be limited to post-service care for veterans, there would be no “safety net” for anyone unable to work. They would be at the mercy of private charity, if any such thing exists in a society that would, per Col. Dubois, not recognize “natural rights” or “morality” beyond that which is one’s best self-interest.
Heinlein’s notion of citizenship for people who can “quickly solve quadratic equations” sounds ‘way too much to me like the “educational tests” that the Jim Crow South used to disqualify blacks from registering to vote.
Ultimately, what disturbs me most is the implication that this society would see as its goal creating a self-perpetuating ruling class of soldier-citizens (as opposed to citizen-soldiers) of a particular, uniform physical condition and mental ability that begins to sound ominously like eugenics.
@53 bguy
No military tolerates a recruit striking a superior officer. However, Hendrick is the only voice of opposition to the Federation within the MI- the other recruits may listen to him, but none of them really express any dissenting ideas of their own. If there were several critics, and one of them was kicked out for an obviously justified reason, I wouldn’t see anything wrong. The fact that the only real opponent of the Federation turns out to be an idiot who lacks the emotional control to avoid striking a superior or the basic intelligence to understand the consequences of doing…well, that strikes me as a bad sign. Just as DuBois had to easily win every argument with the students in his class, Hendrick had to wash out so that he couldn’t remain as an alternative to the Federation’s system. If there was one other MI soldier who expressed doubt, it wouldn’t matter, but the discrediting and removal of the only dissenter strikes me as bad, politically motivated writing.
And after Hendrick’s discharge, we never hear any criticism, however mild, from any of the soldiers. All of them support the Federation’s authorities from their sergeant all the way up to the Sky Marshal and whatever they call their political leaders (I don’t think we ever find out). No lingering questions, no real doubts, no meaningful alternatives, and the only person who dared to ask questions turns out to be an unstable troublemaker who couldn’t make it as a soldier. It just seems too convenient for my taste.
@54 Russell H
How many dangerous jobs are there in peacetime? The whole justification of the Federation is that only those who risk their lives for society can be allowed to run the government, but there are a limited number of meaningful risks in daily life. DuBois tells us that the Federation is extremely law-abiding, so police officers aren’t in real danger, and society only needs so many firefighters.
Forget about paying for jobs; how does the Federation build giant warships and suits of powered armor while maintaining the lowest tax rates in human history? It’s a system of looting, where the citizens tax people without political representation to pay for their giant military, while refusing to spend any of that money on things like Social Security or decent universal health care.
All limited franchises work the same way. The voting class uses their political power to take from the powerless, and they ensure that their successors will be people like them. Sometimes they select on the basis of class or color or gender; in the Federation, they select for ideological similarity, producing a citizenry that hates dissent, worships authority, and despises change. It’s eugenics of the mind, not the body, but the results are very similar.
#7 @JanaJensen – Absolutely. My toddlers definitely have some beautiful moments of caring and empathy, but they also have the ability to be completely selfish and insensitive, not to mention destructive. It’s especially interesting to see the differences in the twins. The one who can be the most … feisty is also the one who is quickest to give her sister a hug and take care of her after she falls down. I wasn’t trying to suggest that kids don’t have the ability to love and care, but that those traits don’t exist in a vacuum. They have to be modeled and encouraged. Morality is more than just the ability to do good, it’s understanding the difference and why it’s important.
#17 I’m surprised by this comment: as the OP notes, the entire first chapter is a long and detailed description of a battle, and there are two other battles described in detail – the (catastrophic) raid on the bug homeworld, and the successful raid to capture bug leadership. For a short book, that’s quite battle-heavy.
There are some battles, but by modern standards (ahem David Weber ahem) they’re very light on technical details. For example, can anyone say what the main weapon that MI use is when fighting bugs? There’s a description of a missile launcher in the first raid (but the implication seems to be not every MI has one, because they aren’t mentioned much in the other scenes), and a reference to a ‘hand flamer’, but it’s not clear how they work or if there are other weapons or what their ranges are or much else. This is probably a good thing, but definitely very different than modern MilSF.
@57 Re MI weaponry, there’s also self-proclaimed “Thirty Second Bomb” that’s launched against the Skinnies in Chapter One, arguably one of the most surreal pieces of ordinance ever introduced in military SF.
@56/Nick31: Yes, I guess I agree with that.
@55:
However, Hendrick is the only voice of opposition to the Federation within the MI- the other recruits may listen to him, but none of them really express any dissenting ideas of their own. If there were several critics, and one of them was kicked out for an obviously justified reason, I wouldn’t see anything wrong. The fact that the only real opponent of the Federation turns out to be an idiot who lacks the emotional control to avoid striking a superior or the basic intelligence to understand the consequences of doing…well, that strikes me as a bad sign.
I still think its significant though that Hendrick wasn’t bounced for his political beliefs. If the Federation was truly a fascist government, it wouldn’t tolerate any of its military personnel openly criticizing the government. And frankly in an authoritarian state even Rico’s ruminations about the Federation taking a terrible licking in Operation Bughouse and him stating that post-Bughouse the Federation was losing the war would probably get him in trouble as a “defeatist.”
Just as DuBois had to easily win every argument with the students in his class
Of course we never see DuBois debate a fellow adult. Him shouting down students in his class isn’t really that impressive a feat.
And after Hendrick’s discharge, we never hear any criticism, however mild, from any of the soldiers. All of them support the Federation’s authorities from their sergeant all the way up to the Sky Marshal and whatever they call their political leaders (I don’t think we ever find out). No lingering questions, no real doubts, no meaningful alternatives, and the only person who dared to ask questions turns out to be an unstable troublemaker who couldn’t make it as a soldier. It just seems too convenient for my taste.
Well the Federation is in a war with a seemingly genocidal enemy. How much dissent do you think there was in the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor?
Otherwise the fact that Rico specifically feels the need to tell the reader that he is not criticizing General Diennes after Operation Bughouse (and that he mentions a rumor about General Diennes allowing himself to be talked out of additional troops for the operation by the Sky Marshall-in-Chief) certainly makes it sound like other people around Rico are criticizing Diennes and/or the Sky Marshall. And later on when Rico is acting as a Third Lieutenant he gets warned by his CO that he is upsetting the men in his platoon (which certainly makes it sound like some complaints got routed up the chain of command about his leadership.)
DuBois tells us that the Federation is extremely law-abiding, so police officers aren’t in real danger, and society only needs so many firefighters.
Does the text really support DuBois’ claim that the Federation is that law abiding though? Rico and friends can’t even go on leave in Seattle without getting attacked by 4 thugs (one of whom had a knife.) That doesn’t much sound like an extremely law-abiding society.
Anyway, IIRC it’s mentioned in the text that there is a major terraforming project going on Venus, so that probably provides plenty of dangerous peace-time jobs.
@Russell H.:
And it led to this lovely moment in Fritz Leiber’s A Specter Is Haunting Texas:
@55 Actually, while the MI doesn’t officially tolerate subordinates striking their superiors, the scene where Johnny takes Ace to the head for some bare knuckle counseling shows that there is a rougher form of justice and discipline practiced down on the deckplates. This is something that was fairly common in the sea service in days gone by, and Heinlein was no doubt familiar with it, familiar enough to write a pretty realistic scene in the book. But, like other officers at the time, he probably “put a blind eye to the telescope” and pretended not to notice. With efforts against old practices like hazing, the US Armed Forces have been, in recent decades, trying to stamp things like this out.
Wow, phenomenal review!! Heinlein’s work (in particular, this one and Stranger In A Strange Land,) have been on my TBR for many, many years. I’ve no idea why I haven’t read him yet. Your review compatantly showcases the novel’s positives and negatives, and features an added bonus that goes a LONG way: Heinlein’s military experience, and the world around him. The aftermath of WWII clearly shaped how he perceived the world. Thank you for encouraging me to finally try Heinlein!!
I kind of like Heinlein’s exposition lumps. I’m strange
I knew someone who always idealised family life; I could never shake the feeling that he could do such so easily because genocide had deprived him of most of his. Heinlein, forcibly separated from military service after (for him) far too short a time, then receiving a small but significant pension and free medical care in a jobs-starved nation not yet sane enough to care even half-decently for its citizenry, may have been similarly influenced.
@37: When I saw the very loose film adaptation, I got the very definite feeling that Verhoeven was saying ‘Very fine talk—here’ s how I think it would really work.’
Actually, those are not the ‘bugs’ on the cover of that paperback edition – those were the Earth troop-carriers – they are spaceships, not the alien arachnids. Just FYI.