Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The screen version of this classic SF novel is less an adaptation than a counterargument. In a way that's appropriate; Heinlein was certainly trying (or at least expecting) to generate loads of controversy with this work. But if you're about to read _Starship Troopers_ for the first time, it's only fair to warn you that _whatever_ you think of the film, you'll be disappointed if you expect the book to resemble it very much. (Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier took incredible liberties with, and sometimes even directly contradicted, the book on which their film is 'based'. It's a fine film on its own terms and I think it's been unjustly maligned. But it's not this novel; it's the next round in an ongoing dispute with this novel. And whatever else the movie has going for it, its _military_ action is incompetent to the point of silliness.) I've been reading Heinlein for nearly forty years now. I don't think this is one of his best three or four novels, and it's never going to be one of my personal favorites either. Nevertheless, it _is_ a genuinely great work of SF and raises issues that genuinely deserve to be raised. Whether you buy Heinlein's own _answers_ is a different matter. The 'arguments' presented by the characters in the novel are mostly aimed at straw men. ('My mother says violence never settles anything', indeed.) This is perhaps forgivable since so much of Heinlein's positive case is so good. But I'm not persuaded that the society he imagines in this novel would be as functional as he seems to think. At any rate, its essential socio-political point -- that authority and responsibility are a coordinated yin-yang pair and an imbalance between them puts the world out of whack -- is extremely well taken. (It applies more broadly, too.) Its account of what it means to be a human being (as opposed to an economic animal) is darned good too. And this is where the real meat of the novel lies. You see, the _story_ here isn't about the war with the Bugs; it's about Juan Rico's coming of age. As a character (not Rico) remarks at one point: 'I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man.' If you grok that, you'll grok the novel. (Yes, Heinlein tells this story in the context of military service, but its theme applies much more widely. And lest you think the novel is too autobiographical here, note that Heinlein -- a Navy man -- locates his story not in his own branch of the service but in the 'poor bloody infantry'.) The stuff about the Bug War is a different deal. This aspect of the novel was very much a product of the anticommunism/Cold War era; I don't think it's survived all that well and I'm not even persuaded it was all that terrific at the time. But it's background, not main plot -- and at any rate Heinlein is surely right that a cap trooper in the Mobile Infantry isn't going to be involved in setting the Federation's diplomatic policy; Rico's own story doesn't depend on whether the politicians are 'right' to send him into combat. One of Heinlein's greatest, then, but not the absolute cream. Anyway, don't get scared off either by the movie or by comments from readers who didn't grok it. Whatever you think of the Old Man, he was no fascist.