Sparta In Space!

Title: Starship Troopers

Rating: 4 Stars

I admit that I’m not a big fan of sci-fi. I might have mentioned this before, but it seems like there’s typically too much science and too little fiction. Things like character development often seem to be missing. I do every now and then reach into some sci-fi best-of list and read one just to prove myself wrong.

That’s how I ended up reading Starship Troopers. I know that this is kind of a questionable choice because of its reputation surrounding its politics.

I found the story itself to be quite enjoyable. Set in some distant future, it’s the story of Johnnie Rico, a somewhat directionless spoiled rich boy about to graduate high school. On little more than a whim, he decides to join the military. With virtually no aptitude in anything else, he ends up in the Mobile Infantry, one of the most dangerous branches of the military.

It’s the story of his boot camp, first battles, increasing danger, decision to enter the candidate officer school, and ends up with him as a wizened veteran leading soldiers into battle.

At that level, the tale is pretty much every non-ironic coming of age story that you’ve previously encountered. Heinlein describes the punishing boot camp, Rico’s increasing maturity, the thrill and danger of combat quite well. It was addictive reading as Rico was propelled from situation to situation. This was the primary reason why I gave it four stars.

You cannot discuss Starship Troopers without discussing the politics. There is a global government on planet Earth. To be a full citizen and to be able to vote, you must serve a term of federation service. Effectively, for a man this means the military.

The vast majority of people do not join and thus are not full participants in the society. Such people can become quite successful and affluent (if not actually quite rich). Generally, they look upon soldiers with ill disguised contempt.

The soldiers, of course (and also for that matter, it’s safe to say Heinlein himself), see the matter differently. They see themselves as the only true citizens. Their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the federation proves that deeper commitment. Their training, with the emphasis on sacrificing the one for the all, uniquely prepares them for the full participation of being a citizen.

It’s important to realize that this novel was written in 1959. Heinlein wrote it in response to the US suspension of nuclear tests. From a Cold War point of view, it’d be harder to find a time much colder than 1959. Sputnik had been launched a couple of years earlier and the US was in a panic about losing the space race. The US was in the midst of another panic regarding a nonexistent missile gap with the USSR. People were building bomb shelters under their houses. Eisenhower knew how ill prepared the Soviets actually were but could not reassure the American public without revealing intelligence sources.

Could it be that the central planning of the USSR is a superior form of government to the individual initiative of the US? Would the twentieth century liberal society collapse as it turned its men into effete marshmallows?

This was a time when the US was convinced that it was in a battle to the death with a philosophy utterly opposed to the Western democratic / individualistic philosophy upon which it was based. For those people, like Curtis LeMay, who literally had their hand on the button that could result in millions of deaths, this was no time to be soft. We were in a bitter fight to the end. We must be willing to lose and kill millions of lives to save our American Way.

Given that context, the novel makes more sense. The enemy that the forces of Earth are fighting are The Arachnids (literally called bugs by the soldiers). They are faceless, fearless, amoral fighters mindlessly fighting to the death under central direction. Armed with all kinds of weapons (including nuclear), the Mobile Infantry soldiers willingly jump into danger and face, at times, near certain death, to protect the comfortable way of life of those non-citizens back on Earth. They are hard men having to make hard decisions while facing death on a far away planet.

Of course, this fetishizing of the military can lead to um, a more fascist society. There is that. Also, although women with their faster reflexes (!?) make better pilots, there are scarcely any women in the novel at all. The few times that the subject comes up, it seems to be in the context of the big manly soldiers protecting them, thus rendering them as essentially equivalent to children.

Given that it was written in 1959, I’m not saying that that makes the politics in the novel awesome, but it does make it understandable.

Just in case you think that this is all in the past and that there aren’t people that still think like this, here’s a quote from A Few Good Men, where Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) sneers at the young lawyer Kaffee (Tom Cruise) by saying:

We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way.

Robert Heinlein (and for that matter, Dick Cheney) couldn’t have said it better.