what does matter is that everybody drops

starship troopers (robert heinlein, 1959)

In September 1959, Joanna Russ’s first genre story, “Nor Custom Stale,” was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the next issue, the magazine also published the first half of a serial by Robert Heinlein titled “Starship Soldier,” better known now as Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s book would go on to win the Hugo for best novel; Russ’s next story, “My Dear Emily,” wouldn’t show up until 1962.

There’s no relationship between Russ’s story and Heinlein’s other than proximity, but one part of researching Weird Sisters is going back to read the old Hugo and Nebula winners that I haven’t read (or haven’t read in a long time), as a way of keeping a “mainstream” in mind as I go. And Heinlein is, in general, a pretty big blind spot for me. If I read any of his stuff when I was young I have forgotten it. So, here are some notes on Starship Troopers. Initially, I was going to do a bundle of “weird capsule reviews” but this turned out a bit too long for that. Still, they really are notes.

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Heinlein, like Isaac Asimov, is one of the classic “bad writers” of science fiction, about whom people like to say that the writing is bad but the ideas are good. I don’t really buy this line. I almost always think it’s actually the other way around: the writing is good (or at least fine) and the ideas are bad. Starship Troopers was not really an exception. This first paragraph is not, in my opinion, the product of a guy who is bad at writing:

I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important—it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.

If you picked up some hyped new literary release that opened with this kind of energy you’d be thrilled. “I always get the shakes before a drop” is a perfect first sentence. Heinlein also accomplishes, very adeptly, that worldbuilding through asides and small details that everybody wants to do and which usually ends up much clumsier than if they’d just explained stuff. Here’s Johnnie. He’s a soldier in a war against bugs. He comes from a future in which we’ve colonized space. Also, only members of the military are citizens. That’s the book, more or less. We see Johnnie fight, we get explanations as to why things turned out this way, but the book ends with no particular resolution. The war goes on. It ends right where it starts: before a drop.

On the other hand, the ideas of Starship Troopers go something like this: what you’re seeing in this book—rule by a military class that anybody can join and perpetual war against a non-human enemy—is actually the closest thing to an ideal outcome for humanity. Starship Troopers is actually very “woke”—pointedly not racist (Johnnie isn’t white, he’s Filipino) and not really all that sexist, particularly if you compare it to some of the other writing at the time.¹ This egalitarianism is only made possible by an ultimate social distinction between soldier-citizen and civilian-resident.

writer support group poppin off

War against a non-human enemy—an enemy that doesn’t even really exist on the individual level, such that any form of warfare against them is licit—gives men² purpose, is key to the “moral science” of this future (which centers the will to survive as primary), and, also, keeps the population from getting too big (this is said right out). So we start the book in the middle of the conflict and we end in the middle of the conflict, because ending the conflict is not important. Conflict is.

I ended Starship Troopers feeling sort of depressed in ways that were not really about the book itself, which is alternately a fun read (when it’s about blasting space bugs) and very tedious (when somebody is explaining ideas). It is clearly a book for young adults³ in a way that excuses a lot of its flaws, by which I mean not only its provocative but insubstantial ideas but also the fact that Johnnie goes to school three separate times in this book (and is constantly receiving the commendations of his old high school teacher). In general there’s a real inability to conceive of life outside of school here—the military essentially also functions as a school that hands out tests and grades and rewards, in the form of battle and promotion, and fixes its members in a hierarchy where there always seems to be some ultimate teacher above them.⁴

Thus in what we might call “real life” (relationships), flirtation is real, as are crushes, but sex, inside or outside of relationships, basically does not exist. (Guys will do anything For A Girl but in the most abstract sense possible.) Friendships exist within the military but are always subordinate to it and the death of a friend does not hit harder than the death of anybody else. Mothers are well-meaning but suffocating beings who seem to come from some other species than the girls your own age. Dads are gruff authority figures who will eventually come around. And so on.

None of this depresses me because it feels basically accurate to a twelve year old’s view of the world. It’s more that it’s easy to trace the lineage of this book in ways that are good and bad. To use a trivial example: there is no Evangelion without Starship Troopers, because there is no Gundam without Starship Troopers.⁵ But of course Starship Troopers also has an afterlife in minds of people who have a worshipful attitude toward their idea of “the military,” an attitude that almost definitely has no correlation with actual military service (or even deference to actual members of the military). And I basically agree with this

Max Read

post about Elon Musk and the Culture books:⁶ you can’t really just say that people didn’t understand these books.⁷

You can certainly say that they read selectively, such that they missed the part where the hero isn’t white or women are respected (and necessary) parts of the military. You can also say that they refused to grow up (that’s almost certainly true). You can say a lot of things, but as somebody who does in fact like this type of science fiction, it is nevertheless sort of weird to realize that it exists in an essentially undigested form in the minds of people who are way more wealthy, powerful, and influential than I am.

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I haven’t seen the Paul Verhoeven movie and I’m not going to because I’ve never seen a clip from it that didn’t make me want to throw up. Well, OK. If somebody offers to pay me $1000 I will watch it directly after their Venmo transfer is actually deposited in my bank account (three to five business days I believe).

1. i.e., Johnnie runs into his high school crush Carmen, the entire reason he enlisted, who is now in the Navy:

One thing did startle me. Carmen relaxed and took off her hat while we were eating, and her blue-black hair was all gone. I knew that a lot of the Navy girls shaved their heads—after all, it’s not practical to take care of long hair in a war ship and, most especially, a pilot can’t risk having her hair floating around, getting in the way, in any free-fall maneuvers. Shucks, I shaved my own scalp, just for convenience and cleanliness. But my mental picture of little Carmen included this mane of thick, wavy hair.

But, do you know, once you get used to it, it’s rather cute. I mean, if a girl looks all right to start with, she still looks all right with her head smooth. And it does serve to set a Navy girl apart from civilian chicks—sort of a lodge pin, like the gold skulls for combat drops. It made Carmen look distinguished, gave her dignity, and for the first time I fully realized that she really was an officer and a fighting man—as well as a very pretty girl.

2. I do think it’s men, specifically.

3. I’m aware that there is a contested publication history that this comment is ignoring.

4. But again, this is a pretty classic flaw in young adult books, where big events also always happen at the end of the school year for unclear reasons.

5. There’s an anime and American science fiction mutual feedback loop that is interesting to me.

6. except I haven’t read the culture books lol

7. With the exception that I think the “rule by private companies” in every cyberpunk novel is clearly the dystopia against which we rebel and that part does seem to sail over a lot of heads. In general cyberpunk is perhaps so cool aesthetically that people forget the overwhelming message is “LIFE SUCKS HERE.” Musk saying the cybertruck is the car Blade Runner would drive pops up in my mind often because Musk is a real nerd who somehow constantly gives off the impression of being a fake nerd. Like that’s a “Cowboy Bebop at his computer” level miss. But I also would easily believe he’s watched Blade Runner twenty times or whatever.