Robert A. Heinlein. Starship Troopers. 1959; Ace, 1987.

The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony, sweat, and devotion…and the price demanded for the precious of all things in life is life itself—ultimate cost of perfect value. (74, ellipsis in original)

“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:42-44)

In my younger years I was a fan of Robert A. Heinlein. I loved Glory Road. Stranger in a Strange Land is great literature. I even liked Time Enough for Love—some critics panned it, but it had scope and originality. His Job was a weird disappointment. Somewhere along the line I just forgot about him till I picked up a copy of Starship Troopers at a recent yard sale. What an enjoyable book! I had forgotten how great he could be and what an experience reading one of his novels is.

On one level Starship Troopers is an entertaining “space opera,” as they say. Our narrator, Johnnie Rico, has just graduated from high school and has decided to join the military, much to his father’s dismay. “We’ve outgrown wars. This planet is now peaceful and happy and we enjoy good enough relations with other planets,” his father tells him (23).

Except that soon Earth and its planet colonies would be threatened by a new and different alien life form that was apparently trying to colonize the same kind of places where people from earth were living. They are slightly larger than humans but their culture is organized like ants or bees—perhaps a precursor to the Borg of Star Trek. When they move to a place they want to take over, they simply flood the place with their “bugs.”

Humans learn quickly that is makes no difference how many of these worker bugs they kill. The workers do not fight, and in a war situation they are like cannon fodder. For every hundred or so workers there is one soldier bug. The humans learn to focus on fighting them. But even that is not enough. The bugs burrow underground, and the humans discover that there are at least two more types of these creatures. There are the “brains,” the ones who give the orders to the workers and warriors who follow them blindly. It is truly a hive mentality. Then there is the queen who breeds all these creatures at a profligate rate.

As is true with ants on earth, we rarely see anything but workers—soldier bugs if there is fighting. The brains and queens stay deep underground. A few human soldiers have tried to go into the underground labyrinths, but invariably get lost and captured.

Being futuristic science fiction, Johnnie also tells of the suits, like space suits only mobile, that those of the Mobile Infantry (MI) wear. We learn that the navy operates the space ships that transport the MIs to where they are needed. There is still inter-service rivalry in the future. We are told at one point that a group of admirals proposed eliminating the army altogether. With interstellar travel, it was obsolete. Clearly Johnnie’s father was naive about there being no more wars, the same is true with armies.

Back in 1977 a friend who had served in the National Guard had just seen the original Star Wars. His response was simply that all those guys in white spacesuits were the infantry. No matter where you go, or when, even to a galaxy long ago and far away, there will be the “grunts.”

This in itself would make for a decent story, but Heinlein puts much more thought into his stories. Most of the book is actually about the training that Johnnie and MIs in general go through. It is the distant future—we are not exactly told when but Heinlein’s century is called the XXth—which makes it sound like that it was a long time ago. Anyone who has been through basic training can identify with some of Johnnie’s experiences.

As is true even with current military training standards, it is understood that some recruits will fail to graduate. Unlike the American system today, however, some of those failures will be because of death. If they died in combat or following orders, they will be promoted posthumously. But one truth about basic training remains: “Boot camp was made as hard as possible and on purpose” (45, italics in original).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the government of Earth—and it has been single government for a long time—is that only military veterans can vote. It is not because the culture has become a futuristic Sparta, but simply that only veterans have put the lives of others in their land ahead of their own. Johnnie’s History and Moral Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dubois, explains it, “…their citizenship is valuable to them because they paid a high price for it” (27). In the American culture there used to be the idea that people who worked for the government were public servants. It is still an ideal, but it seems that in the last few years even American bureaucrats want us to know they are our masters.

Mr. Dubois teaches Johnnie the opposite of what his father told him:

“Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it…” (24)

Indeed, Starship Troopers reminded this reader of Star Wars in another way. Mr. Dubois is one of several characters who, as they say, pour into Johnnie as he matures as a man and as trooper not unlike Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi. We still need wise mentors who speak truths rather than what people might want to hear. Heinlein himself is one for us.