Book Review – Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

This is my second read through, as naive, 7th-grade Patrick all those years ago watched the movie version and bought the book with Casper Van Dien on it. Well, that young man learned his lesson vs. a movie adaptation of a novel and a novel that day. And while the lad got over his disappointment, he didn’t hate it at the time. Now, the mature and well-read man cracks open the book with the entire collection of the “troublesome” Robert A. Heinlein in his collection – and I got to read it along with some good friends. Ah, the joys of living in the future! – link: Book Discussion

No comparison will be made here to the movie. Heinlein does a masterful job of world-crafting and making it interesting. As someone who doesn’t care much about worldbuilding in spite of the plot, this was a rare instance where it worked well. Heinlein crafts a world where world war and junvenile crime launched a new revolution and what followed was a military type society where citizenship (voting and holding office) is upheld as a high virtue, but also optional. From there, we follow a military infantry trooper, Johnny Rico, from his enlistment to the first major campaign in the bug war (which only accounts for about two chapters out of this short book).

However, what’s a subtext in the story that Heinlein weaves into a future world (of the 1950s) asks about what a high-trust society that values not direct democracy but earned citizenship and where corporal punishment of both children and adults is viewed as beneficial and taken very seriously by whoever those in that hierarchical relationship to the individual. Within that we then see the childhood to adulthood growth that a simple soldier like Rico experiences and set in a world of aliens and war, colonization and exploration, and a solidified humanity of capitalism and military preference but without military dominance. This could be the classic dystopian/utopian world based on the reader’s presuppositions. And while Heinlein didn’t view this as his ideal society, he does such a good job of presenting the world and asking the question of “what would it look like if this was the case?”

While some people might not like the philosophy and world-building and another might equally not enjoy the limited details on what citizenship implies and a real sense of story closure, I believe an astute reader, taking his/her time with the story presented, can find a lot of value in the story. Politics, the military, child rearing, fatherhood, and coming of age in a 1950s future world where you fight some big bugs for the right to be a citizen. What’s the matter? Do you want to live forever?