Werner's Reviews > Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was part of the generation of American science fiction writers whose interest in the genre was shaped within the insular little world of U.S. SF fandom in the years between the World Wars, centered around a handful of pulp magazines, with John W. Campbell's Astounding Stories ultimately the foremost of them. Making his first SF short story sale to Astounding in 1939, in time to become, like his slightly younger colleague Isaac Asimov, one of Campbell's proteges and leading contributors to the magazine in pulp SF's “Golden Age,” he would go on to be one of the genre's biggest 20th-century names, winning the Hugo Award four times (the first time for this novel). Despite a liking for science fiction that goes back to my childhood, though, I've never sought Heinlein out as a writer. Overall, my taste in the genre runs more to its “soft” branch, or to sociological SF, sword-and-planet scenarios, post-apocalyptic and alternate history works –not so much to the “hard” school, closely aligned with strict extrapolation from (and often devoted to expounding a lot of) actual science, which characterized the pulp tradition. (Heinlein fit into the latter very well; in the late 1930s he was a postgraduate student in physics and math at the Univ. of California.) Then too, with a few exceptions, military-oriented SF isn't generally my thing. There are also significant differences between my worldview and his. So my prior experience with his work was limited to a handful of his short stories in anthologies (which for me have been a mixed bag). But when my oldest grandson was thoughtful enough to gift me with a copy of this book last Christmas, I was resolved to read it ASAP; and it turned out that I appreciated it more than I'd expected to.

Our setting here is the far future (I don't recall the exact century being specified), and our protagonist and narrator is a soldier whom we meet in medias res as he's about to “drop” down, along with other troopers, from an orbiting starship onto the surface of a hostile planet, for a raid in the course of a high-tech interstellar war. We don't learn his full name until chapter 11 of a 14-chapter book (that's actually done for a purpose, which I won't divulge, but for which I give Heinlein high marks on a couple of counts!); until then he's just “Johnnie.” In the following chapter, we drop back to the time when he's finishing up high school on Earth and about to turn 18, when his best friend convinces him that after graduation, they should sign up for military service together. (The war breaks out while he's still in basic training.) Beginning with chapter 2, the plot proceeds in linear fashion, though there's a longer than usual chronological gap before the final chapter. You might suppose, then, that this will be primarily a space opera action-adventure potboiler with primary emphasis on battles and military hardware. But that supposition would be wrong.

The book opens with a battle scene, and there's a grand total of one other such scene in the entire novel. Both of these are described in an exciting and suspenseful fashion, with plenty of action, though none of it grisly-gory. But these are hardly the meat of a 335-page novel. Likewise, there's some attention paid to describing the trooper's formidable armored combat suits and their weaponry, communications capabilities, etc., just sufficiently so that you can understand the action taking place. But this isn't heavy-handed nor lengthy, and there's no hard science for its own sake. (No effort is made to explain faster-than-light space travel, for instance; just that it's made possible by the “Cherenkov drive.”) Most of Johnnie's narration describes his training (at one level or another), and the conditions of starship life in a combat unit. Heinlein served in the Navy from 1929-1934 (after graduating from Annapolis –he had to return to civilian life on a medical discharge), and allowing for the mostly cosmetic differences of setting, futuristic technology and some specific future customs and practices, a lot of the lifestyle and ethos he describes clearly derives directly from this real-life experience. According to one SF website, “...Troopers was the first SF novel in which military life was depicted in a manner believable to readers who had actually served.” Readers looking for a constant high level of slam-bang action won't appreciate this, but for readers who value verisimilitude, this is actually a plus.

Plausibly realistic description of what training and life in a space navy might be like for a mobile-infantry trooper, however, though important to the author, still wasn't his main reading for writing. His real reason is to make the novel a vehicle for expressing certain social messages relevant not only to American society in 1959, but to Western society in general in succeeding generations down to the present. This is very much a novel about ideas, and about the consequences of ideas.

As Johnnie learns in school, 20th-century Earth societies collapsed, at least partly because of an epidemic of teenage crime produced by the ideologically driven abandonment, at the societal and legal level, of not only corporal child discipline, but pretty much any punitive child discipline at all. Teens grew up with no sense of moral duty to others in their society in general; the resulting aggressive violence made the cities increasingly unlivable. A third World War hastened the collapse. In its immediate aftermath, order was gradually restored by vigilante groups of veterans, who had that kind of sense of duty; and as a federated world state took shape under their tutelage, they created a polity in which full citizenship with voting rights was restricted to veterans. (It was also a state where crimes were punished primarily by the whipping post rather than by prison terms.) By Johnnie's time, this had produced a stable, widely prosperous society with low crime and maximum personal freedom for most of the populace. All those who applied for military service were accepted, and if they stuck out at least one two-year term (not necessarily in combat service), they became voting citizens. But frivolous applicants were discouraged, training was rigorous enough to weed out those who couldn't hack it, and the service itself was no cakewalk. In the service, there was a strong emphasis on discipline and on self-sacrifice for the good of the civilian society which military services exist to protect. The implications for American society in the author's present, facing a then unprecedented rise in “juvenile delinquency” as well as what many perceived an an existential external threat from the Soviet Union, were fairly obvious. They remain obvious, as the decline of law and order has become even more noticeable than it was in 1959, and as existential threats multiply in the post 9/11 world.

Heinlein's own general socio-political attitudes were broadly right-of-center (more so than mine, in some respects), though he doesn't go into those much here, and he later supported the Vietnam War, a stance that in hindsight was recognizably misguided. By the late 1960s, this led the rising younger generation of intelligentsia and college-educated SF fans to hate and demonize him. This novel was grist for their anger. One reviewer has described his viewpoint here as “hyper right-wing nationalism,” which is ironic, considering that he happily depicts all nationalities as absorbed under a benevolent world government, a goal which was really popular with SF writers in the Campbell school, but not so much so with those of us who actually are (peaceful) nationalists. Another reader (and probably more than one!) has characterized it as “Fascist,” though Heinlein was actually a very strong libertarian. For my own part, I have significant disagreements with him at the philosophical level. I don't, for instance, deny that humans have a moral instinct and reduce all valid ethical principles to whatever aids individual or group survival, nor explain all wars as caused by population pressure (his Darwinism, IMO, misled him in these respects), and I think there are serious problems with restricting suffrage to veterans, and doubt that it would work as well in practice as he imagined. Yet in his basic thesis that children and teens need constructive moral discipline, and that a willingness to defend your community against aggressors with your life if necessary is a laudable thing, I would contend that he wasn't wrong.

Also on the plus side, this is a very clean novel, with no bad language and no sexual content. It also has a positive view of women in combat –none serve as infantry troopers (probably because the weight of the armored suits would be too heavy for most), but we're told that they make better combat pilots than males do, and they generally captain the starships. (For 1959, that's a pretty feminist stance!). Personally, I really enjoyed the book overall, and would recommend it to SF and military fiction fans.