This is not a review, and I don't hand out stars either. It is part of my annotated reading list. Whatever first comes to mind when I pick up the book. More about it in this blog post.
written on November 1, 2026, read 1998
This book is a bit problematic. It’s one I only read after I had seen the film adaptation: Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”.
The book is often counted among the important novels of science fiction, and you can see its significance for military science fiction. Even so, I find it decidedly questionable and difficult.
Today it’s hard to read the book without the film running in your head. Back then, Paul Verhoeven received a lot of criticism for having created, with his adaptation, a work with a great many fascist, or at the very least militaristic, overtones. In my view, that was exactly the point: the film drips with satire. Take a cast you could just as well have put into “Melrose Place” or “Beverly Hills, 90210”, and drop them into a splatter action flick. Add Egon Hoegen – in the German dub, the voice of “Der 7. Sinn”, a long-running German road-safety TV programme – for the army’s propaganda films. Oh, come on! If that wasn’t supposed to be satire, then what on earth is? After “RoboCop”, one could certainly have expected satire pushed to such absurd lengths – and read it correctly. In fact, the film is a reckoning with the book – it doesn’t celebrate it.
And the book thoroughly deserved that reckoning: it takes itself seriously and, in my view, lacks any irony or satire whatsoever. It plays the idea of a society that ties civil rights to service through to the very end, without ever really distancing itself from it.
That said, you also have to see the book as a product of its time. It was published in 1959. Both the Second World War and the Korean War were not long past, and the Vietnam War was still some way off. I can well imagine that some veterans of those two wars struggled with social developments in the USA and harboured the idea that only those who had “been there” should steer the country’s fate. I think you have to read the book in the context of a generation that still knew conscription and had fought two wars in a short space of time. I can’t really imagine a book with a similar message coming out of the post-Vietnam era. Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”, however, has the reputation of having emerged in exactly that period as a counter-design.
The book differs greatly from the film, and not only because the satire is missing. Heinlein uses, for example, his protagonist’s course at officer school to explain the theory behind the society described in the book – just as he had previously used the character of the teacher for that purpose. The film boils this down to the beginning and the high-school teacher. It does the film good not to give the social theories too much room.
While I’ve watched the film several times precisely because of its absurdity and would also recommend it, that applies to the book only to a very limited extent – more because of its significance for the development of the genre than for its own entertainment value.
By the way, I’ve read that a more faithful adaptation of the book is planned. I’m firmly in the “Um, please don’t …” camp. I wouldn’t know how anyone would want to film a book like “Starship Troopers” with the necessary distance in the era of the “forever wars” in the Middle East without turning it into a mindless action film. Then you might as well commission a “Helldivers” movie.