★★☆☆☆ One of Heinlein's weakest novels

Starship Troopers

Robert A Heinlein

I read this as a high school student, roughly 1970, working my way through the canon of so-called Golden Age (mainly John Campbell-inspired) science fiction: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, ... (Never Hubbard -- somehow I escaped that particular awfulness.)

I never liked Robert A. Heinlein as much as Asimov and Clarke. I think what particularly bothered me about Heinlein is that he didn't actually understand the "science" part of "science fiction". I remember being especially annoyed by a book (no longer remember which one) in which he butchered relativity. (It's OK to not understand relativity, but if you don't, then for Gawd's sake don't write a novel in which it is a key element of the plot!) Also, his writing had the usual weaknesses of most Golden Age science fiction: two (at most)-dimensional characters, almost all male (although Starship Troopers has women characters, too), pew-pew plots, etc. (Clarke is the honorable exception here. At least until Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin came along, he was by far the most literary science fiction author.)

Starship Troopers, right from the start, was obviously a political tract in the shape of a novel. We begin with our hero, Juan Rico, in a school with a teacher who used to be in the military, explaining why the vote should be restricted to those who had served in the military, and why corporal punishment is the Greatest and Most Effective Thing, Really. It read like a paleoconservative "Why the world is so messed up right now" script.

I don't like stories that preach at me. I don't like it even when they preach things I agree with. (See, for instance, my review of Emergency Skin.) As a high-school student I was willing to listen to Heinlein's ideas (I would probably be less so, now), but I still objected to being scolded and preached at.

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