Review: Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When a book is generally regarded as a great classic scifi it can feel superfluous to say anything about it at all. Especially when there is some lingering debate about the author's intent. I don't know much about any of that. From what I could gather by reading the least amount about it that I could reasonably manage, the issue of contention has to do with whether this is a pro-militaristic wankfest or a sharp, satirical piece. Well, here's my two cents: It doesn't matter folks.

I'm going to presume that the author never weighed in on the topic otherwise there'd be nothing to debate. If Heinlein didn't specify either way then everybody is right, that's how the best art works, the audience interpret it as they see it without direction. And anyway, after reading this story I don't see why it couldn't be interpreted as being both of those things to some degree and with due respect.

Apart from that bloated way of saying that the pro/anti war discussion is moot, I'll add that the story is decidedly more of a military procedural than a scifi. There is some very cool tech and the futuristic society is interesting but these are only ever explored when they affect the soldier's life.

The first half of the book is all recruitment and training. The narrator even comments at one point, something like "There's only one more thing I want to tell you about the training", like Heinlein was quite aware of how long that section felt. Then if you split the second half into thirds, it went Scifi with snippets from the actual alien war, followed by a bit of shaky philosophical rambling, and ended up back on the battlefield for a scifi finish. So all up about a third of the book has much at all to do with the war between humans and bugs.

I do like stories that show me something I'm unfamiliar with and I thought that the soldiers and their experience in this story were given respect even though at times some characters or events seemed farcical. Their was a grittiness to the storytelling and about which events were focused on that gave this a feeling of authenticity.

The story had its hits and misses. It is occasionally quite funny and often darkly so. The field court martial was pretty dramatic. The writing was definitely engaging and I felt a vested interest in most of the very well drawn characters.

As I mentioned, the middle third of the second half was a bit heavy on with philosophical preachings about the military way of life. Dad initially didn't support his son's decision to enlist but much later in the story he makes a significant life choice and when he explains it to his son he laments that he had never been a "real man" because he'd never done military service. Seriously groan inducing stuff.

Right at the start of the story we find out that women make the best pilots and you get tricked into believing that women will have a significant role in the story. Not so, after that early compliment the very few women that appear in the story get the porcelain doll treatment and the gender generalisations seem to get worse each time.

However you look at the book, we can probably all agree that there were too many quotes from the bible story. These were presented to either justify the righteousness of the war effort or to highlight the horrors of Christianity. Either way, a handful of quotes would have sufficed instead of reprinting the first few gospels.

The story does make one bold statement which I can get behind and I'm going to finish by quoting it:

"everything of any importance is founded on mathematics."

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