Robert Heinlein, born 1907, died 1988, was one of the foremost early science-fiction writers, and one of the first to break into the mainstream with his work. Alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein was one of the “The Big 3” of science fiction during the 1940s and 1950s. He won four Hugo Awards, as well as three Retro Hugo Awards (for years in which the prize was not given). While science fiction, especially in that era, had a reputation for fostering a very left-wing mindset, Heinlein was one of the few major figures with unabashedly conservative viewpoints.
Politically, he was an odd combination of free love, (with numerous books riddled with incest and polygamy), libertarianism, and, for lack of a better way to describe it, pseudo-fascist authoritarianism. In Starship Troopers he deals with only the last one mainly—the book is primarily a political tractate, formed by a series of scenes and events, (all witnessed by his blank-shell of a main character, Juan Rico, whose main reason for existence seems to be to absorb military ideology and authoritarianism from mostly ill-defined characters and an even more ill-defined backdrop).
Heinlein makes a very serious attempt to talk politics like a grown up in Starship Troopers and yet he utterly fails in this regard, not least because he takes an enormous shit on all the painful lessons the world learned about applying Darwinism to social affairs. Heinlein carefully and conscientiously rejects these lessons in exchange for articulate, and dangerous, arguments, including that a species has to continue expanding as fast as it can and that population control is a dangerous rejection of that species evolutionary will to live. What Heinlein does a good job of is speaking a good game, beautifying ideas that are both half-cocked and dangerous.
At a certain point, perhaps a third of the way into the book, Heinlein totally lost me and I ceased to afford his ideas the benefit of a doubt. This was of course the point where he compared human beings to dogs in an argument supporting public flogging as an affective form of punishment—with his greater idea being that you have to inflict physical pain on dogs to train them (an assertion that is itself totally baseless). I, as a person, have no use for the political ideas of a man who considers human beings on the same level as dogs (as much as I love dogs) and more dangerous was his suggestion that pain is the only form of mental training and that a person’s survival instinct must be activated in order to direct them in the right manner.
For all his talk of personal freedom, there is surprisingly little of it in Starship Troopers which is, at heart, the fantasy of white American conservative in the 1950s. The government, as best as Heinlein describes it, has no social safety net, and only exists as a massive military/public service collective run off the work of volunteers who join for a two year term in order to gain sovereignty.
This brings me to the only bits of political discussion in the book that has even a cursory bit of interest to me: at one point an officer asks Rico what the converse of power is, to which he answers crisply: responsibility. The same officer agrees, and the goes on to describe the failure of the 20th Century democracies with their universal sovereignty as that of handing out power without responsibility. This interests me because, while a lot of attention is paid to authoritarian governments that abuse their power (they have a lot more and obviously it makes a much greater impact when they abuse it), in spirit is essentially no different than the vastly smaller abuse an ignorant voter makes with his vote. And in this sense I don’t mean a voter that disagrees with me; no, I don’t take myself nearly that seriously, but I mean a voter with absolutely no grasp on the factual reality of political affairs, and thus I see many many voters like this and it annoys me even when said voters share my political preferences.
Please note that I am giving the general public the benefit of the doubt; I’m suggesting that almost none of them are too stupid to grasp this, only too lazy. Part of it is the media, (in America at least where media is more about partisan prognostication), but part of it is the voters themselves—after all, it does not take a PhD in Symbolist Logic to understand what Obama’s healthcare plan actually does, (of course when a country’s other major party thinks that is appropriate political discourse to put hold a protest and put up a banner with the mangled bodies of Dachau with a caption saying ‘Government Healthcare’, it’s political process is effectively fucked in the short-run), and what HMO advertising and chain mails say that it does.
So, needless to say, I found this aspect of what Heinlein said to be of moderate interest, but even this is in the end a highly idealistic representation, and I find it unlikely that the core issue would be dealt with by requiring public service for citizenship—it wouldn’t fundamentally combat ignorance and misuse of voting power, though it might combat the idea many voters seem to have of getting something for nothing; i.e. they get mad and vote against politicians threatening to slash important government programs, and yet when other politicians vote to raise taxes to preserve these programs, they also vote against those politicians.
The one insight the novel really offers is it’s perspective of the military mindset. When a grunt complains about the pointlessness of learning how to incapacitate two enemy soldiers with his bare hands in a stealth operation to take out an enemy facility when he could just nuke it, his officer explains to him that war is by it’s very basic definition controlled violence that is used to bring someone else to your opinion—not to kill them indiscriminately, echoing of Clausewitz’s famous adage, “War is the continuation of policy by other means.”
If I had to make an overall assessment of the work, I’d say that it is mildly pleasant to read, even with it’s lack of any developed characters, and even with the callous way it tends to kill off, at random, side-characters. The work suffers from it’s montage quality; it’s essentially a collection of poorly fit together snapshots and does almost nothing to develop the wider environment within which it is working. This is to say it’s pleasant, but utterly empty—I couldn’t live on books like this anymore than I could live on water. Starship Troopers truly doesn’t hold up under postmortem examination; two stars, with a slight inclination towards three stars.
As a sort of side note, now that I’ve read the book I also feel confident making a comment about the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film, which is that I think it was a serious miscalculation to turn the movie into a satire, and one that is an insult to the book. It’s the very idiocy and flaw-filled nature of Heinlein’s earnest arguments that entail an equally serious response. Verhoeven’s failure, with this film and his other satires, (like RoboCop, a satire on blue collar law and order themes. I bet you didn’t know RoboCop is portrayed in a way that is supposed to imply he’s the American Jesus), is that both liberals and conservatives tend to take him seriously. When the only result is shallow mockery, the needed political discussions are never had and the field is indeed muddied more.
Please vote in the poll. I'm interested in how many of you have read Heinlein, and course always like to know how many different Dkos users are reading something I write, (as opposed to simply looking at net views).