It was Heinlein taking the “only veterans should be able to vote” to a logical end. A society that’s always at war because the ruling class are all military.
The opening pages tell you the reality - land on planets and nuke the bugs, even if there’s intelligent life there. And use all those nukes, we don’t want to bring those back to the ship. It’s heavy and inefficient.
After that, we step into the eyes of a high school student being indoctrinated.
Heinlein wrote the book extremely well, but many fail to see the whole picture. He didn’t approve nor disapprove. He just took a stance his father had always held and crafted a world where that was the reality.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
By that logic, Robert DeNiro is head of the Mafia.
Heinlein also wrote ‘Stranger In a strange Land’ a book that was revered by the hippies, and one of the first stories to feature a transman. He wrote all kinds of stories about all kinds of wild ideas.
Was he perfect about everything? Hell no, but at the time he was writing a lot of African Americans thought that Malcom X was a dangerous radical.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Heinlein’s life story is fascinating and well documented. Stranger in a Strange Land was just one of his many influential works, and the world of literature is fuller because of his creations.
Starship Troopers was published after his marriage to a woman, Virginia, who significantly affected his political and social worldviews. That’s not speculation, that’s from the man himself. By the end of his life, he had reversed almost all of his early progressive opinions in his writings, which often included arguments in favor of xenophobia, eugenics, and fascism. If you read his writings in chronological order, it’s like watching a brain literally rot with time.