is Star Ship Troopers a "classic book"?

Cafe Society
41

Hee. Guilty as charged, FNRFR :wink:

And I’d agree with your distinction frankly. I don’t think that Starship Troopers is a “classic”, but it is an SF Classic. It’s terribly important to the genre, but I don’t think it would have much appeal elsewhere. I’d be much more comfortable claiming “Classic” status for Citizen of the Galaxy, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, The Moon is a Harsh Misteress or a half-dozen others (the short stories “Requiem”, “The Man who Travelled in Elephants”, “The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathon Hoag” and “The Green Hills of Earth” certainly are “Classics” by any definition!)

Hazel: The line’s something like… (I don’t have the book with me and, contrary to the impression I may give, I don’t have EVERY word Heinlein ever wrote committed to memory! :D) “If a blind parapalegic showed up and wanted to join…well, we’d find something for him to do, maybe counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch. But everyone who applies is allowed to serve.”

Tars: A libertarian dictator? You just made Ayn Rand’s head explode! :slight_smile: Seriously though, I don’t know that “Old guy that lectures”/“father figure” = “Heinlein writes himself into every book”

I’d agree that some of his books feature an older guy that lectures at the audience, but I’d put that number at less than half of his output and again, the characters hold such wildly different philosophies that I don’t see how they can all be Heinlein. My arguement here isn’t that the “lectury old guy” dosn’t show up a lot. I’ll concede the point. My arguement is that “the lectury old guy” doesn’t equal and really can’t be Heinlein, unless Heinlein has multiple personality disorder.

Daniel: IMO, Job holds up very well (it’s one of my favorite later Heinlein books), although I get the feeling that Heinlein wrote it thinking: “This will be my “Mark Twain”-ish book” (not that that’s necessarily bad). BTW: The Word for World is Forest feels to me exactly the same way that Tenhau felt to you, if you substitute “Viet-Nam” for “men”.

Chronos: I always put Heinlein in a sort of “Medium SF” category between “Hard” and “Soft” SF. If I was forced to put him in one or the other, though. I’d put him in Soft SF. To me, Hard SF puts the science ahead of the fiction, Soft emphasizes character over science.

I’d put James Hogan (before his brain melted and he bought into AIDS conspiracy theories and became a Velekofsky-ite) in Hard SF, I’d put Hal Clement, certainly Stephen Baxter, Robert Forward, etc. Larry Niven would be where I drew the line dividing the two, but even Niven’s just barely on the Hard Science side.

To me, Heinlein’s charm was that even in the Golden Age where the emphasis was on whatever gimmick, Heinlein humanized the story. Imagine Clement (who I love) doing “The Roads Must Roll” or “Blowups Happen”: we’d have had pages of explaination regarding the nutz-an-boltz of how the science worked, where Heinlein made them stories about people first and foremost. How would you define the difference between Hard and Soft?

Fenris

42

For those of you on the fence regarding Heinlein, may I suggest the following books:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Double Star
Citizen of the Galaxy
Have Space Suit - Will Travel
Starman Jones
Tunnel in the Sky

And try short stories like, “The Green Hills of Earth”, “The Long Watch”, “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, and others collected in various short story collections.

All of these are on Heinlein’s “A” list, along with a few others. It’s too bad that most people who try Heinlein and abandon him never go near his best works.

43

For those of you on the fence regarding Heinlein, may I suggest the following books:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Double Star
Citizen of the Galaxy
Have Space Suit - Will Travel
Starman Jones
Tunnel in the Sky

And try short stories like, “The Green Hills of Earth”, “The Long Watch”, “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, and others collected in various short story collections.

All of these are on Heinlein’s “A” list, along with a few others. It’s too bad that most people who try Heinlein and abandon him never go near his best works.

44

Well, the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers might’ve been less-than-stellar, but ya gotta admit, the Starship Troopers pinball game was pretty fun.

45

I’d quibble just a tiny bit with Sam’s excellent “Heinlein for Newbies” list.

Starman Jones tends to make newbie’s heads explode 'cause of the bizarre tech contradictions (that the plot often hinges upon):

Lessee…they have bullet-trains…but no safety precautions.

They have sort-of-hover-cars…and dirt roads?

They have FTL and Hyperspace. But no computers, no data storage…no tech beyond slide rules* and paper books???

And the society’s just wack. Evil guilds control the Earth? They have secret, sacred texts…like logrithmic tables…that one can be fined or jailed for reading without permission…but still have hyper-tech? Without shared math and science knowledge???

I’m charmed by the book, but I don’t think it’s a good starting point. I’d recommend swapping it for the short story collection The Fantasy Stories of Robert A. Heinlein, or if you insist on a novel, the uncut version of The Puppet Masters or, if you have your heart set on another Juvie, the uncut Red Planet (although it has a bit of the lecture-y old man character) or The Star Beast (in large part for Betty and Mr. Kiku. John Thomas was boring by comparison.)

Fenris

46

Also, in the future world of Starman Jones, random coding was considered an artform, rather than a mistake. It wasn’t discussed anywhere in the text of course, but I think it can be inferred from context.

Fenris

47

Fenris,
I think John Thomas was supposed to be boring. He was needed to be the contrast to the wisdom of Mr. Kiku and the flair of Betty. That did not leave much for him to do.

Is the uncut version of The Puppet Masters very different from the standard version? I have never bothered picking it up.

The problem with threads like these is I want to pick up the various books and re-read them again.

Lok

48

Oh, and I forgot one that definitely belongs in the ‘A’ list: The Door Into Summer.

The big problem with that book now is that with our heightened sensitivity about adults with children, the scenes with Rickki are a little uncomfortable. But I remember first reading the book about 25 years ago, and had absolutely no sense of that whatsoever. Our perspectives change.

I also have a soft spot for Time for the Stars, because the concept of twins literally talking to each other as they age differently was fascinating.

Then there’s Methuselah’s Children, or The Rolling Stones that were also fun reads. Same for Podkayne of Mars.

49

Lok: The difference between the cut and uncut Puppet Masters is that the uncut version is scary. There’s only like three scenes that were taken out but…:: shuddder ::. We get to see what happens when the Slugs learn about human vices and addicitions…and remember, they consider our bodies disposable…
Sam: What I like about Time is how unhappy our hero is throughout most of the book. It was a shock for me, the first time I read it, when he went to the psychiatrist: first time I’d ever read of a character in a “kid’s book” doing that. He may be one of Heinlein’s most detailed and well-fleshed-out characters.

Fenris

50

Actually, this makes sense.

If most (but not all) people drive hovering cars, there will be little need to pave the roads, or to maintain existing paved roads. If cars don’t touch the ground, why bother putting in all the effort to make the ground flat and hard? However, roads of some kind will still be needed, either to guide the hovercars or to provide roadways for the old wheeled cars that a few people still might need to use for whatever reason from time-to-time.

51

Even the great Arthur C. Clarke made this same mistake.

In Clarke’s short story “Superiority,” he has a vast galaxy-spanning empire with armadas of starships, and about half way through the story, they finally get around to inventing the “battle analyzer” – an automatic device that could instantly compute things like the trajectory needed for a space torpedo to hit a moving target. The battle analyzer contained neary a million vacuum tubes. :wink:

52

But the tech (IIRC)…specifically the vacuum tubes as such…aren’t the thing that the whole story hinges upon in Clarke’s story. In Starman Jones, hangs the entire story on the fact that there’s no computers, no data storage beyond books, etc.

With Clarke, you can simply replace the word “Vacuum tube” in your mind with “micro-minaturized transistor” and the story would work just as well. With Starman J., you can’t or the entire plot vanishes.

Fenris

53

Time For The Stars is definitely under-rated. His depiction of the various twins and how they related to each other was very well done. The character development was extremely well done. And it was a fascinating story.

I don’t understand the charge that Starman Jones was that strange. There weren’t just dirt roads, there were also superhighways with high-speed levitating trucks on them, and spaceports. I actually think Heinlein was more correct than other science fiction authors who have depicted futures as some kind of glass-and-steel metropolis. After all, there are still dirt roads around much of North America today, fifty years after the Interstate Highway project. There are still ‘hollers’ with shacks where people live, 90 years after the Rural Electrification Administration. 100 years from now, there will still be cars driving around on dirt roads.

The ‘Guilds’ I had no problem with - this was at a time when ‘closed shop’ laws were springing up all over the place, and union power was really taking off. Heinlein was just extrapolating the trend, while at the same time showing the similarities between modern unions and the old trade guilds. I thought that part of the book was very interesting.

Heinlein had a strange relationship with computers. A standard criticism is that he didn’t ‘get’ the computer revolution. I think he did - after all, ten years before “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” he wrote about ‘Thorson memory tubes’ which could store large amounts of information and could ‘learn’ through example.

I think he ignored computers largely because they didn’t suit his world view of competent people who could do their own calculations, and and who could use a slide rule. That was his bias coming out as a practicing engineer in the 30’s and 40’s.

54

The three Heinlein stories that most resonated with me were Starship Troopers, The Door Into Summer, and Orphans of the Sky, all of which I first read about 20 years ago.

As it turns out, I just re-read The Door Into Summer over the last two hours, due to this thread. :slight_smile: (It was innocent enough–I was simply googling to find the narrator’s name, and came across the whole story online. It must be a copyright violation–I won’t post a link.)

To a certain extent, I agree with Sam, though the camp director never let the narrator (Daniel Boone Davis) speak to Ricky out of her sight. Nonetheless, I also do not recall any discomfort on reading the story the first time around. This time–it’s more than a little odd.

What struck me in particular was the technology portrayed in the story. All of Davis’s inventions are so single minded, such as “Drafting Dan.” It had “linkages” and used an electric typewriter for the keyboard input. Compare this to his “Dictation Daisy,” a separate machine that “you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence.” All of these fantastic machines used “memory tubes.”

Of course, all of this is just the same story of how much the PC has changed our world beyond anyone’s imagining.

55

POTENTIAL!?!?!

places thumper in FNRFR’s general vicinity. Nonchalantly walks away.

56

Fenris,
That sounds very nasty. Parts of it were already pretty nasty, if you have any ability to extrapolate from the given information at all.

And you are right about the story point in Starman Jones. But I have never let it ruin the story for me. Probably because I first read it before there were any computers that were less than huge.

[hijack]
I don’t remember for sure if the first Heinlein I read was Between Planets or Time For the Stars, but whichever it was go me hooked. Not just on Heinlein, but on SF in general. It lead me to Starman’s Son by Norton, then Star Surgeon by Nourse, then Star Surgeon by James White. (I got a small paperback used in the late 60s and still own it. I managed to get it signed by White when he was GOH at Worldcon a few years ago. One of the few greats that I managed to meet before we lost him.)
[/hijack]

Lok

57

First off I would like to apologize. I know it is Heinlein not Heinman, and starship is one word. Give me a break, I didn’t have the book with me. Acording to the 8 aesthetic princials for evaluating art, Starship Troopers would be considered a classic. Yes people are correct in saying that the dialog was dry, and the descriptions were lacking. Heilein did this on purpose, the book was describing the motive behind a military mind, not entaining the reader with an elaborate plot. He also describes the flaws in our goverment. With this style of writing he describes a truth in life, and convays the value of the military. Starship Troopers also as said before brought social and political change to our world, by describing how the U.S. military should evolve

58

Knew that was gonna happen…

[sub]I am SOOO going to Sci-Fi hell for that crack[/sub]

Enjoy,
Steven

59

It’s true that you can’t underestimate the impact of Starship Troopers on the modern military. I believe it’s on the required reading list at Annapolis.

Heinlein in general has influenced an entire generation of scientists. If you ask many scientists what their childhood influences were, Heinlein would rank near the top.

60

It’s true that you can’t underestimate the impact of Starship Troopers on the modern military. I believe it’s on the required reading list at Annapolis.

Heinlein in general has influenced an entire generation of scientists. If you ask many scientists what their childhood influences were, Heinlein would rank near the top.