Not knowing anything about this anecdote, I nonetheless detect John W. Campbell.
Seconding “The Forever War.” Great book.
TS, you are correct.
Filipino actually. At least he said they speak Tagalog at home.
Don’t stop now! Read the whole Heinlein catalog, which is considerable. And you will see the influence his works have had on many works of modern fiction and movies. Not just Science Fiction either.
And every strong woman in his stories and books, is his wife Virginia. And every hero is his idealized vision of himself.
Starship Troopers won the Hugo Award for best novel, one of the two major awards for science fiction novels (the other, the Nebula, wasn’t around back then). A look through the list of Hugo winners reveals other classic science fiction books (as well as some that have fallen into relative obscurity, perhaps justly).
If you’re looking to get into more SF, you might want to look at this old thread: New to SF literature: where do I start.
Or, you might also be interested in this old thread and the list of “SF Masterworks” it discusses and links to: Is this a decent list of SF reads?
Do not read the whole Heinlein catalog. Best advice is to continue reading his books in chronological order, then stop whenever you hit the one that makes you go :rolleyes: or :smack:. Subsequent ones will not improve matters any.
I was a big Heinlein fan when I was young, but I never thought much of Starship Troopers.
To me, it belongs down there near the bottom with other lesser Heinlein–Beyond this Horizon. Farnham’s Freehold, Rocket Ship Galileo and I Will Fear No Evil.
I think *Time Enough for Love *is his masterpiece.
First, let me add another vote for The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I place it slightly higher than Troopers, but both are truly excellent books.
Second, while The Forever War is a great read, if you want to see Heinlein’s style and content aped and aped well, try David Gerrold’s A Matter For Men. The series grows more didactic (and unfocused) with the third book, but the first book is freaking awesome (and was done with RAH’s full knowledge & blessing).
Third, hi Opal!*
*I can never resist doing that! 
That book would be I Will Fear No Evil. I’d recommend continuing after that, but not until one waits for the greatness to sink in.
Quoth Dallas Jones:
I’ve seen that claim many times, but if it’s true, then Heinlein had a lot of very different visions of himself. Yes, he does have a tendency to re-use the same characters with different names, but even accounting for that, he still has at least a dozen different characters. Nor are they entirely divided along gender lines, either: The character most like Lazarus Long, for instance, is Grandmother Hazel (and vice-versa). If you’re going to try to claim that Hazel was modeled after Virginia, then Lazarus was, too.
Quoth Tom Scud:
Not bad advice in its broad outlines, but needs a bit more refinement. When you get to Stranger in a Strange Land, if you don’t like it, then just skip to the next one after that. Suffice to say that opinion is widely divided on that one: Everyone I’ve met who has read it has either loved it or hated it. And Friday is pretty good (not as good as his earlier work, but still better than most other authors), but I’m pretty sure it comes after one or two of the senile books. Also, I don’t know much about For us, the Living, his first novel but heavily edited and published after his death, but it’s probably best to save that one for after you have a few of his classics already under your belt.
My usual advice to a new Heinlein reader is to start with the juveniles (except for Time for the Stars, but you probably won’t hate that one as much as I did anyway) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The juvies (in which category I include Citizen of the Galaxy, Podkayne of Mars, and Orphans of the Sky) are perfectly good books for adults or youth, and are set aside entirely because they have less sex and politics than the “adult” books. But one of the most common ways Heinlein goes bad is by putting in too much sex and politics, so that’s OK.
Also, short stories. The Past Through Tomorrow collects most of them, and IMO it’s a better volume overall than any of his novels with the possible exception of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. There are a few other volumes that collect his non-Future History stories, as well, which are worth seeking out.
Total bullshit. Lazarus isn’t Johnnie, who isn’t Mr. Kiku, who isn’t Cas or Pol, who aren’t Kettlebelly Baldwin, who isn’t Col. DuBois, who isn’t Waldo… the list goes on and on. Wyoh isn’t Hazel, who isn’t Carmen, who isn’t Friday, who isn’t Margrethe, who isn’t Gail, who isn’t…
He also has quite a few protagonists who have serious flaws. Hardly an “idealized vision.”
You can’t go wrong with TMiaHM, the juveniles, Revolt In 2100 and The Past Through Tomorrow.
I am the other way round. I thought the book was absolute tirgid drivel whereas the film was a widely misunderstood masterpiece. Maybe it depends on which you came across first?
I stand corrected, thanks.
Actually, despite being a rather low-budge shitty movie, Starship Troopers 3 (yes, 3) made use of full on powered armor and was true to the style of planetary insertion that was used in the book (individual pods shot down to the surface from an orbiting drop ship). I don’t deny that Aliens is influenced by ST at all, just that ST3 got the armour and the whole drop scene down better than Aliens (even if it the effects were welfare in comparison to Aliens).
Aliens was heavily influential on Starcraft though…right down to lifting sound bits from the movie. Starcraft SCV’s are pretty much exactly what Ripley used to kill the Alien at the end of Aliens
We’re in the pipe, five by five
Why not?
(It’s a credit to the strength of Heinlein’s writing that even knowing she’s a fictional character, and her author is long dead, I’m still a bit nervous about cracking that one.)
Regarding the juveniles - I don’t think it tops anybody’s list, but I’ll always think fondly of “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” . Introduced me to Heinlein and science fiction both.
Well, in my opinion, the best thing you can say about Starship Troopers is that, unlike Heinlein’s later works, the main characters weren’t clearly stand-ins for the author’s self-aggrandizing fantasies. But the characters were all about as three-dimensional as the computer screen I’m using (hint: it’s not a cathode-ray tube). And then again, now that I think about it, the situations were all pretty much self-aggrandizing fantasies (Ooh, I start by rampaging through a city with superhuman powers, nearly bringing it to its knees with just a couple of hand-held weapons. Then I show how tough I am by going through basic training and then officer training. Yes, there’s just enough off-screen tragedy to allow me to show how I can bravely jut out my jaw and keep going, but I’m never really hurt, physically or emotionally, even in a frikken war. And at the end I get to boss my dad around!).
I mean, I have nothing against unrealistic escapist fantasies, but pretending they’re an argument for how to organize society seems like kind of a stretch to me. Of course the politics were maybe even less developed that the characters, but in the end I think they’d work well with the cardboard cut-outs who inhabit the book’s universe, but not so well with real humans. If you could convince me that the sophomoric smug know-it-all-better-than-you tone was an intentional artistic choice by the author, I might give it some credit, but since nobody seems to ever say that the message of the book is “If you let the military run society, of course you’ll end up in wars with the first aliens you meet”, I’ll stick to my estimation.
No, I saw the movie before I read the book and I still think it’s garbage.
It all comes down to this:
In the book, characters act in ways that work, which is how real people generally act in real life.
In the movie, characters act in ways that don’t work, because Verhoeven wants them to look bad. Any point it tries to make is automatically invalid, because it relies on the artificial construct of Verhoeven’s idiot plot.
Any examples? I ask as I really didn’t see any of that. As for the ‘idiot’ plot, at least it has one. I struggle to even remember what happened in the book.
Fantastic book, in every way possible. I don’t read science fiction books for their philosophical insight. So, when Heinlein starts in with all the fascism, I’m able to say, “wow sci-fi fascism, awesome!”