I strongly recommend Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. It doesn’t have the budget or the directorial chops of the original, but the satire is back, this time focusing on Christian fundamentalism. (and bug fundamentalism, too. Contemplate the various meanings of “communion.”)
ETA: I’ve heard that #2 isn’t worthwhile, so don’t let your poor reaction to it, put you off the third.
I think the magnitude of political disagreement with the source material is a factor. Any reverence for the author’s intent goes out the window when he’s the ideological enemy, and not just someone you disagree with.
This fits with what Verhoeven says about the threatened remake:
“It said in the article [that] the production team of that movie of the remake, that they would go back more and more towards the novel. And of course, we really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic,” said Verhoeven. “You feel that going back to the novel would fit very much in a Trump Presidency.”
Now there can of course be political debate about whether Heinlein’s ST is evil enough to warrant that level of disrespect, but if you take the level of political disagreement as a given, “respect for the source material” becomes a strange demand. If Donald Trump publishes a book, how much respect will you have for the integrity of the source material?
Ånd then there’s the plagiarism problem - a movie named “Bug Attack” that was as close to the book “Starship Troopers” as Verhoeven’s movie is would be accused of plagiarism. They needed to get the rights to Starship Troopers to make a movie like that.
That’s what I did. I’ll give it a try.
For the record, movie #2 was apparently made by and for people who saw Verhoeven’s film and took it literally. They did not care about Heinlein’s thought experiment about the right to vote. They did not even notice Verhoeven’s criticism of militarism and fascism. They saw Verhoeven’s film as a mindless exposition of militarism, gore and sadism, and they apparently thought, “great, we need more of that”. Only they tried to make it a bit less cerebral.
My point was that a society in which some people get to vote and others don’t is not going to be a society where people who don’t get to vote have their rights respected in the same way as people who get to vote, not really about who it is that gets to vote. I think a thought experiment that posits otherwise is less a thought experiment and more a fantasy.
Can you point me to the place in the book where it says that? Or did we not read the same book?
I rather think that this is an apocryphal addition Heinlein made later, in discussions about the book.
I haven’t read the book in 20 years, and don’t have a copy. IIRC he refers to “federal service” and does makes some limited reference to non-military jobs, the narrative is almost entirely focused then on the military, so it’s not surprising there’s not much mention of the other stuff. He then wrote in more detail about the other aspects in another work (not sure if it was a short story or essay), Expanded Universe I think was the name of the collection (I’ve not read it myself, just read about it - apparently it was something like 90% of citizens had served in a non-military capacity). I see no reason to not take him at his word, it’s certainly compatible with what he originally wrote, even if a simple reading of the original hints mostly towards simple military service.
If the “federal service” (which is referred to as military service here)…
You’re making an assumption there, “federal service” is referred to elsewhere in the book, this sentence refers to “military service”, which presumably is a subset of “federal service”.
Well, earlier, @smulder posted a link to an essay about this: http://nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pdf
This contains yet more excerpts from the book than I posted earlier.
The evidence from the book is quite overwhelming, independently of what ideas Heinlein had later.
Anyway, at worst, we’ve got two different versions of Heinlein’s idea:
Only people who go through military service get to vote. This military service might include military support jobs (i.e. being a cook on a warship) as well as pointless make-work with military discipline.
Only people who go through civilan or military service get to vote. The civilian service is truly civilian - you have to serve the state in some civilian job, without being subjected to military discipline, bootcamp, or extra war propaganda.
Now, ignoring all the other, minor elements of the book that I consider “disgustingly militaristic and proto-fascist”, let’s consider the difference between #1 and #2.
I am aware of two fundamentally different arguments against restricting the franchise.
I couldn’t put the first argument better than this:
They will be at a disadvantage. As far as this argument is concerned, #1 and #2 are equivalent at first glance.
In Heinlein’s world, they are free to join up and serve. So the theory is that once the disadvantage exceeds the advantage of not having to go and die on a strange planet, people will simply join up, and things should level out, shouldn’t they?
Inequality does arise when service is not equally harsh for everyone. As a well-educated person, I’d get a cushy office job, while the plebs get sent to die. Or they exercise their freedom and not join up, and live with whatever laws we educated people deem right for them. In this way, alternative #2 might actually by worse than #1.
The second argument is that veterans will vote in a certain way. First, they are likely to vote in a way that preserves their position of power. Second, the prospect of military service selects a certain kind of people (whether this is good or bad depends on what you think of that kind of people). Third, war does strange things to the human psyche.
And fourth, the military and veterans are in charge of indoctrinating (or “educating”, if you prefer) recruits.
For this second argument, #1 and #2 are vastly different, because with #2 the selection of people who get to vote is not skewed as far away from the general population.
Personal note: We have mandatory conscription in Austria, but we get to choose the civilian alternative. About a third pick the civilian alternative. The largest group among those get to work as paramedics; I did a year helping out at a home for refugees run by a nonprofit. Whether people choose to go military or civilian correlates strongly with political opinions.
But even with #2, you’ve got an arbitrary elite who gets to decide on the education and selection of the next generation of the elite - something that inevitably leads to inequality.
Only people who have invested a significant part of their life in supporting & upholding the status quo get a say. Assume the state is doing something that is wrong - you’ll have to spend a few years actively supporting these wrong actions before you get a vote. Imagine - you only get to vote Trump out of office if you spend two years serving in his new Muslim-hunting brigades. Will you join and Do Your Part?
So what arguments would one need to make for restricting the franchise?
Modern democracies restrict the franchise for children (under 18 in most places, under 16 in Austria). To justify that, a two-step argument is made:
Therefore, the argument goes, you can deprive 10-year-olds of their right to vote without endangering the well-being of 10-year-olds in general.
Heinlein tries to make the argument that service veterans would make better decisions because they are in some way better human beings by having taken “responsibility”, having shown a readiness to contribute to society.
He fails to even attempt to make an argument why we can trust those people to care for the non-voters interests, especially given that in the book, they seem to look down on the civilians - after all, they fail to take responsibility.
Isn’t it also a thing that people don’t all make it through basic training? It isn’t just a question of making a choice between having the right to vote and taking on risk/burden vs. not having that right and having an easier go of things. You could prefer to have the right to vote but find yourself unable to make the cut. One has to imagine that certain people with disabilities are disenfranchised in that society because of their disabilities, and it is extremely hard to imagine a society that would deny people with a certain kind of disability to right to vote and yet would provide accommodations to allow people with that kind of disability to participate fully in society.
And I think that point about people who do serve not looking out for people who don’t because they look down on them is Heinlein seeing the real result of his own thought experiment but not carrying it through. Another example where the franchise is restricted is that voting rights are taken away from those who have committed serious crimes in some places, and from those currently incarcerated in others. I don’t have data to back this claim, but I’d be willing put to a substantial wager on it: People from societies that don’t allow criminals to vote view criminals more negatively than people from societies that do. It would be almost hard to imagine how it could be otherwise.
This is more akin to what Heinlein is suggesting. There’s not reason to think that a person who hasn’t signed up for service has worse judgment than a person who has. Instead, they are excluded from voting because they are seen as freeloaders who haven’t done their part (i.e., more akin to thieves than children).
We’re busy demonstrating our intellectual superiority and can’t be bothered with understanding the book and the entire genre it created, El Mariachi.
I see your concern, but I think Heinlein actually covered/tried to cover that one.
Everyone has the constitutional right to serve, and thus the right to refuse a medical discharge. They have to find something the recruit can do. Heinlein mentions one soldier who fails to make it through basic training and ends up serving as a cook on a warship. Heinlein also thought of disabled people joining up: he even stoops to mentioning testing of experimental drug as a suitably dangerous service that a severely disabled recruit might perform to earn their franchise.
Of course, the only thing that could keep those jobs from being systematically harder/more dangerous than those given to able-bodied recruits are - theoretically - the votes of citizens who got their franchise the same way.
The data should be trivial to find, but it’s probably quite hard to prove which way the causality goes. I mean, does Europe (the region where the ECHR is actually applied, which seems to exclude Britain these days) allow criminals to vote because we respect them more, or do we respect them more because they get to vote? We’ve got way less severe punishments over here, but then Austria first abolished peacetime capital punishment in 1787 (It lasted until 1803), so that might have nothing at all to do with voting and democracy.
You still haven’t even tried to enlighten me about where I supposedly misunderstood the book.
But for those who want an introduction to that genre, try here:
http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/series/military-speculative-fiction-that-doesnt-suck
No Heinlein on that list, strangely. But plenty of Heinlein here:
http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/series/the-great-heinlein-juveniles-plus-the-other-two-reread
Thanks for that, I had not known of the existence of Time for the Stars, or I’ve completely forgotten it!
I read Have Spacesuit, will Travel to my kids. Pro tip: not really a good read-aloud story, worse even than The Hobbit in that regard, much on-the-fly editing by the reader required.
But I don’t think Heinlein invented the genre of military SF that doesn’t suck… he did create the power armor genre, though, which is very large now.
Ahh, no; that goes back at least as far as Doc Smith’s Lensman series; 1937 (first appearance of powered armour is in Galactic Patrol, IIRC).
Yikes! I suggested he should of thought of people with disabilities. Be careful what you wish for?
I think direction of causality is the wrong way to look at it. Disenfranchising the population has to either be done either through democracy or through a non-democratic approach. But even a non-democratic approach, sustained over a long time, is basically a democratic approach because the people haven’t rejected it or voted in leaders that reject it (unless the government has sufficient control that the people can’t do this, in which case the society is simply not a democratic society). If disenfranchisement and devaluation go hand in hand because disenfranchisement causes devaluation, then the case is made. If they go hand in hand because devaluation causes disenfranchisement, then the posited society simply wouldn’t exist if the culture didn’t devalue those people - the people in the society wouldn’t allow it. Culture works more on self-reinforcing spirals than it does on imposing A to cause B.
If you look at a case of outright disenfranchisement, like apartheid, disenfranchisement didn’t cause the devaluation of the black population by the white population, it happened because that devaluation already existed.
I think it’s very hard to get away from the basic idea that democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people. If it is of people of group A, by people of group A, then it is going to end up being for people of group A. The whole reason we rely on democracy instead of other forms of government is because people in power just can’t be trusted to look out for people without power. If you reject that basic idea, then just pick a nice enough king and let him make all the decisions.
Well, you don’t hear what I’m saying. What’s the point?
The book is not about the society Johnny Rico left behind on Earth or about politics or militarism. It’s about Starship Troopers, literally. The armor itself (all three versions) is a character, like the Serenity is a character in Firefly. Verhoeven kept none of the characters, only applied their names to completely different people. But you didn’t see any depth to the characters, so how could you know they’d been bowlderized? Us discussing it has surpassed pointlessness.
I didn’t remember that either! And I read all the Lensman stuff I could find in my youth. Were there really any Lensman stories where the armor was the a major subject, rather than just a plot assisting device? Like in Steakley’s Armor, or Leiber’s Spectre? (Hmmm, I better re-read that, I might be misremembering it).
My favorite is still the Burton Damnthing, from Larry Todd’s The Warbots in Haldeman’s collection Body Armor 2000. I love the name.
It was a focus for a major part of one book, where the protagonist (Kimball? One of the Kinnisons, anyway) has a special suit of armour made so he can single-handedly destroy a Boskone base. There’s a memorable scene where he has them test it by firing an autocannon at him.
Later on in the series, it becomes standard for them to explore new planets by flying around in their armour.
You’re accusing me of misunderstanding the novel because I saw a layer of politics and society that you choose to ignore?
Granted, I’m choosing to ignore the layer that you seem to care about more, because I consider the layer of society and politics to be far more unique, and therefore more interesting. But I wouldn’t deny that either layer exists.
Nope, didn’t ignore it. Nor did I elevate it above the story.
Can we be done, now? No amount of you telling me how dense I am seems to be magically making me like the movie.
Nice link. If you read his review of Starship Troopers, you’ll see why there’s no Heinlein on Juames Nicoll’s MilSF list:
I generally mark the beginning of military science fiction as a coherent sub-genre as somewhere in the 1980s or even the late 1990s. I would classify works like Drake’s Hammers Slammers stories and Haldeman’s The Forever War as “pre-MilSF”, the way 19th century scientific romances foreshadowed science fiction. Pretty much nobody agrees with me on that.
Starship Troopers is an interesting case because it contains pretty much every significant characteristic of modern MilSF, from a deep-seated hostility towards unrestricted democracy to an enthusiasm for atrocities.
Nicoll’s review of Starship Troopers also contains this gem, which is a great summary of the book:
The novel then steps back in time to explain how Rico went from being just another one of Heinlein’s incurious teenaged dullards to an enthusiastic war criminal. In the process, it paints an interesting picture of the world Rico lives in, as well as of the contents of Heinlein’s id.
The review also reminded me of several details of the book that I had apparently repressed, such as how Heinlein espouses a classic Lebensraum theory of why wars are inevitable, and how he advocated brutality against children (“Why didn’t they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it—the sort of lesson they wouldn’t forget!”).
A few people have brought up The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as one of Heinlein’s “libertarian” novels. I’ve always found this characterization bewildering, because while the lunar society is repeatedly represented as libertarian (or at least Heinlein’s idea of libertarian), and the main characters perpetually lecture one another about libertarian ideas, the political revolt that actually takes place is entirely due to Mike-the-computer’s total control of the colony’s infrastructure and information systems.
Very soon after the book begins, any drama the story might have is over, because by that point Mike has decided (autocratically) that it would be fun to have a revolt, and with Mike in charge of everything, victory is essentially a foregone conclusion. And Mike’s human collaborators, stalwart libertarians though they claim to be, go right along with it.
(Heinlein even arranges it so that the Earth forces that come to stop the revolt “just happen” to be less efficient than the lunar forces. Well, even if they remained less efficient, what if they’d been just plain stronger than the lunar forces? Heinlein waves his magic author-wand so that that challenge just never happens. He does similar things throughout the book to render the revolt “frictionless.”)
When I finished the book, I felt that the only way it could be read coherently was as an epic trolling of the libertarian audience, since nearly every significant action that’s taken is anti-libertarian in its essence. If the book was intended to be un-ironically libertarian, it’s just daft.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
