Tastes vary, Sam, but I think that was the scene that didn’t work for me (granted it’s been 16 years since I read it). Did the skinnies use weapons? How did they fight?
John Scalzi is sometimes described as Heinlein’s heir, especially for books like Old Man’s War, and I quite enjoy how he writes action. Heinlein’s action just left me cold.
It’s been a good fifteen to twenty since the last time I read Starship Troopers, too, but I remember the battle scenes pretty vividly. I thought it was an excellent job of showing a “grunt’s eye” view of combat - chaotic and confusing, with no clear idea of how the battle is progressing overall, just how it’s shaking out in your small corner of it.
IIRC, the Skinnies are described as being “basically like us”, so presumably they do use weapons. The specific ones Rico encountered mostly didn’t, but that was because they were mostly civilians, not because of any limitation of their species.
I’d be interested if someone can post an excerpt from the book including a description of the skinnies and their combat methods. Maybe I’m misremembering; maybe I was too harsh on the book.
The skinnies did use weapons. The reason Rico decided to go through the next building instead of jumping over it was because he got grazed by some sort of beam that gave him a numb tingling feeling, and he speculated that if he hadn’t already given his suit the command to jump he would have died right there. He then realized that Skinny gunners had him zeroed and would probably burn him on the next jump. Also, one of the skinnies he burned had some sort of hand weapon. And of course Flores was killed in the attack.
Heinlein also went to pains to show that the whole reason the ‘smash and run’ tactics worked was that the cap troopers went way out of their way to hide their position by expending X amount of their ammo on targets outside their perimeter so their operational area couldn’t be analyzed. They also hit fast and hard and got out of Dodge before the enemy could regroup. It was basically “shock and awe” that got them through. Every minute extra they spent on the planet was an extra minute the enemy had to bring its forces to bear, which is why recall happens fast and on a tight schedule.
The bugs also had sophisticated weaponry. It was Verhoeven’s stupid movie that came up with the idea of bugs attacking with flaming poop, claws and halitosis. In the book they were a space-faring race with lots of powerful weapons - powerful enough to destroy Pluto and smash Buenos Ares. In the movie their flaming poop was apparently capable of faster-than-light speed and remote targeting across light-years of space. Gah.
First encounter with Skinny weaponry was during the drop:
The second is just after an atomic rocket detonated several miles away, as Rico was landing from a jump. He describes the flash and how his gear protected him from it, but any locals caught unawares would be temporarily blinded:
Then he discusses the Skinny defenses starting to come online:
…
The Skinnies were an advanced civilization with star travel and heavy weaponry - after this raid, the Skinnies switched sides from the Bugs to the Federation and helped them fight the war.
The bugs were also technological - on "planet P’, listeners could hear machinery sounds underground, and Rico mentions that the best way to tell a worker from a warrior is that the warrior will be armed with weapons. And the book mentions that the bugs had starships.
Actually, that sort of intellectual exposition is possible on the stage or screen. You just have to work the monologue into dialogue (or, skip dialogue and leave it as monologue and work it into a one-man show) and have characters expound it. See Mindwalk, or Shaw’s Man and Superman, or, for that matter, Plato’s dialogues, any one of which could be staged (and some have been) as a peculiarly highbrow sort of play.
Does anyone remember the Starship Troopers animated series? I never got to see more than a couple of minutes of it at a time. It would be on in the morning while I got ready for work. This was back in the nineties or early oughts.
Roughnecks. Pretty good, for what it was. Borrowed a lot from the Colonial Marines in Aliens, which was to its credit. Netflix was streaming it a while back, but I don’t know if they still have it.
IIRC, they had the raid on the Skinnies in the first season, and in the second season, a Skinny actually joined the squad.
Thanks I see if I can find it. I can’t do Netflix on Linux though.
Just checked, and looks like they’re not carrying it anymore.
Looks like Youtube has it at least the first episode. But first Elementary just finished downloading.
I imagine so - I mean, you could perform the work with a very high level of fidelity by treating some parts as an interview-style monologue, some parts as voiceover monologue over scenes such as slow-motion battle or training ground (or even within the orbital drop capsule), and other parts as straightforward action (action in the broader sense of acting, not just explosions).
But I think anything that would satisfy the purist fanbase of the book would probably not be popular or successful in the mainstream, and vice versa.
But of course he did not include such things as co-ed showers (or female MI troopers) in a book written for children in 1959.
Y’know, the thing that bugged me most of all about the film was what it did to the Bugs. In the book, no one had any doubt that the Bugs were sentient. They flew in spaceships and used nuclear weapons and negotiated with the humans over POWs.
The book’s basic POV is that peaceful coexistence of different sentient species is not an option, that life in the Universe is a never-ending struggle for Lebensraum and genocide is the natural fate of the losers. I think the movie got that part spot on, at least.
Absolutely. The bugs were a very interesting premise - what would an utterly alien spacefaring civilization look like? How would we negotiate with it? How would we understand it?
We know that insects are often social creatures and can create amazing structures and sophisticated behaviors as a group while the individual creatures are dumb as dirt. What would happen if they were just a little smarter and evolved technology? That’s a cool idea, and Heinlein handled it reasonably well. The movie turned them into stupid, large insects that used excretions as weapons that they could somehow shoot through space. Guh.
That’s not the point of the book at all. After all, they did make peace with the Skinnies.
The book was in part a story about what real diplomacy is: The art of saying “Nice Doggy” while you look for a big stick. In other words, diplomacy isn’t about ‘understanding’ each other. It’s not about appealing to your opponent’s good nature or shared humanity. Diplomacy is always about finding what your opponent wants and fears, and then using carrots and sticks to make the other side cooperate with you.
The skinnies could be negotiated with because they shared enough common frames of reference and goals with humans that humans could deal with them on that level. The opening attack in the book is a diplomatic mission of sorts - the troopers were under strict orders to limit the damage, and they were used in the first place (instead of nuking the planet from orbit) as a show of limited force. Bloody the nose of the enemy to show him that you can hurt him, but restrain yourself to show that you can also be merciful and would rather cooperate than fight. There’s a large section in the book that discusses this.
Part of the strategy with the bugs was to find out what made them tick and what they wanted so that diplomacy could be applied to them as well. The problem the Terrans had was that the bugs were simply so alien that they had no common points of reference from which to start diplomatic relations.
This is what the book had to say about the raid on “Planet P”:
There’s nothing at all in the book that says different races or species cannot learn to live peacefully with one another. In fact, the whole point to the existence of the MI in an age where planets can be turned into glass from orbit is to be able to apply limited force so that you retain the ability to make peace with your enemies.
Sgt. Zim says it well in the book, when a recruit asks him why they bother learning to fight hand-to-hand when they can just nuke people from orbit:
This is the kind of nuance that seems to have blown past the people who thought that the book was just a glorification of killing, or a fascist wet dream or something. That’s what Verhoeven thought it was, which is why the movie went so horribly wrong. The very scene I just posted was reduced in the movie to Sgt Zim actually stabbing the recruit in the hand with his knife, for no apparent reason but to be sadistic. It completely flipped the point of that passage upside down.
The society in Starship Troopers was not fascist. The military wasn’t revered by the citizenry - it was looked down upon. It was true that you had to do federal service to get the vote, but the other part people miss is that the government was small. It was more of a libertarian society than anything. There was no conscription, and many people chose to simply ignore the government and their franchise and live with as little contact with the state as possible.
Heinlein didn’t intend to glorify all things military - he had plenty to say about the idiocy of the higher-ups and the stupidity of some generals. He believed strongly in civilian control of the military, as is pointed out in the passage above. What he was doing with this book, aside from exploring real SF themes such as what a first encounter with a truly alien race might look like, was glorifying the “poor bloody infantry” - the people who put their bodies between war’s desolation and their loved ones at home. The people who are forced to pay the ultimate price when diplomacy breaks down.
You have to consider the times the book was written in - WWII was a recent memory, and the cold war was nearing its heights. The military that had sacrificed so much to win WWII had been largely dismantled, and many of the people who fought did not adjust well to civilian life and were ignored or forgotten.
The U.S. had gone from a military large enough to control the world to one so small that was overextending itself just to fight North Korea, in a mere five years. And the Korean war was the first ‘bad’ war in which the actual soldiers were forced to fight with unrealistic rules of engagement, supply lines for the North Koreans were intentionally put off limits for diplomatic reasons, etc. That war had just ended as Heinlein started writing this book, and the treatment of the soldiers both in the war and after was probably on his mind.
Heinlein was fond of Rudyard Kipling, and one of Kipling’s poems that he had quoted several times was “Tommy”. This book is an extended, SF echo of that poem:
Nicely said, Sam.
Excellent post, Sam.
One thing that caught my eye, though:
Aren’t these fundamentally the same military doctrines?
Thanks guys.
That’s a good point. Doctrinally they might be similar but there’s a difference between a smash-and-run raid and a long term battle. All raids of that sort are generally fought under tight rules of engagement. The difference in North Korea and Vietnam was that they were supposedly all-out wars, and yet the soldiers were often left exposed or compromised by rules of engagement set down by their civilian leaders. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing - clearly, bombing China could have been a very bad idea, and even hitting the supply lines risked killing Chinese soldiers which could have broadened the war. But again, it’s the soldier on the ground who pays the price for that nuance.
Actually, there is a better parallel in Starship Troopers - in the raid on Planet P, the MI are put at severe risk by the rules of engagement; their normal tactic would be to drop a bomb down any bug hole and seal it, but their orders were to let the enemy swarm out and attack them, so that specialists could then go down the holes and try to capture ‘brain’ bugs. It was presented in the book as sound strategy and the right thing to do, but again it was the Poor Bloody Infantry that had to bear the pain of that strategy. That’s what Heinlein was writing about.