Editing Starship Troopers (section)

== The Book ==
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Now if you're here, you might be aware Starship Troopers has become a [[Skub|controversial work]], in large part because it is often mischaracterized by people who didn't read the book at all and/or experienced the movie first. What many such people might be surprised to learn is that the Starship Troopers book is ''not'' a war story in the traditional sense. In fact, there's only a mere handful of scenes where there's any real fighting at all, and it doesn't dwell that much on the action. The war with the Bugs simply serves as the backdrop to the book's plot, the majority of which deals with the the main character's training, career, and education while in federal service as Mobile Infantry. Large sections of the book are also concerned with history, philosophy, political science, economics and other social issues ranging from spanking to the purpose of war. After all, this wouldn't BE a Heinlein book without him including a somewhat [[TL;DR|thorough and lengthy]] exploration of his ideals.

===The Terran Federation===
The Terran Federation in Starship Troopers is an interstellar constitutional democratic republic. A constitution limits and describes the powers and responsibilities of government, and citizens vote for representatives. The main difference between their society and ours is the distinction between citizens and civilians. Civilians have all the normal rights and protections of a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy liberal democracy], except that they cannot vote. Voting is restricted to citizens, people who complete 2 or more years of federal service. Federal service is generally used for public works projects or military service such as space janitor, terraformer, starship pilot, or Mobile Infantry (or occasionally desk jockey, but they're mostly wounded vets of more dangerous jobs). Everyone in the Federation is guaranteed the right to (try to) become citizens, and the government is compelled to find something useful for them to do in their service without regard to race, religion, sex, class, disability status, or any other identity group.  If you're a blind quadriplegic but insist on taking the oath and sticking out your term, then they'll find something suitably dangerous and useful to humanity for you to do, like being a medical test subject or something; what matters is that it is hard, contributes to the common good, and that you will remember what your vote cost you (assuming you survive to enjoy it).

The Federation's justification for restricting voting to citizens is to ensure only people who have demonstrated that they actually give a fuck about humanity as a whole are allowed, via their vote, to exercise the violence of the state. Federal service is intentionally made difficult, dangerous, uncomfortable, and poorly paid in order to weed out people who are motivated by personal gain and would use their political power for corrupt personal advancement or the advancement of a particular faction. They argue that a person's educational, class, wealth, or hereditary status is irrelevant, and by limiting the franchise to those with proven moral status, the state will act more justly and responsibly. The proportion of the population that are citizens varies widely by province, from 2% to over 80%. The supreme commander of the Federation military is the Sky Marshal, and only those who have [[Autarch|commanded both a Mobile Infantry regiment and a Navy capital ship]] at respective points in their careers are eligible for the position. The Terran Federation has enjoyed peace, prosperity, and good relations with its neighbors for generations, making war between humans a distant memory.

A required, but audited, class in all high schools and officer candidate schools is "History and Moral Philosophy", which teaches the students, (and the reader) how the Terran Federation came to exist; as nobody has to actually pass it in high school, few students take it seriously there. Sometime in the 20th century, most nations were on the brink of anarchy due to rampantly corrupt governments, unaccountable and irresponsible electorates, and widespread criminal gangs. A major and devastating world war breaks out, which collapses the already shaky states into chaos. Returning veterans organized local governments that grew and coalesced into the Terran Federation of today. The Terran Federation would later blame the failures of the 20th century on politicians and voters that were unconcerned with the well-being of society at large, and the inability of society to instill morality into its youth. The resulting Federation institutions are specifically designed to address that failure. Thus, many discussions in the book are concerned with discipline, responsibility, punishment, and morality.

The Mobile Infantry are the mainstays of the Federation military: they are an elite and high-tech infantry corps that uses powered armor equipped with multi-spectrum sensors, lasers, jump jets, flamethrowers, missiles, tactical nuclear weapons, and various other bombs and personal weapons. Each Mobile Infantryman costs $500,000 (if that's 1959 dollars, that would be over $4 million today) to train and equip. Mobile Infantry often employ hit-and-run tactics by [[drop pod]]ding from orbit and then doing as much damage as possible while skimming over buildings and terrain with their jump-packs toward a designated dust off point. Formations of Mobile Infantry typically have several miles between individual soldiers, using missile launchers and grenades to cover a wide swath as they go. Mobile Infantry training is comprehensive and extremely difficult. Recruits train with everything from knives and sticks to rifles, lasers, and tactical nukes, and in all environments, from mountain ranger to spaceborne assault in vacuum. Large-scale training exercises are done Russian-roulette style, with 1 live round for every few hundred blanks, meaning there are real (albeit rare) casualties in training. However medical and cybernetic technology has advanced to the point that any wound that isn't instantly fatal can be rapidly repaired; indeed, the recruiting sergeant who signs Rico up is missing an eye and three limbs, but when he has his prosthetics on you wouldn't know it to look at him. He takes the prosthetics off during the day just to make prospective recruits think ''really'' hard about whether they want to sign up for federal service. 

===The Xenos===
The Arachnids are arthropods with 8 legs and a social structure similar to ants or termites. They have a terrifying appearance. There are 4 castes: workers, warriors, brains, and queens. Workers are defenseless and incapable of fighting, and described more as biological machinery than sapient creatures. Warriors are very tough fighters and are psychologically incapable of surrendering. Brains are the leaders of the species, while queens are apparently just there for reproduction, though nobody knows for sure since nobody has actually seen one. Most of their civilization is in underground tunnels that go deep enough that no one knows how big they are. The bugs of the book are particularly notable for being one of the first hive mind insectoid species in ''all fiction'' that actually uses technology; they are shown to build starships, equip their warriors with advanced beam weapons, and use some kind of weapon that can destroy Earth cities over interstellar distances. The latter is admittedly never given any detail or description, but it's probably fair to assume it's a little more advanced than ''throwing a fucking rock''. They're also one of the only hive minds in fiction that actually has alliances with other species and takes prisoners.

The Bugs are not the only xenos in this setting; there is another species called the Skinnies who are very loosely described as humanoid, presumably generic gray aliens.  They start out allied with the Bugs, and then the Federation drops one platoon of [[SPESS MEHREENS]] armed with nukes on their planet to show them how grimdark things will get if they continue to be allied with the Bugs, and then the Skinnies stop being allied with the Bugs. FYI, this is the book's opener and doesn't stop getting better from there.

===The Bug War===
The Terran Federation goes to war with the Arachnids after the Bugs destroy the city of Buenos Aires. The book leaves doubt about who actually provoked the war, but it seems a straightforward ''Thucydides's Trap'' affair, where one power grows and another decides the galaxy isn't big enough for the both of them. For his part, Rico doesn't seem to have much actual antipathy towards the Bugs, viewing the conflict as an unavoidable fact of life, when he bothers to think much about it (he doesn't even have that big of an initial reaction to hearing about the destruction of Buenos Aires). As he puts it, both species are tough and smart and competing for the same real estate in a finite galaxy; ''of course'' they're going to go to war over it if they can't negotiate. 

The Federation immediately invades the Arachnid home world of Klendathu in retaliation, but is summarily BTFO. For some time afterwards, humans are on the losing side as they attempt to weaken the Bugs with harassment. Over the next few years, several more cities and other installations in the Sol system are destroyed, while the Federation destroys peripheral Bug colonies, pacifies/converts Bug allies, captures Bug leaders, and learns more about Bug tactics, society, and biology. Starting out, the Bugs' biology gives them an inherent advantage, as they are able to rapidly replace losses. If 1000 Bugs die to kill a single trooper, it's a net win for the Bugs, and it takes a while for the Federation to adapt its weapons and tactics. The book ends just as the Federation is massing forces for a second invasion of Klendathu, in which the Federation appears to have a massive advantage, and presumably will win.

===RAGE===
Remember that controversy we mentioned before? Well...

''Starship Troopers'' was specifically written as a riposte against the activists that were agitating against nuclear weapons testing during the late 50s, and was published only a few years before the Vietnam War became a major global crisis; thus, its reception and subsequent movie adaptation should be understood within that context. According to Heinlein, a naval engineer, the book’s publication and awards “[[RAGE|enraged]]” the activists, because it opposed much of what they advocated: the book is pro-military at a time when large parts of the university literati were violently opposed to the armed forces. In the 60s and 70s, the debate between socialism and capitalism was still hotly contested, and several discussions in Starship Troopers place it solidly in the capitalist camp. It is also contemptuous of the social sciences (note that the culture around the "hard" science disciplines is such that they often tend to sneer down their noses at the "soft" sciences and at least at this point in his life Heinlein absolutely lived down to that stereotype of the STEM nerd), meaning that people who had the literary training to take the book apart often felt insulted by it personally. In the case of the modern social sciences this insult is EXPLICITLY in the text, faulting them with the decline of values in the 20th century. And Heinlein's warhawk values and contempt for anyone who disagrees with him leap off the page.

The result was that ''Starship Troopers'' has been accused of advocating fascism for the better part of a century, and though the worst of this reputation would eventually pass, it illustrates well how perceptions of the work shifted with the changing times. Come the 1980s, Heinlein's idealization of militaristic values and warfare as key to the creation of moral, socially-responsible citizens were far less compatible with the post-Vietnam counterculture's pacifist sentiments and disillusioned, often maimed and maladjusted veterans who felt abandoned by their country after fighting in a morally-murky conflict. It is perhaps relevant at this juncture to point out that Heinlein was ''not'' a frontline soldier and never experienced modern total war firsthand, as he was invalided out of the Navy seven years before America entered WWII. 

Among the more merited criticisms is the harshness of some Federation laws, under which many misdemeanors warrant corporal punishment, and truly violent criminals are simply executed. The idea that a violent felon could be rehabilitated is dismissed as irrelevant, for if they ever truly repented their only course of action to cope with their failings would be suicide. Meanwhile, it's not fair to the rest of society to give them a second chance that might end in recidivism; better to make stark examples. Such laws are few in number for civilians, and more numerous for active military and citizens, but regardless feel very abrasive to a modern audience, and modern social sciences dismissed this "harsh punishments make for few punishments" attitude even at the time. (Dostoyevsky wrote that it is the certainty, rather than the severity of punishment, that deters crime the better part of a century before ''Starship Troopers'' and modern criminology agrees with that)

Heinlein was said to have based this future society off of Switzerland (which has a longstanding tradition of national service) but made voluntary, as he was not a fan of conscription. However, the glorification of the military's role in strengthening society and aforementioned strict law was often taken at face value, to the point that some people accused Heinlein himself of being fascist. In truth, Heinlein was more sort of a proto-libertarian, to the point where several long stretches of dialogue in ''The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'' outright advocated anarchism, to say nothing of his later works. Of course such a system, in which some could vote and others could not with a high social tolerance for heavy-handed punishment, naturally has plenty of room to be abused and twisted to fascist ends (depending on how the voters are determined eligible and what beliefs prevail among them), or at least more general authoritarianism in a stratocratic junta. And the ''creation'' of the Federation is described in a chapter that dismisses modern liberal democracies as decadent and weak, and envisions a future where hardbitten veterans have to reestablish order through vigilantism and mass violence, all of which is ''pretty'' close to what actual fascists like the Blackshirts believed would happen in the future.