I normally put my fiction book reviews on my personal blog, but after finishing Starship Troopers, I realized it fit the theme over here pretty well. Additionally, because Robert Heinlein’s novel ended up being more thought provoking than plot driven, this post will resemble a discussion more than a review.
For starters, Starship Troopers doesn’t contain that much action anyway. Much of it takes place in flashbacks, especially involving protagonist Johnny Rico’s History and Moral Philosophy class in high school, his training camp, and eventually his time at officer candidate school. I would recommend it, as it’s a monumental book in war-based science fiction, but also the philosophy it interjects is probing. The novel does suffer slightly from what I’ll call the cliche-origin problem; reading it you may be disappointed at how unoriginal some of the future combat is, until you realize the only reason you’re so familiar with the concept of a “space marine” is because this 1959 book sculpted the concept, spawning the common sci-fi trope known today.
There’s actually an interesting gap between the book’s legacy and its content: Starship Troopers is a foundational book for futuristic warfare, yet action sequences and the technology of the future isn’t really the main thrust of the novel. Its influence is seen in classics like Ender’s Game, but the idea of soldiers in mechanized suits shows up in almost every single sci-fi war movie or videogame: for example Halo, Edge of Tomorrow, Starcraft. In some sense, Starship Troopers is interesting because it actually takes seriously the concept of space warfare and explores it. Yet the book only spends some time on action, with a heavy concentration on philosophy of warfare and training. Clearly Heinlein thought that the discussion of warfare, army psychology, training, and the relationship of society to the military was worth discussing, yet that aspect of the book is where I’d like to challenge it the most.
The question is how literally to read Starship Troopers. The book is vitally important to the genre because of its literal discussion of space wars, yet it’s undeniable that the book is a not-so-thinly-veiled critique of American policy in the Cold War against the communist threat. If we take that the book is a metaphor for how a society should organize itself for survival, does its message hold up?
Writing in 1959, the world was only a few years removed from the deadliest conflict in human history, and the U.S. was locked in an existential struggle with the Soviet Union, that many reasonable people believed would eventually lead to war, with nuclear weapons ensuring it would be a very deadly and costly one. Given the time, the apparent inexorable march of history towards deadlier and deadlier wars would have seemed obvious. The spread of communism to Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia had put huge swaths of the world population under communist rule. The U.S. faced existential threats, and given that reality, Heinlein created a novel where humanity faced an existential threat.
Starship Troopers is often critiqued as glorifying militarism, perhaps even fascism. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Heinlein doesn’t really demonstrate that war is glorious or even good. Rico advances quickly through the ranks mostly because so many people are getting killed around him. It’s not that he wants to be a hero, but he’s forced to do a horrific and terrifying job because humanity is literally depending on the military for survival.
There’s a striking quote towards the beginning of the book from Rico’s History and Moral Philosophy teacher:
Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.“
The main problem I see with the book (and the thesis stated in the quote) is that communism wasn’t defeated by the grit and determination of infantrymen; it turned out that naked force wasn’t the only way to deal with a struggle of superpowers. The U.S. military went to Vietnam, where men fought and died in the thousands, or, in the case of Vietnamese civilians, hundreds of thousands. Yet that was a pretty colossal loss in the fight against communism. On the other hand, Nixon’s trip to China is generally seen as a big success, fundamentally changing China’s role in the Cold War, and leveraging Russia into negotiating arms limitations. In fact, seen from the perspective of the 1950s, the success of liberal capitalism and democracy over communism with so little conflict has to be one of the most incredible events of the past 60 years.
Given what actually happened in history, is Starship Troopers‘ message worth hearing? Did Heinlein have a realistic outlook on war and how societies can confront existential threats, or was his thinking bound and backwards-looking, stuck in the era of conventional war that the nuclear age had made obsolete? This is a hard question to answer. On the one hand, doomsayers of the early 50s predicting conflict were obviously empirically wrong. On the other, we came very close to nuclear conflict several times in the Cold War, and it’s possible we just got lucky. Conflicts have become less deadly and less common since the end of World War II. This could be a trend that continues, in which case, Heinlein’s book looks pretty dumb. Or, this somewhat conflict free time period could be a brief historical blip when America’s hegemonic power established a nice liberal world order for a few decades, which then collapsed in dramatic fashion, plunging the world into some pretty awful conflict later on. In that case, perhaps Heinlein’s worldview would prove true in the general case, if not for the exact conflict in which the book was written.
Thus, I would argue Starship Troopers, while establishing a foundational aspect of science fiction, puts forth a philosophy that has not been validated by the empirical experiences of our world. That may change, and the extent to which the reader believes conflict is inevitable is a vital factor in determining their appreciation of Heinlein’s novel.