On reading old books honestly, and why parody is not criticism.

Caveat: I’ve been a Heinlein fan since my early teens. I don’t read him much these days, but I do return to old favourites from time to time.

As an author, and as one of the fathers of modern science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein—along with peers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke—deserves our respect, even when we disagree with him.

This book—Starship Troopers—is often the subject of considerable negativity. Heinlein himself is frequently treated the same way.

Starship Troopers is not subtle—and I think that is by choice.

Any critique that ignores the eras Heinlein lived through, the era in which he wrote the book, or the novel’s speculative intent can safely be set aside. Historical context does not excuse the book’s contents, but it does explain them.

The book is jingoistic. It is explicitly didactic. Heinlein isn’t smuggling ideas in under the radar; he places them on the table, sometimes with almost pedagogical bluntness. That isn’t a flaw—it’s the experiment.

What is often lost is that Heinlein is exploring a political model, not necessarily prescribing one. The novel reads less like a manifesto than a thought experiment:

If political power is tied to voluntary service and sacrifice, what kind of society emerges?

That society is uncomfortable to modern readers precisely because it refuses liberal-democratic assumptions we now take for granted. Discomfort, however, is not the same thing as endorsement.

Heinlein was born in 1907. He lived through the First World War, served in the National Guard, attended the Naval Academy, and achieved the rank of Lieutenant (junior grade) before being medically discharged due to tuberculosis.

He then lived through the Second World War and the Korean War, and his country was entangled in the early stages of the Vietnam conflict when Starship Troopers was published in 1959.

It is therefore not especially surprising that Heinlein was pro-military. One need only look at the man’s personal and national history. How many American men of fifty-two in 1959—however liberal by the standards of their time—were not?

For a man born in 1907, military service was not a political stance; it was a civic norm. The idea that citizenship should be tied to demonstrated responsibility would not have sounded extremist. It would have sounded orderly.

Objections to the book’s stance on corporal punishment are another example of historical blindness. Authoritarian schooling, harsh discipline, and corporal punishment were all commonplace in Heinlein’s formative years. The novel exaggerates these elements, certainly—but not to a degree wildly out of step with the period in which it was written.

The book treads on many toes.

It questions universal suffrage, suggesting that only those who have earned it should participate in the political process. It ties the right to vote to demonstrated dedication to the state’s goals.

Yet modern societies already remove voting rights from certain classes of convicted criminals. Rights that can be lost through particular behaviour are not a radical concept. From there, it is not a great leap—however uncomfortable—to ask whether some rights might need to be earned in the first place.

Starship Troopers is not a book about how society should be. It is a book about what society might become if particular values are taken seriously—and followed to their extreme conclusions.

I have seen the Starship Troopers movie. I respect the novel, and for that reason I strongly dislike the film.

The filmmakers chose parody over engagement. They highlighted what they perceived as the worst aspects of the society depicted in the book and lampooned them. In doing so, they replaced argument with caricature.

Heinlein did not need to do this. He presented his fictional society as functional—even admirable—and supplied more than enough information for a thoughtful reader to find it troubling. He trusted the reader to notice the cracks without painting them in clown makeup.

That trust is absent from the film. And in my view, that is its greatest failure.

Any fiction written well before our own time is likely to be problematic in places. That is not a flaw unique to the work, but a consequence of change. To understand such writing properly requires a willingness to read it in historical context, rather than measuring it solely against contemporary sensibilities.