[Tobytwo]

I must say that I disliked Starship Troopers very much, but I can appreciate the arguments being made for it.

With regard to the politics, the whole thing to me has the tone of an old colonel spouting off about "young people these days". "What they need is a spell in the damned army, the layabouts!" I don't think ST is racist, as is sometimes claimed, but it is (I hate this term) culturally imperialist. The culture of the Federation is not the culture of, say, India, Germany or even Britain, yet all of these places seem to be part of it. (Culturally, it seems to be a vast 1950s US army base, but much more vicious - like a sadistic version of Bilko). I don't know if this is what Heinlein actually wanted the world to be like, but I think that this is how the Federation is portrayed.

I would also take issue with the idea that ST is accurate in its depiction of future warfare. It is a good extrapolation of modern warfare, in that each soldier is effectively a high-tech walking tank. This is fair enough, but as soon as someone invents a powered-armour suit, some other clever fellow will work out how to stop it. ST is a credible view of how such a war could be fought, but I don't see that war will be like that. Of course, Heinlein isn't saying that it will, but the "rightness" of ST's predictions about future war are sometimes wheeled out as a sign of his skill (although he himself might have disagreed).

I felt that Rico, although a bit dim, was a reasonable narrative voice. We don't learn much about him, but I'm not sure that matters terribly. The story, however, doesn't really progress very well: it is simply a set of events in which the Infantry is proved right. The more Rico subordinates himself to the will of the powers that be the better he does. It seems pretty unsophisticated to me.

However, the thing I deeply dislike about ST is its tone: rampant cynicism in the guise of tough realism. None of the characters ever credits mankind with any sort of likeable trait, unless you count obedience, fighting hard and possibly cunning. Time and again we are told that mankind is just a sort of big clever rat, and anything else is just dewy-eyed sentimentality. (I wonder what wishy-washy liberals like Cromwell or Churchill would have made of this.) Yet for a book that claims to be stripping away the soppy rubbish, the attitude to war in it strikes me as far less feasible than (inevitable comparison!) that in The Forever War (or, say, The Cruel Sea). It is this aspect that leaves an unpleasant taste for me: otherwise I would say that it was an interesting, if flawed, novel.