Book Review - Starship Troopers

Starship TroopersStarship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Read this book on a complete whim. I'd watched the movie as a young teen and hadn't liked it because GIANT BUGS! Yuggghhh. Can't remember much else in the film, barring its often misguided attempt at treating both genders equally in terms of abilities and experiences. That's what I remember anyway.

The book is from the 1950s and it's been controversial. Reading it, I was pleased the lead wasn't just a John Smith - Juan Rico is a person of colour (Filipino according to the author apparently, but all signs point to him being Latino or Hispanic). We don't get to delve too much into his ethnicity however, as the book doesn't get into artificial differences. It's mostly a sci-fi rendition of a training manual - Juan (Jonny) attends the bootcamp from hell, where death and maiming are par for the course. The book details the daily tortures the recruits go through, all in the name of patriotism. Juan's family didn't want him to join the army, but the nationalistic call was too great for him to ignore. Despite the many signs that things would end badly (many of their instructors have been disabled in the wars), Juan steadfastly remains in training.

He goes up the ranks, and witnesses much suffering (a no-nonsense colleague of his is flogged for insubordination) and suffers himself (he gets flogged too, but no one's attitude towards him changes, because this is part of training protocol), his wavering thoughts of leaving last for brief moments only. He sticks around and achieves his successes.

Eventually, he enters battles, and they're hairy, but he comes out of all of them unscathed. Somehow, he makes it without a scratch.

Early on the author specifies that women make for better pilots, and I was excited at the idea that the author was bigging up women's roles in the book (I'd just finished reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and that book is mired in misogyny), but alas, it was not to be. Women are absent from the majority of the rest of the book, and when they do appear, it's as manna for the male gaze. Irrespective of who they are and what they're doing, the overwhelming viewpoint is that Juan and his comrades are starved of the sight of women and bask in the glory of even a peek. This was, for me, the biggest disappointment in the book. I was looking forward to the even balance of the genders that I recalled from the film (my memory could be betraying me, it was a while ago), but I didn't get that. I know this was written long ago, but why is it that, even today, we can envision a future of endless possibilities, but equality between genders, sexualities, races and body types continues to elude the minds of our greatest writers.

This book is unlikely to leave a lasting mark on me - it's too militaristic, glorifying military tactics and behaviours at the expense of all else. Even as someone who once wanted to join the army (but couldn't because there were no opportunities overtly available for women and girls), I found this book to revel in violence a little too much. It was of its time, but not of this time.

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