While not a complete satire in tone, Starship Troopers was very much a "bildungsroman" showing a child growing up in that society and getting lectured about it and growing up (and growing more cynical as childhood naivety wanes). The book is extremely didactic and written "this is the way society should/must be", but that doesn't mean they were the actual didactic thoughts of the author (especially as the protagonist does start to question them late in the book, despite being a proponent of it all in youth). As much as anything the book seems to me a "gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment)…
When I was in the military, I reread the book that convinced me to pick the Marine Corps, Starship Troopers. When I reread it after having been active for a couple years, I realized how off it was from my experience[0] and thought it odd to be the book that made me make the earlier decision. I actually finished the reading in the field and since I didn't bring another book, I flipped back to the first chapter. [0] - Or what I thought my experience would be. Granted, it is future-y and I realized that I wouldn't have cool exoskeleton armor but, being that Heinlein was a Navy man, there are…
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb. One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of course Verhoeven and Neumeier are right, it does that too). If no one stands up for a society, then that society is vulnerable to predators. Sometimes it's foreign invasion,…
Multiple sources I've come across over the years have claimed that the movie started out as an original property and only became an "adaptation" of Starship Troopers shortly before it went into production, when the studio realized they had an option on Heinlein's book and that it was sorta-kinda similar. (This is much the same thing as what happened to the movie I, Robot, which started out as an unrelated script, I believed called Hardwired.) My suspicion is that Verhoeven -- like Alex Troyas with I, Robot -- knew full well that their movies had very little to do with the source material and…
>> Exactly zero members of the military get to vote. Fine, fine, bad turn of phrase- it's like you say, the vote is for the citizens who've finished their service (which is voluntary... except you don't get to vote without it, I think). Really, I don't see why you need to doubt that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever or that I read it "carefully". I haven't read it in ten years, at least. Does that sound so uncommon to you? I also haven't read Consider Phlebas in at least that long, so I hardly remember the finer details of it (I seem to remember Horza was hit by a…
>> But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues of service to the collective. Can we please not over-read politics into Starship Troopers' imagined society? It's first and foremost a book about space marines in power armour making war to giant bug-like aliens. There is some political subtext but it mainly serves the purpose of painting a convincing portrait of a future society, with mores that seem weird to uss (public floggings, voting only for the military etc). Or in any case, the desire to add some convincing fluff in an already interesting interstellar…
Obligatory complaint about the mis-representation of Heinlein. This is an author who also wrote a (glowing) book about anarcho-syndicalists liberating their prison colony from corporatists colonialists (that'd be MiaHM). Does it get more anti-facist than that? This is also the author who wrote a book about how free-love hippies are so much more correct than Mrs Grundy that physics itself obliges the hippies (I'm thinking of SiaSL). But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues of service to the collective. (Again, other books talk, extensively, about the…
Sure, I won't over-read into it, I'll just actually read it. For example, I won't make the mistake you made, of claiming that voting is only for the military. It might be one of your favourite works ever, but you might not have read it very carefully. Exactly zero members of the military get to vote. The franchise is granted to citizens who have finished a term of service, whether in the military or in another branch of public service. But even the militarism and war-making is absolutely about "service to the collective". It goes on and on about that. And on top of that, the context of…
Decent review, avoids falling into the "Wow! Fascist!" trap that seems easy. Like almost all reviews of Starship Troopers, it misses the fact that the Terran Federation has a "mathematical logic" of ethics. Mr Dubois is given the lines: We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race - we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. This same thing comes up when Rico is in OCS. A professor asks for a proof of an ethical assertion made by another officer…
In both the book and the film Starship Troopers: * persons can choose whether or not to do government service * Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens * the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service * the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves In the book but not the film: * the only benefit of government service is the right to vote * only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist.…