Melissa's Reviews > Starship Troopers

Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called “natural human rights” that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

The world Heinlein depicts in Starship Troopers is both selectively cynical and quietly optimistic in a manner it masks as realism — when it comes to the failures of democracy its loquacious, but the efficacy of a stratocracy as depicted here, Heinlein is far less hesitant to grasp for platitudes.

The actual story of a rich kid rebelling against the cushy life his parents have mapped out for him is quickly sidelined by the minutiae of basic training and the petty politics therein. The meat of the story is actually a series of political and philosophical polemics/lectures by Heinlein, through various characters but primarily Mr Dubois, a teacher of Rico’s.

I imagine the effectiveness of this overly-didactic storytelling depends considerably on whether you agree with Heinlein’s points.

Often, I didn’t.

The lectures of violence and duty, on the necessity of state violence and a citizens duty to implement it, I can only say the analysis here is fairly shallow. An uncritical approach to state violence isn’t all that thought-provoking to me. Neither is mocking the idea that “violence never settles anything” as Dubois takes this almost too literally to believe, and invokes Bonaparte and Hitler — two figures whose use of state violence ended all matters related to the use of them in the first place, according to Dubois.

Yes, it was definitely the violence and absolutely nothing else. The continued colonial troubles France would incur in the century after Napoleon’s ignominious exile in 1814 would suggest it hadn’t quite settled anything. The Hitler example speaks for itself.

Essentially, you don’t “settle” an issue by killing your opponent — you just postpone it.

That isn’t to say state violence doesn’t have value; it’s just that that value is in continual negotiation with other means of reconciliation.

There are other discussions related to the efficacy of corporal punishment I find fall into that quiet optimism masking itself as realism.

There’s also a incident when one of the MI’s goes AWOL and kills a child, only for that man to be turned over to his unit and dealt with. Military law taking precedence over civil law is just insane, especially for the grieving parents.

Outside of that, the power armor is cool. Rico is a good protagonist but he’s never given any decent characters to play off of unless he’s being lectured in some capacity, and that wears thin by the halfway mark.

I struggled to get through Starship Troopers, and the discussion around this book and its intentions are far more interesting than a single page of its actual content. But the main reason there is anything to debate at all related to it is due to how passionately inchoate most of the ideas are expressed here. Almost any reading beyond the staunch militarism is possible in my mind, and it wouldn’t take much imagination.