Advertisement I mean, sure, the camaraderie, and sure, the consistent feeling of doing a job that matters and doing it well.Heinlein starship troopers Books Top 201 1 Starship Troopers is one of Robert Heinleins most famous books, and one of the most famously controversial in SF.
And the 1960 Hugo winner has its problems but thats probably why its a classic. Advertisement Man, I accomplished straight-up nothing over the last fortnight or so. In fact, those of you who are especially alert, as well as those of you who have built tiny shrines in your basement to honor me, may have noticed that this particular piece of writing was supposed to run last weekend. I have always found it very difficult to get anything done during the holidays, and now that I am fully self-employed, this is more true than ever: I take a couple days off, it spirals into a few more days, and pretty soon I am back to staying up till 3 a.m. AMC and sleeping in until noon. Which is why, I think, Starship Troopers is such an appealing book. Let me briefly interject that if you havent read it, you ought to. I can now say with some authority that its the first Hugo winner that can be called an honest-to-goodness classic, and deservedly so. As I mentioned back in November, Heinlein has one of the most engaging voices in SF lit, and this is him at his most engaging. The story is accessible and fast-paced surprisingly so, given how much of it is comprised of conversations, rather than action and if youre a fast reader, you can finish it in a day. Anyway, its part of the canon, and it should be.) Advertisement With Double Star, the Hugos Start to Shine The original Grand Master brings us the first Hugo-winning novel truly worthy of the award. Hot Read more For those of you who have not read Starship Troopers at least four or five times, as I have, it is the first-person account of a high school graduate named Johnnie Rico who defies his parents to volunteer for service in the Terran Federation government. Starship Troopers Book Essay Free Promo CodeGO Media may get a commission Subscribe and Get Your First Bag Free Promo Code AtlasCoffeeDay20 More than all that, though, Starship Troopers is also an examination of the moral philosophy that justifies the Federations organization and policies. As Golem100 pointed out in the comments a few weeks ago, its as much a tract as a novel, and its rather famously controversial for that reason. Me, Im not that interested in arguing for or against the merits of the political model Heinlein lays out here. Its pretty much been done to death, and as best I can tell, the question has been settled among most intelligent readers: Heinlein wasnt some kind of fascist, and it takes a willful misreading of Starship Troopers to consider him one. Restrictions on franchise have been part and parcel of plenty of perfectly non-tyrannical representative governments, and his goes out of its way to give its people as many ways to qualify for citizenship as it can, and makes doing so as painless and always voluntary as reasonably possible. Advertisement Now, that said, critiques of the book as military propaganda hold some merit. When I first read it, I was not far out of adolescence, the son of a self-made businessman in a high tax bracket, reasonably thoughtful, but awfully directionless in other words, very much like Johnnie Rico. And the idea that I could, like him, sign up for a job where my abilities would be tested, where Id always know what time I was getting up in the morning and what time I was going to bed at night, where Id get paid to stay in shape instead of having to go to the gym, and where, at the end of the day, Id be left with a sense of moral certitude that what I was doing was, in some way, deeply admirable well, that idea was quite appealing, and by the time I turned the last page, I was ready to enlist. Advertisement Fortunately, unlike Johnnie Ricos dad, my father was a veteran, and he managed to gently dissuade me from that course of action. I say fortunately not because I think signing up for the military is a bad thing, but because ten years later, I can say with some surety that I am not psychologically cut out for soldierhood (the killing people I think I could handle, actually, but I am pretty terrible at just taking orders and not asking questions); and more important, because, for as much as Starship Troopers purports to be a celebration of the troops (and as much as, in many ways, it is), it paints a far-from-complete, grossly simplified picture of what their lives are really like, and of the moral dilemmas inherent in what they do. ![]() Armed Forces, but the Terran Federation Mobile Infantry. I certainly dont want that read as a dismissal of my countrys soldiers but nonetheless, its my understanding that the infrastructure in which they operate is not the highly efficient organization grounded in logically provable principles that Heinleins is. My second problem was that even if I had been able to join the M.I., I find it difficult to believe, in my heart of hearts, that it would have been as wonderful as Johnnie Rico makes it sound.
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