FWIW, Sam, I appreciate your insights into the book. It’s possible that I’m misremembering the scenes, or misremembering what I disliked about them. However, at that time I wasn’t the mild-mannered moderate I am today (checking to make sure my sig is turned on), but rather a firebreathing leftwing anarchist type, and it’s possible, even probable, that my problems with Heinlein’s mouthpiece politics colored my opinion of the rest of the book to an unjustified degree. So thanks again for the quotes; you make me think I might try the book again sometime.
Missed this earlier:
The Colonial Marines in Aliens were clearly inspired by Starship Troopers, and some of the dialog in the movie was lifted almost verbatim from the book. And the final battle between Ripley and the alien was fought in ‘powered armor’ that worked just like Heinlein’s with pressure receptors and feedback.
The ship with the marines is called a ‘Drop ship’. The marines talk about how many ‘drops’ they’ve made. Exactly the language the Mobile Infantry used. One of the marines gets the ‘shakes’ just like Johnny Rico did in Starship Troopers. They refer to their mission as a ‘bug hunt’, just as the MI did when they dropped on Planet P.
I remember seeing other parallels between the book and the Marines in Aliens, but they`re not quite coming to me now.
Attitudes on the left towards the military have changed since 9-11. I can recall in the 1980s and earlier that the left often did not make a distinction between soldiers and the leadership and there was quite a lot of disdain towards the military in general. That was the time during which I heard the loudest complaints about the Fascismin Starship Troopers. Perhaps the passage of time has changed your attitude a bit, and you won`t see the book in same way if you re-read it.
That said, Im sure theres still a lot in there that will annoy you. Just try to read past it for the good stuff.
Oh, yeah, no doubt that Aliens borrowed heavily from the novel of Starship Troopers - but the cartoon completed the circle by heavily borrowing the visuals from Aliens. As I recall, the dropship design in the cartoons heavily resembled the one in Aliens, including the folding wings. There was also an APC that was pretty similar, and the cartoon introduced powered armor that basically looked like weaponized versions of the loader Ripley piloted.
Well, that’s coming full circle then! Good stuff. As Heinlein himself said, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Aliens was a great movie.
It’s always especially refreshing when two continuities steal from each other, freely and without hard feelings. Another example that comes to mind is Warhammer and Blizzard’s games (which both also, of course, steal from Starship Troopers).