In one of his novels, soldiers are wearing some gear with cooling fins sticking out the back. If the soldier slips on ice and lands on them, he dies. I want this to be in Starship Troopers but it isn’t. What book is it please?
A scene like that happens in The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Have you read that one?
Yeah, definitely in The Forever War. Don’t recall anything similar in Heinlein.
D’oh! I’ve only read that 47 times. No wonder I couldn’t find it in Heinlein. Thanks you two!
Nae problemo. Happy to help, SB#2.
Those aren’t cooling fins. These are cooling fins.
OK, technically part number 15, which looks like a satellite receiver sticking off the back, is a heat dissipator. It was proposed by space pioneer Hermann Oberth for his moon crew in his book Menschen in Weltraum in 1954 (English version: Men in Space 1957). The astronauts would be carried to the moon and driven around in a Moon Car.
Thank Newton for lower lunar gravity.
The funny thing about Starship Troopers is what a very short book it is, and how little of what readers remember as being in it is actually there. It’s the perfect void to be filled with the reader’s own perceptions.
For instance, there are only about 200 words in the whole book about the nature of the government - and I think I’m overstating that number. Once you discount the endless discussion of service-for-franchise, very little is said about government - and if you strike the relatively generic and vague elements, it’s almost nothing at all.
But I’d bet that’s not how you remember it… 
What I don’t understand is why we have to learn how to kill a man with a blow to the kidneys using an entrenching tool. We don’t even know if the Taurans have kidneys!
I have long assumed that I must have missed something in the book, as I’ve never gone back to re-read it after hearing so many others talk about it.
You should check out the satire of the movie! 
As I recall, the soldier that damaged his suit didn’t die either, though it did help prove how clever and resourceful the main protagonist was.
However, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a book more charged with political and social commentary than two Atlas Shrugged volumes glued together, and nobody ever raises an eyebrow… the book getting all the commentary is a simple war memoir about a guy fighting bugs in space.
Well, don’t get me started on Moon; I’m in the minority that just can’t figure out why the Lib crowd finds it so enchanting.
But ST has provided a lot of fun over the years by entering discussions and pointing out simple facts about it that no one believes. It really is a very strange book, written in a white-hot fury to make a point and missing a huge amount of what would otherwise be essential structure. Part of the reason it’s so endlessly attractive, I think, is because everyone reads their own ideas and prejudices into the gaps… and then is ready to fight to the death (or banning) over points that they believe came from the novel but did not.
But then, even old Bob was wrong about what the book said, decades later. When even the author argues about bits he thinks he wrote but did not, it all becomes a very special case in literary history.
Sounds like “Forever War”, but that wasn’t a Heinlein, it was by Joe Haldeman.
As several others have said. 
Too bad R.A.H. didn’t live long enough to take some lessons from George Lucas.
Yes, during basic training on Pluto, IIRC.
If you like Starship Troopers and The Forever War, you gotta read Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. My military sf/powered armor trifecta! All kinda sorta similar, but different in some important ways - and all worth a read. Scalzi, for instance, writes very, very well and brings a healthy dose of dark humor to the party.
Scalzi is my newest SF love. The only problem with him is that I can’t really talk about his books without spoiling them.
And there are at least a couple of scenes in OMW that are almost pure Heinlein.
Is there a particular order in which one should read his stories, other than publishing date? Are they serial, or trilogies, or individuals?
His main series (the one that Lynn Bodoni is talking about) goes in publication order starting with “Old Man’s War” and the books are reasonably independent (no cliffhangers). There’s a new book in the series coming out next year (“The Human Division”)
Cool, I guessed right. Stopped off at Barnes & Noble this morning on the way to work today to pick up the latest Valdemar novel, and then stood there for about ten minutes trying to remember who you guys had been talking about… went to stand in the checkout line and saw a book by somebody named Scacci and thought “Scacci? Scalci? Scalzi!”, then went back and got that (his oldest book).