Starship Troopers
"A suit isn't a space suit - although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor - although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are... A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little - on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in."
Starship Troopers is a science fiction book by Robert Heinlein, later adapted into a series of movies, a cartoon, and several board and wargames. It influenced the look and feel of science fiction militaries that came after -- and it influences real-world militaries as well, as it is on the required reading lists of the United States Marine Corps and Navy.
The basic storyline is that humanity is fighting a war against an implacable species of insectoid aliens called "Bugs" or "Arachnids". The actual front-line combatants are the Mobile Infantry, an elite, all-volunteer force equipped with devastating weapons and powered armor. Life for the average human is not bad, but the only way to get ahead (like the right to vote) is to do a term of service in the military.
Does any of this sound familiar? Would you like to know more?
Frankly, the only reason that Starship Troopers avoids falling into a pit of cliches is because it did them all first -- the Alien films, Warhammer 40,000, Starcraft, and basically all military science-fiction since the 1950's owe a lot to Mr. Heinlein.
Worth noting, Heinlein's Bugs (not the movie Arachnids) are like the only hivemind-insectoid race in the fiction capable of using actual tech (like metal-made spaceships, electromagnetic guns and good-old nukes) instead of biotech.
The Movie
So come the 1980s, Heinlein's ultra-hard-right anti-commie borderline-fascist viewpoint seemed kind of laughable after Vietnam happened. As such, the original Starship Troopers movie is a parody of this attitude. The problem is that the parody is a little bit subtle, and quite a lot of people didn't quite get it. So you have people who didn't get the movie, people who thought the movie was great, people who said that the book was better, and people who didn't get the movie, thought it was great and made a 'sequel' with... flashlights, and all of these things are backed up by the intensely political nature of both the books and the parody.
So yeah... Lotta skub there.
External Links
- Klendathu Drop, from the first movie's soundtrack, and one of the features of the movie that everyone agrees is awesome. Very useful in Deathwatch and Only War games.