25 of the greatest science fiction books ever written

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

3. Starship Troopers number 3?

Johnny Rico, the hero -- Heinlein does not have protagonists, he has heroes -- is the sort of cardboard character who gives cardboard characters a bad name. Any novel that has verbatim lectures from courses in "History and Moral Philosophy" makes me think that the author has other motives than just telling a story. He glorifies war, and his philosophical ramblings are libertarian idiocy at its worst.

I first came across Starship Troopers when I took an undergraduate course in SF from the English department. The professor knew I had been in the army in Vietnam, and asked me my opinion of the book on that basis. I said that Heinlein clearly knew the military well, but had no experience of combat, since no one who had been in combat could have written that book. I looked him up, and I was right: Heinlein was a graduate of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in the late 1920s, but had been invalided out of the navy for tuberculosis in the 1930s. He spent WWII in an engineering job at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (where two of his co-workers were Isaac Asimov and A E van Vogt).

George Bernard Shaw said that H G Wells was "a born story-teller who sold his birthright for a pot of message". The same can be said for Heinlein, the difference being that Wells was a Fabian socialist, and Heinlein was a libertarian.