Starship Troopers

Reading the granddaddy of military sci-fi was not at all how I was expecting it to be. I had no idea that the inspiration for so much media that came after it was sourced from what was effectively an old man shaking his fist and pontificating at the moral decline of the 1950's. Imagine accidentally creating a whole new genre of fiction by accident during a rant. We should all be so lucky!

After the most badass, balls-to-the wall opening chapter that had me repeatedly saying, "wow, this is just like Halo/Mass Effect/Helldivers/Old Man's War/etc./etc.!", I realized that was a flash-forward and found myself strapping in for a young man's play-by-play of how he got to that point. I'd watched the movie from the 90's and knew that it was more campy/unfaithful to the source material, but I didn't realize how young the protagonist was meant to be. The larger narrative beats are mostly the same if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, but the movie cut out a lot of the parts that the author clearly had written the book for.

Like any young adult, Rico is impressionable and looks up to his teachers and instructors in his life. There are multiple chapters where he's in a classroom environment (either in school before he enlists or in officer training afterwards) where the figurehead expounds upon all manner of topics: the supposed "right" to vote, spanking children and capital punishment, the virtues of military order over civilian life, etc. A particularly strange through-line I kept noticing was the insistence that the only thing that can motivate a man to fight in a war is being reminded of the existence of women (???). Not even specific women they have personal attachments to, just the concept in general. In fact, for as macho and conservative as this felt, the goal of finding a woman to settle down and have kids with was strangely absent, and it's kind of implied that everyone in the military has frequent one night stands with whoever's available at a given point.

The action scenes are engaging and undeniably influential; I cannot believe that parts of this book featuring orbital drops, powered suits of armor, and FTL spaceships was written in 1959. But the philosophizing about how society should be (at least according to Heinlein) is as subtle as club over the head and took me out of long stretches of the middle. This book feels like an excellent candidate for saying, "thanks for the cool stuff, we'll take it from here," and almost seven decade's worth of creators before me have fortunately already had the same thought.