absternr

Starship Troopers

Doing my periodic reread of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I don't actually love the book, I mostly find it confounding. But it seems so seminal to SFF, it feels worth rereading every now and again to remember why SFF is the way it is. I've probably read it a half dozen times, it doesn't hurt that it's a quick read.

The discourse on Starship Troopers always surrounds the question of whether or not Heinlein is championing fascism. Heinlein describes a society where only soldiers can vote, where in one chapter an officer advocates beating dogs as part of a metaphor in defense of beating children, a society whose only values are power and loyalty. But is he defending this society? That's a little more unclear.

Contra many depictions in successive SF of Bugger-like races, Heinlein makes it clear from the get go that the Buggers are not a voracious race of mindless monsters but an industrial society not very different from that of the humans. The very first scene shows Johnny Rico down on a raid attacking not an enemy defense force, but shooting rockets at warehouses and other production infrastructure- the first thing Heinlein wants you to know about the Buggers is they have factories.

If the Roughnecks are not attacking civilians, it's not out of moral qualms but because it's not seen as militarily productive. Killing Workers is a waste of ammo, he literallysays. Never once does any theory of the rule of war come up in the book. The Geneva conventions are routinely flouted.

And whenever the Buggers's casus belli comes up, or whether the war could end, Johnny Rico is evasive. That's a question for the top brass, above his paygrade, he says, as if it weren't the whole point of the book that by serving in the army he will obtain the right to vote and participate in bigger picture decisions about the continuation of the war and its prosecution.

So the thing that is confounding about Starship Troopers is how easy it is to read it as self-undermining, how easy it is to wonder if the humans are the bad guys.

And in fact, you can imagine reading it as a sort of SFnal PT 109, another book about the making of a humble lieutenant who maybe aspired to more. The key scene where Rico describes being convinced to become an officer features a prediction that he will ascend to high rank. So we could say that maybe the book is full of transparent bullshit because it is, Watsonianly, pro-war propaganda by an older Juan Rico who is running for office or bucking for general and trying to raise his profile and defend his participation in the war.

Did Heinlein mean this? Who can say. But it's interesting to me that this reading is available.