The Galaxy According to Heinlein: The Return of Starship Troopers

Published at the height of the Cold War, Starship Troopers shocked readers with its unapologetic militarism and strict civic philosophy.

First edition dust jacket of Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein

It came as quite a surprise back in March to learn there is to be another film adaptation of Starship Troopers, perhaps science fiction grand master Robert A. Heinlein’s most controversial novel. With no confirmed release date, this new adaption is set to be written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, of District 9 fame and released through Columbia Pictures.

The original ‘Starship Troopers’ film from 1997, directed by Paul Verhoeven, remains rather controversial in its own right. It is at times very silly and yet is still eminently watchable and enjoyable. It is, however, hard to discern quite what Verhoeven intended, especially, as he himself admits, he found the source novel too boring to actually finish. Was his film then a satire of the novel and the politics contained within it? Or was it more just a general critique of militarism, or indeed fascism, or perhaps specifically directed at the U.S. military-industrial complex? I don’t think anyone really knows – not even Paul Verhoeven.

Born in Butler, Missouri in 1907, well within living memory of the lives of the pioneers of the American West, Robert Anson Heinlein enrolled in the United States Navy in 1925, only to be invalided out after contracting pulmonary tuberculosis in 1935. After a lengthy hospital stay, and surviving for a time on his disability pension, he decided to try his hand at writing science fiction. He published his first short story, Life-Line, in 1939, his immense natural talent recognised almost immediately.

Incensed by Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 but unable to reenlist due to his disability, he instead found employment as a civilian aeronautical engineer at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where Heinlein also found jobs for fellow science fiction luminaries Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp. After the war he returned to writing, achieving fame in the 1950s with a series of science fiction novels, his ‘juveniles’, aimed at the market for teenage boys. These novels, heavily influenced by the experiences of the pioneers and homesteaders of the American West, as well as being grounded in scientific fact (of the time), would take his fictional protagonists out to the planets, to become explorers and settlers – novels that would inspire a whole generation of NASA engineers and astronauts to work on the Apollo and Space Shuttle space programmes.

It was in 1959, probably at the height of his literary technical mastery, that Heinlein penned Starship Troopers, either the last of his ‘juveniles’ or the first of his adult novels, depending on your point of view. It is essentially a bildungsroman, where, we follow Juan ‘Johnny’ Rico as he leaves behind a life of privilege and enrols in the Mobile Infantry to fight against the alien ‘bugs’ that threaten humanity, rising in the ranks as he does so to eventually become an officer, a leader of men. Heinlein, then approaching the zenith of his influence, had already published a string of works that would define modern science fiction, namely ‘The Puppet Masters’ (1951), ‘Double Star’ (1956) and ‘Time for the Stars’ (1956) and had begun to weave into his stories a deep preoccupation with civic virtue, individual duty and the moral obligations of citizenship.

Written at the height of the Cold War, the story is much more reminiscent of the WW2 campaign in the Pacific, the island hopping of the U.S. Marine Corps and Army as it waged total war against the Japanese Empire. Instead of marines wading ashore from landing craft onto contested beaches to prise the Japanese from their caves and hiding places, in the novel Mobile Infantrymen drop from spaceships onto contested planets to prise the bugs out of their holes. There is no ambiguity in the novel. It is brutal and Darwinist in its premise, humanity fighting for its very survival out in the cosmos. The book’s relentless physicality, its attention to drills, equipment, and chain of command, owes as much to the U.S. Navy’s procedural culture as to pulp imagination.

Heinlein knew his novel would be controversial from the off, using it as a vehicle – as he did in most of his novels – to posit or test certain social and political theories. Heinlein was never just a mere storyteller; he was a polemicist cloaked in the garments of speculative fiction. If one observes carefully, every one of his books - from ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ to ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ - was a kind of ‘thought laboratory’ in which he could dissect the structures of citizenship, duty and freedom.

For instance, in ‘Starship Troopers’ the only people allowed to vote in elections are those who have ‘served’, only those who have been prepared to lay down their lives for humanity – an idea that has horrified many a reader since. To Heinlein’s great surprise, ‘Starship Troopers’ won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960.

But WW2 had been over for fifteen years, and the story of a young man maturing within the discipline of the military, and then fighting for the survival of humanity, was easy prey for satire by those who proclaimed themselves anti-military and anti-war. And despite Johnny Rico being Hispanic (Heinlein broke much ground in science fiction with his use of racially diverse characters in his stories) some saw, and detested, a racial metaphor in humanity’s war against the alien ‘bugs’, harking back to America’s very real war against the Japanese.

Harry Harrison, another extraordinarily gifted author, who had hated every aspect of his time in the U.S. Army, and whose stories often had an anti-military bent, published a direct satire of Starship Troopers in 1965, entitled ‘Bill, The Galactic Hero’ – a book later lauded by Terry Pratchett as the funniest science fiction novel ever written. Where Heinlein’s soldiers marched to the drumbeat of civic duty, Harrison’s protagonist stumbled through an absurdist nightmare of bureaucracy, incompetence, and cosmic futility. His galactic empire was less a machine of order than a carnival of errors, its soldiers doomed not by alien ferocity but by the stupidity of their own commanders. If Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry represented the disciplined perfection of the American ideal, Harrison’s conscripts evoked Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 - a universe where survival depended on hypocrisy and obedience was indistinguishable from madness.

Heinlein and Harrison never spoke again. Harrison soon moved to tax-friendly Ireland, itself proud of its neutral and anti-war stance, its borders happily secured for it by NATO countries which, to this day, Ireland regularly criticises. No more need be said. There, Harrison would write ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ series - a rogue’s gallery of conmen, anarchists and antiheroes who mocked both law and order in equal measure.

More philosophically interesting is ‘The Forever War’ by Joe Haldeman (1974, Hugo Award 1976). Influenced by his own service during the Vietnam War, Haldeman’s novel appears to be the very antithesis of Starship Troopers: a war with aliens that lasts a thousand years, a war begun by mistake, a war where the alien enemy is hardly ever seen and certainly never understood, a war made ultra-confusing by the effects of relativistic time dilation, the many years passing by in a blur. The Forever War is often put forward as the politically correct response to the ‘glorification of war’ in Starship Troopers.

The novel channels the deep existential fatigue of Vietnam veterans, for whom combat was neither ennobling nor clarifying but surreal and meaningless. In Haldeman’s universe, time itself becomes the enemy: as soldiers travel at near-light speed, decades pass between missions, and by the time they return to Earth, their families are dead and their purpose obsolete.

But Heinlein and Haldeman respected each other greatly, even if they had different visions. And Heinlein would tell Haldeman that [The Forever War] ‘may be the best future war story I’ve ever read’.

What then to make of the potential filming of Starship Troopers in the third decade of the 21st Century – a novel so vulnerable to criticism and satire, especially as Neill Blomkamp has promised to remain true to the story? It doesn’t seem to make sense. Surely the film critics and political opinion writers will have a field day in this more cynical, more war-averse, and more sacrifice-averse age.

And yet, as a novel, Starship Troopers is still considered a masterpiece. Is this just due to Heinlein’s literary genius, or are the themes of growing into adulthood, of taking responsibility, of service, of sacrifice, so universal that they still resonate today? And are these themes then properly transferable to film under a director with the requisite skill and vision? We can but wait and see.

(The author is a novelist and retired investigator with an abiding passion for Chinese history. He is the creator of the Magistrate Zhu mysteries. Views personal.)