Notes on Heinlein

When I last wrote, I wrote about Robert A. Heinlein. I'll write some more about him today.

I read Starship Troopers (1959) earlier this year for the first time. I read it in a weird format and kind of cheap edition published by Ace/Berkeley in 2010. For some reason mass market paperbacks are taller than they used to be. Maybe they have hybridized with more upscale and respectable trade paperbacks. The sensationalistic covers are gone, too, replaced by art that seems to have been created by a computer.

I never knew it, but the movie Aliens (1986) is essentially Starship Troopers. There is no getting around that realization as you read the book, likewise if you read the book first and then see the movie. Aliens is Starship Troopers.

Starship Troopers is heavy on hardware. In fact, there are almost pornographic descriptions of weapons, spaceships, and armored suits in the book. In that way, it hearkens back to the hard science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, when Heinlein got his start. You could say that Starship Troopers is written in prose guaranteed to make your science fiction hard.

Starship Troopers hearkens back to an earlier time, too, to the author's own naval/military career of the 1920s and '30s. Last year I read Heinlein's Glory Road (1963). Glory Road is a book of nostalgia, this one for Heinlein's childhood reading and dreaming, especially in regards to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That made me think that we should be on the lookout for a third book in a possible Nostalgia Trilogy written by Robert Heinlein. If there is one, it probably came during the same period of Heinlein's writing career. Remember that he turned fifty in 1957.

I'll record just one quote from Starship Troopers, this one for today--not today as in September 8, 2022, but as in Today:

"That was the sliver of justification underlying the attempted coup d'état just before the Treaty of New Delhi, the so-called 'Revolt of the Scientists': let the intelligent elite run things and you'll have utopia. It fell flat on its foolish face of course. Because the pursuit of science, despite its social benefits, is itself not a social virtue; its practitioners can be men so self-centered as to be lacking in social responsibility." (pp. 230-231)

I might replace can be with are. Witness the trail of death and suffering left by the scientists' recent virus.

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The blurb on the cover of my weird edition uses the word controversial in reference to Starship Troopers. That used to be just a word. Now it's more often a code word meaning something we don't agree with. People call Heinlein or his works fascist, a word that has lost almost all meaning due to overuse and inaccurate use. Not long ago, I saw a snippet of an old interview with George Michael. He said he liked the group Joy Division but called them fascist. I don't know about the politics of Thatcher-era music in the United Kingdom, but that seems a little odd to me.

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Speaking of British music, I was listening to The Who the other day when word came that the United Kingdom has a new prime minister. One of the songs that played closes with the words: "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss." We can hope for better things whenever there's a new boss, but usually it's just more of the same. Or maybe worse. Remember the saying, "Hope is for the hopeless."

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And speaking of leaders, Queen Elizabeth II died today. I feel for her children, her family, and her whole nation. All of the dying and all of the grief have taken their toll on us all. It's the main reason it has been so long since I last wrote.

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Nichelle Nichols died this summer, too, on July 30, 2022. She sang a science-fictional song, "Beyond Antares." Now she has gone there, beyond Antares, and we wish her well in her journey. Robert A. Heinlein alluded to another science-fictional song, written by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, in his title "The Green Hills of Earth" (1947). Heinlein dedicated one of his last works, the novel Friday (1982), to the woman who played Lieutenant Uhura. A circle for today closes.

Starship Troopers, the dust jacket of the original hardbound edition of Heinlein's loved and (I guess) hated novel. The cover artist was the cartoonist, comic book artist, and comics historian Jerry Robinson (1922-2011). We're in the centennial year of the late Mr. Robinson's birth. Let us never forget him.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley