I saw the movie a few years ago, and so I read this book on a whim. Its very different to the movie. The book is interesting, although it does have a tendency to slide into rants about the moral responsibilities which come with having an electoral franchise. The book is also very pro military in its stance, although that's fair enough (an author without an opinion would be a boring author).

Overall, I thought this book was an enjoyable read.

http://www.stillhq.com/book/Robert_A_... ( )

As a fan of Science Fiction I went into Starship Troopers with huge expectations. This is Robert A. Heinlein after all, a man considered to be one of the big three SciFi writers. So, Starship Troopers was my first Heinlein novel and it was a hug disappointment. I immediately disliked the first person narrative. These are, in my opinion, difficult to do well. Here we have a first person narrative from a young man of average intelligence. This means that the prose isn't exactly of the highest quality. Call it snobbery if you like, but I want to read something that is better than what I could write. Come to think of it, the only time I liked the "dumbed down" prose was in Flowers for Algernon. But I digress, back to Starship Troopers.

I don't mind reading propaganda or about ideologies that differ from mine, but I like them subtle. Heinlein hammers his pro-military utopia down our throats with blunt edged force. We spend far too much time in classrooms and boot camps where the characters merely act as mouthpieces for Heinlein's philosophy. The only anti-military character is the protagonist's father who is later involved in one of the most incredible (read improbable) storylines ever written.

So, why not a worse rating? For one, the "pulpy" parts are good. When Heinlein forgets the philosophy and has the space marines fighting on an alien planet the novel is genuinely interesting. It's also impossible to ignore the novel's influence. To my knowledge this is the first space marine novel and it would go on to inspire several dozen others. The influence of Starship Troopers also extends beyond the page and onto the movie screen (James Cameron's Aliens) and video games (Starcraft).

All-in-all this is a case of missed potential. I leave the book with a new respect for Paul Verhoeven's movie adaptation which, in hindsight, isn't too bad. ( )

The classic military sci-fi novel “Starship Troopers” by Robert A. Heinlein even after all these years -1959- lives up to its controversial and cutting edge reputation. And while there were times that I felt that the story-arc was getting too bogged down with the mediocrity of rank and military brinkmanship, the overall sense of Mr. Heinlein’s chronicle was refreshing. Mr. Heinlein’s vision was obviously the building blocks for many future military sci-fi novels. ( )

Starship Troopers is many things, but most of all it is the tale of square-jawed, humble average Joes who find in themselves the grit and courage to confront an implacably evil foe. In short, it is a World War Two adventure story. The ragtag group of misfits is drawn from all over Earth instead of all over America, and they are fighting killer arachnids from outer space instead of Germans or Japanese, but the book's heart nevertheless remains firmly planted in 1944. What distinguishes it from a raft of similar material is Heinlein's deep feeling for military esprit. There are actually only two battle scenes in Starship Troopers, which is more about training than it is about fighting. Specifically it is about the way that training brings people into the culture of an army with its weird mixture of insularity and open-heartedness, brutal aggression and profound fellow-feeling, and the edge of contempt for the civilian world that soldiers require in order to stay in top fighting condition. Even the gripping final battle scene is effective primarily because it resembles non-fiction accounts of combat, where soldiers spend most of their time in a state of anxious boredom, second-guessing everything they see, and falling back on routines ground into them during training as a way of staying alert and beating back the fear.

Despite its personal focus, Starship Troopers is probably most famous for the politics of its future world, and the extent to which those may be seen as uncomfortably right-wing. Ultimately I find this complaint overstated, but you can see where someone might get the idea. Most striking is the novel's conceit that people must do some kind of Federal service in order to win the right to vote. The reason, Heinlein makes clear in one of his many didactic asides, is that only the experience of being a soldier can give a person the sense of responsibility for his fellow man necessary for making decisions to benefit society as a whole. This idea has all kinds of problems, but those don't derail the book because Heinlein doesn't really explore it. The most interesting aspect of this arrangement–the fact that civilians seem completely untroubled by this rule because they don't see the point of voting anyway–is mentioned then dropped. Heinlein cares more about who will make it through basic training than politics.

Which doesn't mean there aren't some ideological howlers. A long digression in which a cantankerous war veteran, high school teacher, and Robert Heinlein surrogate reveals that the fall the of XX Century American Empire was brought about by naive liberals' mollycoddling of "juvenile delinquents" lets you know in no uncertain terms that this book was published in 1959. And since I've heard Heinlein described as a libertarian author, the scene when the main character's father renounces his career as a successful industrialist to enlist as a grunt because being "just a producing-consuming economic animal" was no life for a real man stuck out as just about the most un-libertarian thing I'd ever read. But even though Heinlein's belief in military service as a never-fail instiller of civic altruism is hopelessly naive (as history's long parade of putsches, death squads, and bloody-fisted juntas will attest) I don't detect in it any fascist longings. He is just telling things from the point of view of military men, who necessarily feel that they are privy to a world that civilians are not.

In addition to whatever it offers in its own right, reading Starship Troopers also gave me a deeper appreciation of Paul Veerhoven's 1997 film. That adaptation is good not because it is faithful to the book but because it is complementary. Each covers what the other leaves out. Where the book is gung-ho, the movie is poker-faced satire. Where the book's depiction of combat is tense and restrained, the movie is big, loud, and gory. Most famously, the movie dusts a layer of oblique but unmistakable Nazi imagery over Heinlein's tale of John Wayne wholesomeness. It's still a World War Two story: it's just not clear whose side we're on. Fortunately, Veerhoven has a miraculously light touch with the whole Nazi thing which keeps his movie from melting into a puddle of snark. More so than most book-film pairs, these two are of a piece. ( )

I have been re-reading this book since my late teens - I'm 53 now and still both enjoy the story and admire the moral questions raised. There are many other very good reviews here, so I won't repeat them; I will say that I have never seen it as either fascist (though there is a subtext against communism, which is not surprising for the period) or glorifying war. But nobody has commented on the fact that we discover right at the end that the protagonist is a Filipino, which must have come as a considerable shock back in 1959 to the thousands of young white males at whom it was aimed. Also, Heinlein manages a lightness of touch when considering gender equality, compared to later works (yes, I am a woman). ( )