Except for the fact that I, Robot was an entertaining movie, a trait it does not share with Starship Troopers.
This is incorrect. The service does not have to be risky at all, and there are a number of jobs that exist pretty much solely to give someone a chance to earn their franchise even if they’re unsuitable for hazardous duty. IIRC, Heinlein gives, “Counting fuzzy caterpillars by touch,” as an example of this sort of franchise-earning busy work. The hazardous duty is more glamorous, and probably pays better or gives more opportunities for advancement, but the purpose of the service requirement is to demonstrate a willingness to work for the good of society, not a willingness to risk your life.
The McCoy with a failed marriage idea was in at least one of the Trek guides I have somewhere in my closets. (Perhaps by Larry Nemechek?) IIRC, it never made it to the final version of the ep, but one of the female guests of The Way To Eden (whoever it was that Chekov was enamoured of) was going to be Bones’ daughter from his failed marriage. Not canon, obviously, because that bit was never aired (or even filmed, I think.)
And … I may be partly or completely misremembering the whole thing.
The “counting fuzzy caterpillars by touch” (actually, I think it was counting the hairs on a fuzzy caterpillar by touch) was used to illustrate that fact that no one could be refused the opportunity for service. As in, if someone who was blind and in a wheelchair came into the recruitment center the government was required to find some way they could serve. Under this system, when I had tried to enlist back in the early 70s I would not have been rejected for reasons that were never made clear to me, but resulted in my being reclassified as “unfit for military service”.
Right. Point being, your duty didn’t necessarily have to be hazardous.
Spider Robinson wrote a tribute to Heinlein shortly after his death that explored exactly that. For every assumption that Heinlein believed XYZ, Robinson presented where XYZ was the view of one or more characters in one or more books, and then presented different characters who believed the opposite of XYZ (either in different books or the same ones). It was fascinating.
Miller said:
Crap, you’re going to make me go read the book again, aren’t you? Aren’t you?!
I do recall that one of the examples was being a test subject for medications and the like.
Regarding, Starship Troopers ([del]the real one[/del] the book, not the movie); as I recall, the service required to earn the franchise was not required to be hazardous, but one important point was that you’d have no way to tell going in. The government might decide that you could best serve society by socializing newborn kittens, but they might also decide you were best suited for field-testing new life-support equipment on Titan. But you couldn’t just volunteer for “socializing newborn kittens” duty; you could express a preference and tell the recruiting sergeant “Oh, yeah, and I’m really good with newborn kittens”, but in the time-honored traditions of military organizations everywhere, they’d just stick you wherever the bureaucracy needed warm bodies, regardless of what you actually wanted–unless maybe you were a really hot-shot pilot or a math whiz or had some other very strong natural ability. And of course even if you were very gung-ho and volunteered for the infantry from the start, you might wind up serving out your term during one of those periods when there weren’t any major wars going on. The point is, everyone volunteering has at least accepted a theoretical risk to life and limb, even if they wind up coming through entirely unscathed, and even if they just wind up spending a few years as a supply clerk or something. (I don’t recall if there was any discussion at all of the concept of a “conscientious objector”, who might volunteer for hazardous but non-combat duty on the grounds of morally objecting to killing people, or people-like things. It’s possible Heinlein would have considered such people to be custard-heads unworthy of full citizenship.)
Yes, but wasn’t that example given by the guy whose job it was to scare away potential recruits?
I forgot what happened to people who washed out of the military training programs. Did they lose a chance to vote, or were they reassigned to some other duty? If it was the latter, one way to get out of combat duty would be to deliberately suck during training.
'Course, that probably increases your odds of pulling spacesuit testing on Titan.
Rural southerners have been sterotyped as possessing a certain conservatism with regards to social issues. I apologize for buying into that.
Does Starship Troopers mention what the ratio of “citizens” to “civilians” is?
Last few years, I’ve been using my public library rather than buying books, so I won’t be able to find a cite. After reading the posts after mine, has got me wondering if I did read that this was Heinlein’s ideas. Some of Heinlein’s stories have been collected into volumes, along with with commentaries from others. It’s possible I’m confusing a commentary from someone else with Heinlein’s own views.
Damn, I guess I’ll just have to back and read some more Heinlein. Cursed Message Board, forcing me to read Starship Troopers again.
I don’t have the book in front of me, but I recall Juan talking about this one guy who was going through basic training for the Mobile Infantry who washes out, and later Juan runs across the guy and I think he was in the Navy–still thought of himself as being a little bit better than the rest of the Navy guys, on account of he’d been through M.I. training at least partway.
So, if you wash out on medical grounds or are just physically unable to complete basic training for M.I., you can still say “But I wanna be a citizen” and they have to let you try for something else. I think if you deliberately tried to wash yourself out of M.I. basic training–or any other branch of service–and they caught you doing it, they’d bounce you out entirely and you’d never be a citizen, the same as any other morals discharge. That said, I can imagine someone trying that, and maybe even being smart enough to get away with it and manipulate his way into some fairly safe and cushy berth as a supply clerk in some other branch of the service, and still wind up becoming a citizen. I don’t think Heinlein intended the society he portrated in Starship Troopers to be perfect, just (at least arguably, for the purposes of that one novel) to be better than other systems.
The book implies its on the low-end but I don’t remember any exact figures. Also, citizenship granted some franchises, but not all, specifically the “Sky Marshal”, which required you to serve both in the infantry, and in the fleet.
They would know going in, they were given a cooling period of a couple of days after they were told their assignments in which they could abandon their oath and walk-away without fear of punishment.
They left, they couldn’t re-enlist and couldn’t vote (you couldn’t vote until your service was done). In fact for the infantry, the first half of basic was designed to encourage those who couldn’t take it to leave.
We do, but I’m one who doesn’t.
Thanks. 
If they were going to to strip mine it and send everything back home, why would they carry the entire civilization around with them?
I know I’m late to the party, but I must gripe about something in Firefly. In the episode Out Of Gas, a part of the engine breaks, causing a fire, as well as bringing Serenity to a stop. “Dead in the water” per Kaylee. So somehow the engine part magically blew up with the exact same amount of force and the exact opposite direction of the momentum of the entire ship? That is patently ridiculous.
No. You’re reading too much into a simple statement. Quite simply, if you’re drifting without power and you’re not drifting towards an inhabited planet fast enough to get there before you run out of supplies, you’re screwed. Pointing out that they were still going forwards at a snail’s pace or drifting towards nothing in particular would provide no useful information.
Once you’re out in space without any useful reference points “stationary” is a purely arbitrary concept anyway, so your complaint doesn’t even make sense.
My personal fanwank on that (which I think I read on this very board back when that episode first aired) is that Serenity has some sort of “inertialess space drive” (though not an FTL one). That big spinning thing in the engine room that stopped turning clearly wasn’t any kind of rocket (not even a high tech one like an “ion drive” or a “photon drive”). A lot of [del]crackpot schemes[/del] alternative ideas for spacecraft propulsion seem to involve things spinning around and somehow making the ship go forward in some way that violates the laws of physics. With some kind of “space drive”, you might very well just stop moving if the drive shut down. (Serenity also clearly has big rocket and/or jet engines on the sides, but those seem perhaps to be more used for breaking out of atmo and getting to orbit, not for long-range interplanetary travel–there were even shots of the engines shutting down as she headed out to space, although admittedly that’s what would happen in a realistic depiction of a reaction drive as well.)