Starship Troopers

Picture yourself - a soldier home from the Vietnam war - and you have an opinion. That is what author Robert A Heinlein is sharing with us. Heinlein, an American Science Fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer, named the “Dean of Science Fiction”, wrote an enthralling space satire to his experience in the Vietnam war.

Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers as a parallel story to the war. Instead of Vietnam, all humans are engaged in a war against space bugs. These creatures are exactly what they sound like, giant spiders and other creepy crawlies. The main character, Jonnie Rico, serves as a member of the mobile infantry, who get dropped from space ships and invade the space bugs’ planets.

Fighting the space bugs only takes up about a quarter of the book. The story begins by dropping you mid battle, lost and a little confused. Then, it jumps back in reflection and the majority of the rest of the book is his experience prior to and leading up to that battle. The story ends in a later battle against the Bugs and closes with Jonnie achieving his goal of becoming an officer and reuniting with loved ones.

Starship Troopers takes you on a journey as a new recruit signing up for the military, training in boot camp, and eventually fighting in the war. He writes in a way that makes you feel as if you were his bunk mate going through all these steps with him. You feel his pain as he loses close friends, you feel weary and stressed while him and the platoon go through rigorous months of training, and you smile with him as if you were there for the successful moments. The satire of the story is not always obvious. Some of the connections require deeper thinking and retrospect. Heinlein writes unlike any author. Starship Troopers was not written like a book written by an esteemed author, rather it was written like a story by a veteran who is reimagining and processing his experiences of war. Because of this the story flows a bit unusually, there are lots of missing pieces and details, but I found it most influential to imagine it as a story being told by your grandfather.

As a science fiction fan, it was an absolutely wonderful book to read. However, this book is outdated for the time. The book suggests intense feelings of xenophobia, and glorification of war and militarism. Many of the parallels are prejudice and offensive when comparing it to Heinlein’s feeling of the Vietnam war. Because of this it is hard to feel comfortable promoting the book. However, going by strictly methodical and literary standards, this book was incredibly well written.

I would rate this book 9/10