- I seriously considered sending you that $1000 for a moment.
- One of the most depressing things I’ve seen online in the last year was the classic “Starship Troopers (the movie) fails as satirical critique of fascism because it’s not didactic enough” take mutating into the horrifying variant “Starship Troopers (the movie) can’t be a satirical critique of fascism because as a fascist myself, I find the world it depicts very attractive”
I haven't read Starship Troopers since I was 14 or so. I liked it at the time. I certainly agree that Heinlein was not a "bad" writer -- his prose is slick in a '50s commercial fiction sort of way, often quite clever, well-paced. It might not be what one calls "literary" prose but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Also I was going to mention the whole "controversial publication history" but I see you know all about that!
I do think that Heinlein's best work was in the '50s, and with Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land he clearly made a turn in the direction of didacticism; which sometimes went horribly wrong (as in Farnham's Freehold) but often was still entertaining enough but also dragged when he decide to get on his soapbox.
I should probably go back and read his earlier stuff—I just kind of decided to start more systematically reading at 1959 and go back to the earlier things later or as they come up. It's a pretty good year for me and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, since in addition to Russ it's also when my favorite Fritz Leiber story ("A Deskful of Girls") comes out. (About which I hope to have essay coming out this month, but it's up to the editors.)
Great article. Great book. The film is entertaining; you should watch it. My wife and I saw it for the first time in an old theater in SF. Half the fans were gay men, to see Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico. The hoots and hollers for Johnny were highly amusing. It’s a campy film, but all the questions are there.
I need some version where the brain sucking is replaced with a silent movie–style intertitle that just says "something unpleasant is happening." Or, I guess, to watch it with somebody who knows the movie well enough to hand me a pillow at the appropriate times. That was how I got through Silence of the Lambs.…
To me, my key insight many years after my first readthrough is that Heinlein "cheats" and makes the political regime he has crafted in the story justified by the way he has set up the entire universe, ie, as a Malthusian, Hobbesian wasteland of all-against-all where all peace and prosperity is temporary and imposed at gunpoint. In that way, its most influential spiritual successor is probably the Walking Dead, where the omnipresent encroachment of death forces men to rediscover their masculinity in order to build small fortresses of society in the darkness.
He's not dishonest about it, its just not necessarily obvious to some readers that a) there's no evidence this IS how the universe must work and b) even if it is, are we sure some kind of cooperation isn't still more viable?
A lot of SF challenges assumption a), I think of Starship Troopers/Star Trek as being sort of a clear dichotomy about whether or not you embrace scarcity or abundance as the primary determinative factor in your SF worldbuilding. And I think a lot of real-world influential "dark" nerds (see Nick Land) are folks who basically decided that we live in a Starship Troopers universe and should act accordingly.
b) is the harder, more interesting question to me. I don't know many science fiction writers who have a pessimistic view of the universe but still advocate for kindness or decency, but that might be because I haven't read enough. When you get to the end of the Three Body Problem trilogy that's basically the last question left for the reader. There also seemed to be hints of it in the Road, if you consider that science fiction, but that book bummed be out too much to finish.
Yeah, I agree about the "cheating" (and also that it's not dishonest). It annoys me less in this book than it does in some other books, perhaps because the book is so entertaining, whereas in other cases it feels like the person created some kind of Rube Goldberg machine from hell and then turned to me and said "makes you think…"
I think re b) Tiptree—kind of—fits here. If you've read "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" it is bleak as hell but it contains this idea of another way things could be. Same with "The Only Neat Thing To Do." But I think Tiptree's stories occupy such an extreme end of pessimism that I wouldn't exactly say you end them feeling like kindness and decency have a chance. I think it's more like "we're an incredibly self destructive species and the best case scenario is probably that we self destruct before we do irreparable damage to the earth; but we have other qualities and you feel as if it didn't really need to be this way, sometimes."
Re Elon, it's the ancient and once much better-known dichotomy of nerds and geeks. Nerds are otaku. Geeks are merely hopeless. This distinction faded away right around when it became a sort of cool thing to be Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, and everything drowned in the fantasy/comic tidal wave ... (I probably don't need to explain this to you but sometimes you get to typing, you know)
Some of the most interesting stuff I've read in early Gibson interviews essentially add up to: what if all this boring bullshit about ones and zeroes was *sexy*? What if these losers *fucked* instead? I guess I wrote about that a bit in the messy thing I put on my substack a few months ago. It explains a lot to me.
I didn't do all of high school the normal way myself either - but I think it was a broader cultural thing that was going on for a little while. You can see it in older blog posts and such, though they don't 100% agree with each other:
I think this originates in the 80s, when cyberpunk was coming up ... nerd and geek stereotype characters pop up in a ton of media from that decade. (It makes me wonder now if it was a sort of overcompensation for the same thing that drove a lot of the japanophilia / phobia that is all over Gibson's work -- the sense that America had already peaked, the aftermath of the oil crisis and the interest rates skyrocketing and the Challenger disaster and urban decay ...)
Love the footnote about cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was invented by writers who lived in the counterculture (Gibson was a draft-dodger living in Canada), and who wrote science fiction from a countercultural perspective, but for a fandom living in Reagan's America. The desire of basically mainstream people to present themselves as rebels, or punk rock, or metal or whatever subculture they think sounds interesting means that misreading becomes a basic tool for building a functional identity.
I read a ton of Heinlein when I was a kid, and your characterization of his work as "good writing, bad ideas" seems right. I will add that his supposedly "adult" writing was even more problematic than his writing for young adults - "Stranger in a Strange Land" led to some pretty warped science fiction cults in the Bay Area in the '60s. Like a lot of people, Heinlein went from school to the military, and in the process basically destroyed his ability to experience human difference.
A while back, I read "Atlas Shrugged" for reasons that are difficult to explain, and was struck by a weird familiarity to it, despite never having read Ayn Rand before. I eventually realized that Rand was basically Heinlein, but with railroads instead of rocket ships. The same issue of "good writing, bad ideas". Also, the trouble with imagining difference.
Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the next Heinlein on the docket unless I go backwards, since it's the next one to win a Hugo.
After I wrote and posted this I read a (bizarre) paean to Elon Musk in the New York Times which reinforced to me that many people did not ever figure out Starship Troopers was a book for children. But it's true… in general there's a dynamic with science fiction where for some people it becomes a kind of way to avoid living in the world, and that can easily happen with books that are meant for adults, too. eta: I mean, like you're saying, it DOES happen.
interesting tension with cyberpunk (especially gibson) is:
- sure, it's usually a semi-dystopia, about as bad as Russia or China today at a bigger scale. everyone's life is constrained by corruption and economic coercion.
- but also, the technology, especially all the biotech, is enormously liberating.
I don't think Gibson ever depicts a character who chose to get body modifications and regrets it or is disappointed in the result. When freely chosen, it always works out as intended as far as I remember.
Yeah, I agree with this. It’s like a decade later but I also think the Ghost in the Shell movie fits here. The context is dystopian but the decision to merge with the superintelligence is another story.
haven't read the book, but the movie really is excellent and wonderfully campy and strange. I believe that when the movie came out the critics took Starship Troopers as having proto-fascist and authoritarian aesthetics, but it seems pretty clear that it's a satire? Maybe there are people out there who legitimately look at the universe of Starship Troopers and think, 'this is dope, i love space imperialism, pew pew', but it seems like a critical viewer should look at the world and conclude that actually yeah, this is really really bad! I'd love to read the book though and see how it compares...
I looooove Robocop and I think part of what makes it a great movie is that it works perfectly as an action flick and as a kind of anti–action flick. It's like "yeah what if there WAS a robot cop shooting rapists :) that would be so cool :)" because if you don't get that part you won't get the darker and more satirical aspects. But that also means it's easy to stay there lol
I saw the movie ST when it came out, and I loved it - the fascist supertext seemed like the obvious direction that action movies were going, which gave it an honesty that you normally don't see in big-budget action flicks. SF and comic books become cultural phenomena in the '30s, when fascism still made sense, and space opera and superheroes are inherently fascist genres (e.g. EE "Doc" Smith and eugenics; calling the first superhero "Superman"). Given that the primary virtue of fascism is aesthetic, it's very difficult to subvert it aesthetically - all you can really do is recognize that it's something that people are going to keep finding appealing and then fight them politically when they come to the conclusion that an aesthetically appealing political philosophy ought to be implemented.
With that said, Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and directed a movie in 1977 about the Dutch underground, comes about as close to subversion in ST as you can get with fascist art, with Doogie Howser-era Neil Patrick Harris as a telepathic SS-man. I won't say you ought to watch it, but it is a worthwhile contribution to big-budget SF cinema.
I do love Verhoeven (I'm in the group of people who think Showgirls is a good movie), even if some of his movies are too much for me. I can handle Robocop because it's pretty easy to hide behind one's hands at key moments. But even thinking about the clip of brain sucking I saw from ST makes me feel ill!
This is great. Also I think the punk part of cyberpunk gets missed a lot. People slap that word on all their favorite new microgenres. You can’t have an idyllic world of green, sustainable energy with a cozy little society and call it “solarpunk.” Punk ain’t cozy.
no it's true. Though I feel like the ship maybe sailed with "steampunk"? I don't think I've ever seen a steampunk thing that didn't basically _feel_ cozy, even if the actual story was otherwise… all those gears are just too fun.
Steampunk is SO cozy. I have often wondered if the flip from fiction subgenre to aesthetic did steampunk dirty. I remember reading The Difference Engine soon after it came out and getting excited by the premise but then the tophats-and-goggles types got their gloved hands on it.
Is it the bug guts specifically that would be a problem?
- I seriously considered sending you that $1000 for a moment.
- One of the most depressing things I’ve seen online in the last year was the classic “Starship Troopers (the movie) fails as satirical critique of fascism because it’s not didactic enough” take mutating into the horrifying variant “Starship Troopers (the movie) can’t be a satirical critique of fascism because as a fascist myself, I find the world it depicts very attractive”
I haven't read Starship Troopers since I was 14 or so. I liked it at the time. I certainly agree that Heinlein was not a "bad" writer -- his prose is slick in a '50s commercial fiction sort of way, often quite clever, well-paced. It might not be what one calls "literary" prose but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Also I was going to mention the whole "controversial publication history" but I see you know all about that!
I do think that Heinlein's best work was in the '50s, and with Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land he clearly made a turn in the direction of didacticism; which sometimes went horribly wrong (as in Farnham's Freehold) but often was still entertaining enough but also dragged when he decide to get on his soapbox.
I should probably go back and read his earlier stuff—I just kind of decided to start more systematically reading at 1959 and go back to the earlier things later or as they come up. It's a pretty good year for me and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, since in addition to Russ it's also when my favorite Fritz Leiber story ("A Deskful of Girls") comes out. (About which I hope to have essay coming out this month, but it's up to the editors.)
Great article. Great book. The film is entertaining; you should watch it. My wife and I saw it for the first time in an old theater in SF. Half the fans were gay men, to see Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico. The hoots and hollers for Johnny were highly amusing. It’s a campy film, but all the questions are there.
I need some version where the brain sucking is replaced with a silent movie–style intertitle that just says "something unpleasant is happening." Or, I guess, to watch it with somebody who knows the movie well enough to hand me a pillow at the appropriate times. That was how I got through Silence of the Lambs.…
To me, my key insight many years after my first readthrough is that Heinlein "cheats" and makes the political regime he has crafted in the story justified by the way he has set up the entire universe, ie, as a Malthusian, Hobbesian wasteland of all-against-all where all peace and prosperity is temporary and imposed at gunpoint. In that way, its most influential spiritual successor is probably the Walking Dead, where the omnipresent encroachment of death forces men to rediscover their masculinity in order to build small fortresses of society in the darkness.
He's not dishonest about it, its just not necessarily obvious to some readers that a) there's no evidence this IS how the universe must work and b) even if it is, are we sure some kind of cooperation isn't still more viable?
A lot of SF challenges assumption a), I think of Starship Troopers/Star Trek as being sort of a clear dichotomy about whether or not you embrace scarcity or abundance as the primary determinative factor in your SF worldbuilding. And I think a lot of real-world influential "dark" nerds (see Nick Land) are folks who basically decided that we live in a Starship Troopers universe and should act accordingly.
b) is the harder, more interesting question to me. I don't know many science fiction writers who have a pessimistic view of the universe but still advocate for kindness or decency, but that might be because I haven't read enough. When you get to the end of the Three Body Problem trilogy that's basically the last question left for the reader. There also seemed to be hints of it in the Road, if you consider that science fiction, but that book bummed be out too much to finish.
Yeah, I agree about the "cheating" (and also that it's not dishonest). It annoys me less in this book than it does in some other books, perhaps because the book is so entertaining, whereas in other cases it feels like the person created some kind of Rube Goldberg machine from hell and then turned to me and said "makes you think…"
I think re b) Tiptree—kind of—fits here. If you've read "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" it is bleak as hell but it contains this idea of another way things could be. Same with "The Only Neat Thing To Do." But I think Tiptree's stories occupy such an extreme end of pessimism that I wouldn't exactly say you end them feeling like kindness and decency have a chance. I think it's more like "we're an incredibly self destructive species and the best case scenario is probably that we self destruct before we do irreparable damage to the earth; but we have other qualities and you feel as if it didn't really need to be this way, sometimes."
Re Elon, it's the ancient and once much better-known dichotomy of nerds and geeks. Nerds are otaku. Geeks are merely hopeless. This distinction faded away right around when it became a sort of cool thing to be Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, and everything drowned in the fantasy/comic tidal wave ... (I probably don't need to explain this to you but sometimes you get to typing, you know)
Some of the most interesting stuff I've read in early Gibson interviews essentially add up to: what if all this boring bullshit about ones and zeroes was *sexy*? What if these losers *fucked* instead? I guess I wrote about that a bit in the messy thing I put on my substack a few months ago. It explains a lot to me.
lol honestly you could explain more! many of these nuances are lost on me bc I did not go to high school.
I didn't do all of high school the normal way myself either - but I think it was a broader cultural thing that was going on for a little while. You can see it in older blog posts and such, though they don't 100% agree with each other:
https://betafishmag.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/the-nerdgeek-dichotomy/
https://flowingdata.com/2013/06/14/the-differences-between-a-geek-and-a-nerd/
https://web.archive.org/web/20070403030341/http://www.wikihow.com/Tell-the-Difference-between-Nerds-and-Geeks
I think this originates in the 80s, when cyberpunk was coming up ... nerd and geek stereotype characters pop up in a ton of media from that decade. (It makes me wonder now if it was a sort of overcompensation for the same thing that drove a lot of the japanophilia / phobia that is all over Gibson's work -- the sense that America had already peaked, the aftermath of the oil crisis and the interest rates skyrocketing and the Challenger disaster and urban decay ...)
Love the footnote about cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was invented by writers who lived in the counterculture (Gibson was a draft-dodger living in Canada), and who wrote science fiction from a countercultural perspective, but for a fandom living in Reagan's America. The desire of basically mainstream people to present themselves as rebels, or punk rock, or metal or whatever subculture they think sounds interesting means that misreading becomes a basic tool for building a functional identity.
I read a ton of Heinlein when I was a kid, and your characterization of his work as "good writing, bad ideas" seems right. I will add that his supposedly "adult" writing was even more problematic than his writing for young adults - "Stranger in a Strange Land" led to some pretty warped science fiction cults in the Bay Area in the '60s. Like a lot of people, Heinlein went from school to the military, and in the process basically destroyed his ability to experience human difference.
A while back, I read "Atlas Shrugged" for reasons that are difficult to explain, and was struck by a weird familiarity to it, despite never having read Ayn Rand before. I eventually realized that Rand was basically Heinlein, but with railroads instead of rocket ships. The same issue of "good writing, bad ideas". Also, the trouble with imagining difference.
There’s an AI called “Grok.” People remember that stuff.
Stranger in a Strange Land is probably the next Heinlein on the docket unless I go backwards, since it's the next one to win a Hugo.
After I wrote and posted this I read a (bizarre) paean to Elon Musk in the New York Times which reinforced to me that many people did not ever figure out Starship Troopers was a book for children. But it's true… in general there's a dynamic with science fiction where for some people it becomes a kind of way to avoid living in the world, and that can easily happen with books that are meant for adults, too. eta: I mean, like you're saying, it DOES happen.
interesting tension with cyberpunk (especially gibson) is:
- sure, it's usually a semi-dystopia, about as bad as Russia or China today at a bigger scale. everyone's life is constrained by corruption and economic coercion.
- but also, the technology, especially all the biotech, is enormously liberating.
I don't think Gibson ever depicts a character who chose to get body modifications and regrets it or is disappointed in the result. When freely chosen, it always works out as intended as far as I remember.
Yeah, I agree with this. It’s like a decade later but I also think the Ghost in the Shell movie fits here. The context is dystopian but the decision to merge with the superintelligence is another story.
haven't read the book, but the movie really is excellent and wonderfully campy and strange. I believe that when the movie came out the critics took Starship Troopers as having proto-fascist and authoritarian aesthetics, but it seems pretty clear that it's a satire? Maybe there are people out there who legitimately look at the universe of Starship Troopers and think, 'this is dope, i love space imperialism, pew pew', but it seems like a critical viewer should look at the world and conclude that actually yeah, this is really really bad! I'd love to read the book though and see how it compares...
I looooove Robocop and I think part of what makes it a great movie is that it works perfectly as an action flick and as a kind of anti–action flick. It's like "yeah what if there WAS a robot cop shooting rapists :) that would be so cool :)" because if you don't get that part you won't get the darker and more satirical aspects. But that also means it's easy to stay there lol
I saw the movie ST when it came out, and I loved it - the fascist supertext seemed like the obvious direction that action movies were going, which gave it an honesty that you normally don't see in big-budget action flicks. SF and comic books become cultural phenomena in the '30s, when fascism still made sense, and space opera and superheroes are inherently fascist genres (e.g. EE "Doc" Smith and eugenics; calling the first superhero "Superman"). Given that the primary virtue of fascism is aesthetic, it's very difficult to subvert it aesthetically - all you can really do is recognize that it's something that people are going to keep finding appealing and then fight them politically when they come to the conclusion that an aesthetically appealing political philosophy ought to be implemented.
With that said, Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and directed a movie in 1977 about the Dutch underground, comes about as close to subversion in ST as you can get with fascist art, with Doogie Howser-era Neil Patrick Harris as a telepathic SS-man. I won't say you ought to watch it, but it is a worthwhile contribution to big-budget SF cinema.
“Soldier of Orange.” I loved that film. Saw in a theater when it came out.
I do love Verhoeven (I'm in the group of people who think Showgirls is a good movie), even if some of his movies are too much for me. I can handle Robocop because it's pretty easy to hide behind one's hands at key moments. But even thinking about the clip of brain sucking I saw from ST makes me feel ill!
This is great. Also I think the punk part of cyberpunk gets missed a lot. People slap that word on all their favorite new microgenres. You can’t have an idyllic world of green, sustainable energy with a cozy little society and call it “solarpunk.” Punk ain’t cozy.
no it's true. Though I feel like the ship maybe sailed with "steampunk"? I don't think I've ever seen a steampunk thing that didn't basically _feel_ cozy, even if the actual story was otherwise… all those gears are just too fun.
Steampunk is SO cozy. I have often wondered if the flip from fiction subgenre to aesthetic did steampunk dirty. I remember reading The Difference Engine soon after it came out and getting excited by the premise but then the tophats-and-goggles types got their gloved hands on it.