Starship Troopers

I am now most of the way through my re-read of Podkayne of Mars, so I'd better hurry and write up a post for Starship Troopers. In my previous post, I wrote about how Have Space Suit—Will Travel sort of acts as a culmination or capstone on the thematic arc that started with Rocket Ship Galileo and then continued for eleven more novels. It's such a perfect ending to such an amazing series that extending my personal "canon" of the Heinlein juveniles feels wrong. And that was in the back of my mind for most of my re-reading of Starship Troopers.

I could probably make a case for three different versions of the juveniles "canon" as I envision it. One version stops with the end of the Scribner's run, with a series of twelve stories that expand their scope in time and space, bringing the reader on a wonderful journey that eventually comes back home in an intriguing, yet sobering way. Another version includes that entire arc, but doesn't stop there. It includes the final book submitted to Scribner's, which remains a juvenile, but expects a bit more maturity out of the reader, a start of what could have been "Juveniles 2.0" and introduced the kids who grew up with the first dozen novels to more advanced topics. And a third version, the one I'm processing now that I'm midway through Podkayne of Mars, has everything from the first two version, keeps the tone set by Starship Troopers, but ultimately shows how when Heinlein came back to the well for another juvenile protagonist, he was thwarted in one of the biggest upsets in his writing career and moved on to books for adults thereafter.

There is so much that I could say about Starship Troopers. It is Heinlein's second most famous book for good reasons. And I guess I'll start with my own Livejournal post from just over nineteen years ago.

I read this book almost a week ago, but I'm so lazy that I didn't make an entry until now. Anyway, I was definitely impressed. It's a good book. I don't know. I think I was expecting more. Not that something was really missing, but maybe I thought the book would be longer, even though that doesn't really make sense because I had the book in my hands and could see that it was easily less than 300 pages.

Even thought I knew better, I expected the book to be like the movie, and it was not even remotely similar. Basically none of the characters that are in the book are actually in the movie. They did keep some names, but the characters themselves are completely different. And the book has like, messages and stuff. The movie is just a cheesy caricature. It's as though Paul Verhoeven hated the book but wanted to make the movie anyway. For what it's worth, I kind of like the movie. The biggest problem is that it has the same name as the book and is purportedly based on it.

One thing the book does that's a bit contrived is give us really long flashbacks that are conveniently placed for Heinlein to deliver his philosophy (via the main character's schoolteacher). It's interesting stuff, but seems so removed from the events going on in the rest of the book. Really, I guess my criticism is that the book hops between being philosophical and being action-packed and it gets to be a bit awkward, but mostly, even that is actually done with class. It's an easy read and certainly kept me hooked. A lot. It feels like I've been rather critical here but this book definitely makes my top 50. Not sure exactly where I'd rank it, but it's going on the list.

I hunted this post down prior to beginning my re-read, but I kind of can't wrap my head around it. I can't quite remember the space my head was in back then. My take now? The book is great and I wasn't positive enough about it back then. I'd say that I'd fight the twenty-two year old version of myself over this crappy review, but I am out of shape and he would probably wear me down.

I am spontaneously electing to write the rest of this post, other than a brief conclusion, in bullet point form. Tacky? Too bad. I thought of the idea just now and it appeals to me.

• I cannot believe that I had anything positive to say about that movie. The years since my first reading of the book have really exhausted my patience with trite comparisons between the book and movie.
• A lot of the criticisms of the book, specifically winging about militarism, fascism, misogyny, conflating it with the aforementioned bad movie, or siding with the aliens instead of the humans because some folks are telling on themselves about their own misanthropy, was fully addressed in this essay I'll link to here: http://kentaurus.com/troopers.htm
• Johnnie's descriptions of women throughout the book and discussions of male-female relationships stand out to me more now, especially given the more explicitly sex-driven stuff in Heinlein's later work. There's a certain charm. When the topic comes up and I see any discussion of Heinlein writing about anything to do with women or sex, it's always post-Stranger infamous Dirty Old man Heinlein. But Starship Troopers? He hadn't given up on reining it in, I guess. Maybe it really is a YA novel. It is restrained. That's true. And in a certain sense it is artificial. It's a military story. The main character is infantry. Realistically, there'd be raunchier dialogue and stuff. It's also written with Johnnie as a narrator selecting details, so maybe he did see and hear stuff and even participate, but considers it crass to put in this account and is leaving it out the same way he left out things like the identities of which men were saved when the lieutenant sacrificed his life to throw two men into the evacuation bay. So on the one hand, it's dialed back a little too obvious and on the other hand there's plausible reason for that. But what struck me more than that was what Johnnie does say about women: it's so uncannily reverent. Almost worshipful. It really resonates in a way I guess I didn't pick up on in 2008, and I don't know why not.
• I know at some point I was told that the high school flashbacks to Mr. Dubois are intrusive or hamfisted, and I recall just kind of accepting that on my first reading. I was actually a bit worried that I'd enjoy this one less than the other juveniles because I was expecting long sermons to be in there. But that criticism now seems overstated. The book strikes a good balance and does a good job of grounding the progress of the main plot while still jumping around the timeline to add context. It's smooth. Even in that old LJ post, I described the political asides as "long flashbacks." And on re-reading the book, I'm taken aback. I had totally remembered a version of this book in which the political conversations pad the book out with numerous extended flashback scenes. Did I get brainwashed by online descriptions of the book, even despite having read it myself? Those scenes are sparse, are deeply connected to the scenes preceding them, and are each like two pages of dialogue.
• Considering how much fodder Heinlein gave readers for controversy in his later books, trying to mire this one is just tacky. Some of that just comes from a weird "Everything is fascist" crowd that decided Heinlein was fascist. And they're idiots. They're stupid, moronic people. I ain't got time for that nonsense. But that's only some of it. I think that much of the rest is more telling because it generally hinges on the nuances of the political system used in the world of Starship Troopers. Folks either misunderstand it as being a literal polemic by Heinlein, a blueprint for what he wanted society to look like, or they get pedantic about chasing after perceived flaws or inconsistencies. They want to challenge the realism of a political system used as a backdrop in a novel about a career soldier on the battlefield. At that point, it's like Heinlein already won. You already bought in. If you have burning questions about how big the labor battalions are or how dangerous they are or how free the press is, then don't kid yourself. That's not lit-crit. That's fangirling.
• If we divided up YA into two markets, it's kind of like the earlier books were more like "Early YA" and Starship Troopers is "Late YA." Booksellers don't operate that way, but maybe Heinlein wanted to. I don't know. I think that this could apply to Podkayne of Mars as well.
• I wonder about an alternate timeline in which Scribner's ran with Starship Troopers and Heinlein kept writing more books in that vein. That either means no Stranger in a Strange Land or that it gets pushed back until later in his career. Considering the cultural significance of that book and the timing of it, that's a huge change. He became the biggest name in science fiction and Stranger in a Strange Land was no small part of that. But then, what would we get instead?

In conclusion, this is one of my favorite books and one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time. Among the Heinlein juveniles, I'd rate it as being second, right behind Have Space Suit—Will Travel.