Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

I’m of the position that it’s perfectly fine to like art one finds “problematic,” which is how I’m able to say I like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers while also finding the arguments he makes in that novel deeply flawed and at times repugnant. I’m saying this upfront as I wanna make it clear, before I get into the really dirty stuff, that this is not an essay in which I merely shit on such a famous novel, call Heinlein a fascist, and so on, which seems to have been a favorite pastime for left-leaning science fiction fans for the past sixty-odd years. Starship Troopers is, in a sense, evergreen, because it was controversial at the time of its publication and it continues to draw heated discussion from people who often either have not read it or have read it but misremember it to a tragic degree, even conflating details unique to the novel with the very loose film adaptation. I’ve read this novel twice, once when I was about sixteen and again a couple years ago, finding on that second reading that I had, in fact, forgotten most of it. Starship Troopers is one of the most famous and misremembered “canonical” SF novels; and unfortunately, no matter how you look at it, it also set a horrible precedent from which the genre still has not recovered. It’s totally possible the genre will never recover from such an impact so long as there are creative minds in the field (and by extension likeminded readers) who believe in Heinlein’s argument: that sometimes extermination is the only option.

Let’s wind back the clock a bit, since there’s a buffet of context for how such a unique and thorny novel like Starship Troopers happened. Such a work of art does not simply fall out of the sky, or emerge from the primordial slime that is the Freudian unconscious, but is basically the result and summation of an artist’s political evolution. Heinlein is one of the most complicated writers in all of science fiction and the fact that there are multiple biographies on him has done little to make his complexity more manageable. The reality is that Heinlein contains multitudes, and that when two people discuss Heinlein there’s a good chance each of them is not talking about quite the same person. Some basic facts that we all know: that Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907; that he served in the Navy for five years when the country was in peacetime and was discharged because of severe illness; that illness would plague him pretty much all his adult life, to the point where he was on the brink of death more than once; that he married three times, the second (to Leslyn MacDonald) and third (Virginia Gerstenfeld) playing profound roles in his life; that he seemed interested in “free love” as early as the ’30s; that he started out as a New Deal Democrat and a fellow traveler to democratic socialist causes before drifting rightward; that he didn’t see publication until he was in his thirties, although he had written a whole novel before his first sale. But we’re just getting started.

The conventional narrative is that Heinlein started out as pretty liberal and then, over the course of the ’40s, became a right-winger, albeit one with some very unconventional ideas. He supported Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan, and yet there are scenes in Stranger in a Strange Land and some later novels that would surely make a Reagan Republican break out in hives. In the late ’40s he got into a deal with Scribner’s to write SF aimed at younger readers, which turned out to be a splendid partnership for both parties: Scribner’s got what many now call Heinlein’s overall strongest work, and Heinlein got to feel the legitimacy of a mainstream publisher. The first of such novels, Rocket Ship Galileo, was published in 1947, and indeed 1947 turned out to be a major year for Heinlein on multiple fronts: it was the year he returned to writing fiction (after a five-year hiatus), made his deal with Scribner’s, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for the first time (another big achievement for a genre writer), and divorced Leslyn so he could marry Virginia. (Heinlein and Virginia had met as part of their jobs during World War II, and it’s likely Virginia’s conservatism had influenced Heinlein in his changing politics.) Heinlein’s career is sometimes split into three or four phases, depending, but I go with the latter as I find there to be a break between his run at Scribner’s (1947-1958) and the publication of Starship Troopers. Of course, Starship Troopers began life as another “juvenile” for Scribner’s, but Heinlein had other plans.

Reading the juveniles, you get hints of Heinlein’s eccentric conservatism but there’s nothing in these books that would magically convince some teenager to vote for Trump (or whatever oligarch the Republicans cough up in four years); these are mostly “apolitical” reads. Even something overtly political like Between Planets only gives us a faint glimmer of the madness that is to come later. At first Starship Troopers seems to follow in the footsteps of those juveniles, being about a young man who comes of age and contributes to saving humanity (or perhaps not) in the process. Johnny Rico is like the protagonists of Heinlein’s juveniles, except for a couple things, like the fact that he’s not white but Filipino (you may recall he’s played by the lily-white Casper Van Dien in the movie), and the fact that he ultimately doesn’t do much of anything heroic. Come to think of it, Rico barely does anything in the book, which is one of several things that struck me on that second reading. Still, he’s a good American boy who doesn’t go chasing after girls, and while he starts out as mildly rebellious he comes to learn the “value” of military discipline. The book is essentially split into two sections we jump back and forth across: scenes where stuff happens and scenes where fucking nothing happens. Funnily enough, people tend to forget about the former and focus on the latter when discussing the political implications of this book. In a sense this is fair enough, since the scenes where Jean V. Dubois (the obvious Heinlein stand-in) quite literally lectures at Rico are where the book’s politics become hardest to ignore.

Dubois is not so much a character as he is Heinlein trying to articulate his position on what was, in the late ’50s, a simmering Cold War. He’s a teacher of “history and moral philosophy” who shit-talks Marx and pacifism, being one of many examples that dispels the myth of higher education being filled with leftists. (I remember I took a public speaking course in my last year of college, and our professor was also a local pastor and openly conservative. I wonder how he’s doing now.) See, the conflict at the heart of the novel is that humanity is at war with the “bugs,” a highly intelligent and ferocious alien race that, like this humanity of the future, is set to colonize the stars. There’s no room for diplomacy between the races—no middle ground. Dubois boils the war down to this: only one of these races can survive. The logical conclusion, then, is that the bugs must be exterminated. Genocide. Of course Dubois’s argument (and by extension Heinlein’s) is that since the bugs “clearly” want humanity exterminated as well, this is only fair. If we’re to take this argument and apply it to any real-world situation, the optics are very bad. It is worth mentioning, however, that Heinlein was responding to a nuclear disarmament campaign, and indeed the question of whether the US should continue above-ground hydrogen bomb testing was a tough one in the ’50s. If you know me at all then you can guess which side I fall on, and you can also tell it’s not the same side as Heinlein.

Before World War II had even ended, a race had begun between the US and Soviet Union to build not only the atomic bomb but a nuclear arsenal. Once the Cold War kicked in there was the question of the possibility of nuclear holocaust, but also whether either side of the Iron Curtain would dismantle its nuclear weapons program. A year prior to the publication of Starship Troopers, Heinlein wrote an essay titled “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?,” so named after one of the Founding Fathers, in which Heinlein argues in favor of nuclear testing. His concern with nuclear holocaust at the hands of them no-good Russians seemed to inspire his working on Starship Troopers, but it’s here that we quickly run into a problem. If the bugs are meant to be analogous to the Soviets, then what is Heinlein suggesting? That the Cold War turn hot? That we nuke Moscow? Sounds outlandish, but as of right now we’ve also had at least one major politician suggest that nuking the Gaza strip might be a good idea. Was Heinlein being a genocidal maniac, or was he muddying his own argument? I’m inclined towards the former, but I also think consequences matter about as much as intent, and the harsh reality is that, regardless of whether he meant it, the result is that Starship Troopers unequivocally argues in favor of genocide. It’s a novel that states, pretty explicitly, that brute force is the only way to resolve the conflict, and also that brute force has solved more problems than anything else in human history. Rico, as part of his arc, comes to believe this.

“Genocide” is a word that conservatives and many liberals hate, for reasons that make no sense to those who properly value human life. It’s a word that implies culpability on a mass scale, and as you know, reactionaries try not to believe in systems or the masses—only individual “bad actors.” The 20th century, which Heinlein was constantly in dialogue with, was also the century that codified our understanding of genocide—the systematic murder of an entire people. The Belgian murdering and mutilating of the Congolese, the American slaughtering and assimilating of native tribes, the Ottomans rounding up Armenians like cattle, the Germans exterminating the Herero and Nama peoples in Africa, indeed the Germans exterminating Jews, Romani, and others groups; and of course, the Israelis exterminating and displacing Palestinians since the ’40s. Genocide has also had a fruitful (far too fruitful) history in SF. The space operas of E. E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton often posit that mass murder on a planetary scale might be the only way to resolve the conflict of the week. In Star Wars, entire planets get blown to bits and Our Heroes™ react mildly, if they verbally acknowledge the enormous loss of life at all. Starship Troopers itself was a major forerunner to what we now call military SF, and its influence is such that you can see its DNA in everything from giant robot anime to Warhammer 40K. Even those who take the opposite position of Heinlein and respond to his novel are prone to do so using Heinlein’s tools. Thus the novel’s insane bloodlust is now part of SF’s own DNA, by virtue of being so popular and, ultimately, a compelling (if muddy) argument that makes it sound as if mass murder were perfectly reasonable.

Unfortunately the cat’s been out of the bag since 1959. Starship Troopers was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in abridged form as Starship Soldier, then published in book form a month after the serial’s first installment by G. P. Putman’s Sons (Scribner’s had rejected the book and so Heinlein’s relationship with them ended). The book was immediately controversial but just as immediately amassed a devoted readership, resulting in it winning the Hugo for Best Novel the following year. It has never gone out of print. It remains one of the most famous SF novels of all time. The irony with Starship Troopers is that while it is very much in favor of militarism, to the point of imagining a “utopia” where only people who’ve served the government get the vote, it’s also in other ways a progressive novel for its time. Rico is non-white and isn’t written stereotypically at all. The society of the novel seems pretty egalitarian and even post-racial. Women serve in the military, which wasn’t even a thing in the US at the time. Even so, conservatives love this novel because it is gleefully pro-war and (I suspect) because it argues that even in a post-racial society, humanity has the right to relegate some race of intelligent beings to the status of “other”—or even “subhuman.” No doubt Israel’s defenders think of Palestinians as like Heinlein’s bugs; it’s a line of thought that humanity has been paying for, in blood. I think Starship Troopers is a good novel; I enjoy reading it; I also wish Heinlein, for our sakes, had never written it.