'Starship Troopers' Book Review (Diabolical Book Club #2)

Not what I was expecting...

Starship Troopers is hardly about aliens or fighting space bugs at all. It’s about Johnnie Rico, our narrator and protagonist, making his way through boot camp and officer training school in a future society run by the military, in which citizenship can only be gained through service.

It’s a weird book. It’s very readable and there are some fascinating discussions of the benefits of an orderly—and deeply fascistic—society. As an argument for a sort of “benign fascism” it’s troublingly convincing, though I find Heinlein’s Utopia rather terrifying if we’re being honest. I can see how others would find his arguments rather more convincing, which is exactly why they’re so disturbing.

Rico gets through boot camp and ends up on a ship as part of a unit called Rasczak’s Roughnecks, named after its lieutenant. (Later, as an officer-in-training he serves with Blackie’s Blackguards, a unit with a rather more awkward handle).

During his time with the Roughnecks and then the Blackguards, we get our only real taste of what the war with the Bugs is all about. The action is rather stilted. This was clearly not really what Heinlein was interested in. We get a lot of talk about how the Mobile Infantry troops are deployed. One of the biggest action scenes—when Rico takes his men down a tunnel to save some troopers who’ve gotten lost, including his platoon Sergeant who we later find out is Sergeant Zim from boot camp (what a crazy coincidence!)—ends with Rico getting knocked out in a tunnel collapse.

Heinlein is definitely more interested in the society he’s fashioned and the process of going through training, life aboard a military space vessel (women and men strictly separated) and all the rest. “Moral Philosophy” is the crux of the book, and Heinlein seems very much to consider himself the Moral Philosophy professor with us, dear readers, his students. No romance, very little fighting, very little space travel. It’s a little dry and a little by the book and he certainly captures what I imagine that life would be like very realistically.

Does it work? I guess it’s fine. I was more interested in the first half. The second dragged on and felt fairly repetitive. I’m all for respecting our service men and women and “support the troops” and all that, but it’s a little overly gushing when it comes to military life and the nobility of it all.

The end is just plain silly, too. Rico takes over the Roughnecks and they become Rico’s Roughnecks (good thing he had the R in his name!) and we get this final, sentimental moment. Rico’s dad—who was always against him joining up—joins up after his wife is killed when the Bugs destroy Buenos Aires and naturally he’s able to join the Roughnecks. But we forget about him for quite a while until the last page:

My platoon sergeant put his arm around my armored shoulders. “Just like a drill, Son.”

“I know it, Father.” I stopped shaking at once. “It’s the waiting, that’s all.”

“I Know. Four minutes. Shall we get buttoned up, sir?”

“Right away, Father.” I gave him a quick hug, let the Navy drop crew seal us in….

I won’t write out the rest. The point is, how did this book get so damn cheesy in the end? The Zim coincidence was already a bit much, but this whole notion that Rico is the lieutenant and his dad is his right-hand man and platoon sergeant and he calls him “Father” instead of sergeant, eh, I dunno. I found it quite jarring. Left me rolling my eyes at the end. It also sort of just drops off with very little resolution. The entire structure of the novel is very flat, not much “rising action” or really any big conflicts to resolve. An odd book.

All told, not something I’d read a second time or recommend highly, but not terrible. Not as hard to get through as A Clockwork Orange, that’s for sure. The two are quite interesting to read back-to-back as I noted in my first Starship Troopers piece. Two conservative authors writing jarringly different takes on what the future might hold. Anthony Burgess would not, I suspect, approve of Heinlein’s Utopia very much. Then again, Burgess’s dystopia is nobody’s notion of a good time.

What did you think? Let me know in the comments. We can watch the movie now and compare notes.

Book Club #3

P.S. I’ll post this in a separate post as well but Book Club #3 is going to be Dune by Frank Herbert because the movie comes out on October 22nd. I know that’s not a lot of time to get through the book—less than a month!—but we’ll do our best. I mean, why not do Dune when the movie is almost in theaters? And at least I know I like Dune so it won’t be quite the slog the last two have been.

Thanks for reading along!