Customer Reviews

Starship Troopers

5 star:		(369)
4 star:		(76)
3 star:		(47)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

As with any good sci-fi the story and descriptions of the latest gadget are important; however this is just the window dressing or vehicle to carry a message or concept to you with out sounding too preachy.

Basically this book is not fascist like the movie. It suggests that people should be responsible for their actions and have a stake in what they make decisions on. Never did it say that these people were smarter or better, just that when you have a vested interest your decisions tend to work or you will pay.

I was intrigued in the process that Johnny Rico was going through in the story. The movie does not phase me as it looks like cartoon hype. But the book was too close to home. I hope my memory is flawed as I remember every one of the people types that he described. Actually I think with the volunteer Army today it is closer to the book than was Vietnam where conscripts looked on it this as slightly preferable to prison. I know that this story is not about the military but it is too real to be ignored as just the story.

You could have floored me with I found out there were no naked women in the book. Dizzy Flores must have had a great Swedish doctor. This could have been a genuine attempt to update the story; however it distracted from the original purpose.

Basically after school Johnny Rico is whisked into the military by peer pressure and to finds out if he is more than just the factory owner's son. While going through boot camp he learns of different cultures and the intricacies of military life. Naturally he makes mistakes and learns from others mistakes. As he grows he learns what make the world the way it is. I will not contrast this book with the movie because I think you enjoy the story more if you find out what happens as it unfolds.

I received the book while participating in a book swap years ago, but never got around to reading it, although I was familiar with other books by Heinlein. When I saw the movie, I thought, "Yep. This is one of Heinlein's stories." I dug out the book, and was very disappointed. It is a pretty good book in its own right, but having read "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman previously - and considering it one of my all-time favorites - I felt this pales by comparison.

I must admit that I did not get around to reading this book until after I'd seen the movie. I liked the movie, and so I figured "why not read the book" well... the Book, aside form being dang near a compleatly diffrent story from the movie, was, in my humble oppinion, way better. I am a big fan of the war based sience fiction type books.

I think the Bigest thing that Cought on me about this book was that its not telling the story about a guy that joins the millitary, and goes off to fight some aliens, It's telling you a story about how joining the millitary and going off to fight some aliens has changed from a once dumb civilian, into a soldier, and a citizen. It's about how Juan Rico, evolves from a boy to a man, and from a follower into a leader.

I particularly liked the use of technology, and how for as cool as it is, it's not even an issue in the book. The book didn't get all carried away with fancy weapons and armor, but instead gave you a basic outline and let your own imagination fill in the rest.

There were a lot of Socialistic idiologies, in this book, but I still liked how their govenment was set up, and I think it's too bad we couldn't make a system like that work in today's sociaty.
It's definatly a deep read, with a lot of questions that you may find you ask yourself, but that's part of the joy I found in reading it. so if your looking for some straight "balls to the walls" action like you saw in the movie, this might not be your book, but if your in for some real Sci-Fi that'll keep you woundering what'll happen next, and just who Rico will become in the end, this is your meal ticket!

I am a great fan of ST and its action, but this book has barely a few pages of combat. I understand now that the movie was inspired by this book and nothing more.

For 300 pages, you get 5% of fighting the bugs at the beginning and another 5% at the end of the book. The rest is filled of training stories and millitary procedures.

The only characters that are intact in the movie are Zim (almost) and Shushumi. The others are very altered. Carmen is not his girlfriend. Raschek is only his millitary superior but not his teacher and dies miserably. it is Dubois who plays the role of the veteran teacher. Ace dies quickly too. Dizzy is a guy. No Zander.

I did not appreciate this book and I would say that Davidson, Sammon and Verhoeven did an awesome movie with a good 1959 book that had potential.

And by the way, the bugs have guns! How about that?

For me, Starship Troopers is all the proof you need in order to name Robert Heinlein science fiction's greatest writer. I am getting in the bad habit of naming specific Heinlein books to be his very best, only to find that the next novel I pick up is even better than the last one. This particular novel is fascinating on a number of levels. There is nothing really special about Johnnie Rico; he's a normal lad who decides to join the military, ostensibly at the time in order to gain citizenship. In this future Terran confederation, only those who serve in the military are awarded citizenship and granted the privilege to vote. The government actually discourages volunteers and makes boot camp so difficult that only men with proper soldier qualities get through it. On the broadest level, we see Rico's progression from harrowed recruit to active service in the Mobile Infantry to combat against the Klendathu. I have no military background at all, but I found Heinlein's descriptions of military life and actual combat to be detailed and thrilling. We watch Johnnie Rico become a soldier. Along the way, he figures out why he actually did volunteer, developing a whole new outlook on duty and responsibility.

I don't want to delve too deeply into the politics of this novel. Some have pinned a fascist connotation on it, but I try to examine this future society philosophically. Only those who serve in the military can vote, but the vast majority of people choose not to serve and live happy lives as civilians, so I don't see anything fascist about this society. What intrigues me most, and it is this that sets this book apart from the vast majority of science fiction, is Heinlein's thought-provoking ideas about ethics, morality, duty, responsibility, etc. Mr. Dubois, Ricco's high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy (a required course for all) gets in the ring and dukes it out with Plato, John Locke, and a host of other political thinkers. He argues that man has no natural moral instinct; morality is acquired by the individual and is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. If an individual is not taught the lessons of living in society, he will not learn that the basis of all morality is duty. In this way he criticizes the democracies of the late twentieth century and explains their ultimate failure. The promotion of the idea that certain natural rights are necessarily due each person caused young people to neglect their duties--by concentrating on the rights they think are due them. Liberty and freedom must be earned and paid for, and democracies failed because they did not understand this basic tenet. These kinds of ideas are the source of most of the criticisms directed toward Starship Troopers. I found many cogent arguments in the novel; criticism of democracy is not an endorsement of totalitarianism. Many would agree with some of the ideas Mr. Dubois puts forth (and which find their way into various places elsewhere in the book), but any agreement or disagreement should be purely intellectual. Great fiction is supposed to make us think deeply about important concepts, and Starship Troopers succeeds admirably in that regard.

Thus, Starship Troopers provides science fiction fans the best of both worlds. On the one hand, we have the well-told, gripping story of one man's military journey from boot camp to battlefields of war light years away from home, replete with several intense combat scenes. On the other hand, we have ideas of a political and philosophical nature laid out extremely well by the author, which is all but guaranteed to make you seriously think about society, government, and warfare. In the end, duty and responsibility are stressed if not glorified, and I find nothing at all subversive in that. Heinlein tells a fascinating story, and he makes you think, whether you want to or not. Few are the writers who can claim such lofty credentials.

I enjoyed the book but it isn't the masterpiece I expected. You follow the main character through his military career and see how he adapts, makes mistakes and becomes a responsible man.

This is not an action book. I saw it more as a psychological adventure in the mind of a fictional soldier than as a military adventure. The only real action is in the last 60 pages or so. The rest is about training, learning about people dying, meeting people and explaining why a militaristic democracy would be better.

You read that right. In many places the author tries to push the idea that punishment and discipline makes a peaceful society. I forgave him since the book is old but rewards are more useful than punishments in educating youngsters. Psychology has come a long way.

So, while the amateurish philosophy bits were boring me and while the book itself is not really about action and battle, the last 60 or so pages did have a nice suspense and gave me a feeling of fulfillment.

For fans of the genre only.

This science-fiction story is a masterpiece. It's extremely well-written and talks about different aspects of history (such as violence, politics, juvenile delinquincy, ect...) and how important their role was and how it's apparently now near-perfect. The military side with all the technological advancements are quite interesting. The action sequences are interestingly written (though there aren't as many as assumed). The main character is interesting and it's fun to follow him in his life, from grduating in high school to boot camp to becoming a soldier and so on. The novel isn't like the movie adaptation, and the novel is MUCH better and more intelligent than the movie. A must read sci-fi classic!

I am a Heinlein fan. Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress I have all loved and read more than once. Actually, Stranger is my favorite book of all time. Be that as it may, I was shocked at how dry and shallow I found this book. No real characters, only names. No depth to the story, just an interstellar space war. It would have made a great comic book, I guess. 2 stars instead of one because I've read worse (it could have been boring and not just flat and lost.) Please, read everything else you can by Heinlein, but let this one go.

Here's one way of looking at it. Science fiction is the situational inverse of historical fiction, the interpolation of a fictional narration not within the confines of a precise past but a theoretical future. Whenever I begin a new Science Fiction creative writing class, this is one of the first books I ask my students to pick up. What makes "Starship Troopers" so qualified as a resource? Plot-wise, this novel is nothing but stock quality, something my students could scribble out without breaking a sweat, but that is not the purpose or the goal intended.

This book is contextually similar to perhaps a thousand Sci-Fi novels written in the past fifty years, and half a hundred of which written by this most prolific author. No feature of the scenes, setting, or - most especially - character development in this novel will strike you as ingenious or unique, but Heinlein has penned here a book only superficially based on such elements. His motive is something grander, the ambition of all good Science Fiction writers: to interpret one's breed of history and future history, social setting, and perhaps even global expectations in the time period or environment discussed.

Inspecting the actual term "science fiction" reveals a co-importance of both science fact and fictional activity. One of the most famous sagas of our genre is the ongoing series of Star Wars - but how much scientific attention have you witnessed here? Novels (or movies) like these may seem to fit the field, but they are nothing more than the fantasy genre's technological subfield. "Starship Troopers," on the other hand, commonly puts individual characters and action on the back burner to focus on political theory and sociology. Early on in this novel Heinlein makes the point that, according to his future, "History and Moral Philosophy" are classified right along Math, Biology, and Physics as sciences, and his book serves through character debates, philosophizing, anecdotal supplements, and numerous other means to describe just what his vision of the subject is. He sees his present society (via 1959), and extrapolates onto this a teleologically final social order of mankind. The ideas he pulls out might seem tinted with age in particular regards to psychological theory, but they are undoubtedly thought out to the last detail. Like Aristotle, we cannot and do not fault him for his historical perspective.

This is not to imply, however, that a book with a name like "Starship Troopers" is all theory and no action. Heinlein knows balance and ease of communication, and it is not his ideas but his integration and high placement of these into a storyline that keeps readers, and therefore wins the novel. The result is a work most highly thoughtful, imaginative, and engaging, and not without its due share of adrenalin-pumped activity. All in all, I find this to be a model study on Science Fiction writing - something my students are happy to read as a pleasure, but something that will leave you thoughtfully questioning our own military and societal superiority.

The first and last thirty pages were as eventful as the movie, but nothing happened in the middle.