Starship Troopers

The movie gets it completely wrong. But seriously, read the book. Then see the movie.

"Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves ‘Mobile Infantry’ instead of just ‘infantry’. Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence, more fire-power, greater endurance, less vulnerability.
A suit isn’t a space suit – although it can serve as one. It's not primarily armor – although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn’t a tank – but a single M.I private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against M.I.
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 (like burning down a house to get one flea)..."

– Jonny Rico

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 recommended reading lists for recruits to 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 cutting-edge power armor. Life for the average human is not bad, but the only way to attain citizenship and the perks that go with it, such as suffrage, is to do a term of public service. Military service is only one of the possible avenues to citizenship mentioned in the book, a point often overlooked due to the heavy emphasis placed on the armed forces by the viewpoint character and his comrades.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Would you like to know more?

Starship Troopers is credited with the codification and popularizing of modern science fiction tropes such as powered armor, drop pods, hive-minded insect aliens, and various other Space Marine tropes. The space marine and power armor were concepts invented "proper" in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman books (with the former term first showing up in a 1932 short story by Bob Olsen), though Heinlein would actually use the phrase "Space Marine" before Smith did; he also openly cited Doc Smith as the main influence on his own writings. Regarding power armor, Heinlein had the advantage of writing in the era of computers, and so was able to give a reasonable high level description of how the technology would (and increasingly, does) work.

Such tropes would go on to feature prominently in many other sci-fi franchises and works - including the Alien films, Starcraft, and of course Warhammer 40,000.

The Book

Now if you're here, you might be aware Starship Troopers has become a 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 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 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 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 podding 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 “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.

The Movie

Eventually, it came time for Hollywood to do its inevitable movie-of-the-popular-book, and shooting began for a Starship Troopers movie. The movie actually follows the book fairly closely, even repeating some scenes from the book verbatim. There were some changes however. A few of the characters were race swapped or gender swapped, and the power armor was completely erased. In particular, the intelligent planning, objectives, and tactics used during battles were deleted to make the mobile infantry look stupid. The bugs also had all of their technology removed and, most egregiously, their way of destroying Buenos Aires was with an asteroid they supposedly threw. From all the way across the galaxy. There were also a few dialogue additions that were inserted with the clear intention of making the Federation government look more malevolent (along with the subtle implication that the bugs weren't actually responsible for the asteroid and the Federation just blamed them as an excuse to go to war). Why were these changes made? the answer lies in the previous 60 years of rage surrounding the book, and the director Paul Verhoeven.

Paul Verhoeven had been a child in the Netherlands during WWII and the Nazi occupation who almost died via collateral damage when a bomb from an Allied airstrike landed in his backyard while he was playing there. Such an experience could only color his perceptions of war for the worse: Verhoeven only read the first few chapters of Heinlein's book, and he saw the Terrans as a bunch of Space Nazis (ironically so, since Heinlein served the US Navy in the 20s and 30s), between their near-conscription level of military signups and the incredibly heavy use of propaganda enforcing "the individual's obligation to society". As such, he decided to crank the patriotic jingoism up to eleven and make the Terrans a bunch of hot-blooded dumbasses who, aside from a couple of sergeants, had no idea how to do anything more advanced than run at the enemy shooting their guns while looking pretty. The Terran political officers were even dressed up in black Nazi trenchcoats, to really drive the point home how much Verhoeven hated Heinlein's book. The movie is a giant 2-hour "fuck you" disguised as a parody disguised as a sci-fi action movie.

...OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration: Verhoeven was already working on a movie at that time before he had even read Heinlein's book, a dark satire sci-fi film similar to Robocop, except instead of being about capitalism in Detroit, it was about fascism in space. One of the marketers at the production company noticed some similarities to the novel and decided that the movie would sell better as an adaptation of an influential novel than as a new property. So everything was renamed and several aspects rewritten to make the movie into a loose adaptation with as few budget increases as possible. The biggest "fuck you" was mostly Verhoeven agreeing to name his movie Starship Troopers; a lot of what was considered more direct "suck it Heinlein" moments were accidental.

Ironically, for all the Heinlein fans out there bitching about hippie pinko liberal arts majors, Verhoeven was also a physics and math major, STEM nerd, and naval engineer. He would also go on to be responsible for the ever-beloved Robocop, which gleefully drove a pike up the ass of Reagan-era policing and government-corporate encroachment in a way that would make Judge Dredd proud.

RAGE II: Electric Boogaloo

It's a whole spectrum of skub.

The controversy of course continues on 4chan, and comes primarily from three factions who argue with each other every single day on /tv/'s Starship Troopers troll threads:

• Lefties and ostensibly left-adjacent people who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is bad).
• Neo-Nazis who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is good).
• Heinlein fans who think the Federation is not fascist (and that anyone who disagrees is a retard).

Leftists

The book's got some evidence to support the first viewpoint - the simple fact that the founding of the Federation reads like a classic fascist's wet dream of manly, hard-headed soldiers standing up to reassert social order when a decadent, failing democratic government is in a state of collapse (see the rise of Fascism in Italy and the Freikorps after WW1). However, the people arguing this - including many leftists and those playing at leftism - are also, as a rule, heavily influenced by Verhoeven's movie. Said movie not only threw in a bunch of direct parallels to historical fascist movements (an asteroid attack being a false-flag operation, for instance, as with all those false-flag attacks made by fascist powers during the lead-up to WW II to manufacture casus belli and justify naked aggression), but played up the Nazi fashion of the cast. Additionally, while denying them franchise without civil service, The Federation has a great deal of legal protection for its non-citizen population. In the end, a lot of them end up arguing against the idealized view of stratocratic government the book presents; while they aren't wrong historically, well... it's also a book, and Heinlein isn't supporting that form of government, either.

Neo-Nazis

The film also ended up handing ammo to the second group of people, despite wearing its satirical intentions on its sleeve (if not the entire coat - this is Verhoeven we're talking about); it also manages to make the Federation look like a decent place to live with a functional government, because his satire usually consists of letting the people we're supposed to disagree with present their points into the camera without argument. The result is that real-life fascists like to use it as a bad-faith example of how fascism isn't that bad, really. Is this Verhoeven's fault?

Fuck no, they're fascists, and as such are categorically weasels that co-opt any angle they can get their hands on.

If anything could be blamed on the film and/or Verhoeven besides being too heavy-handed, it's that the satirical approach of "let the villains state what their motives are outright in a way that makes them sound patently bugfuck insane to any rational person" thus assumes a rational audience. Far from an argument for some baby-brained "satire requires clarity of purpose" bullshit, the conclusion is simply that most neo-Nazis and fascists are not very smart.

Heinlein fans

Heinlein fans tend to be very, very protective of Starship Troopers, and very defensive about the supposed virtues of the Federation, to the point of inventing things that aren't in the text - which doesn't go into much detail on the inner structure of how the Federation government actually works. Granted, this is in service of of one of the most important writers in the history of science fiction's most seminal works, but even so it can be a bit tardy.

There is something to be said for drawing equivalences between the way the vote works in Starship Troopers and the way it worked in the classical democracies and republics of the ancient world - and the Federation is not a place that discriminates on the basis of race, class, or sex, virtually all of which are anathema to modern-day fascist movements even if they aren't necessarily requirements for a belief system to be fascist.

Ultimately, 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. At least the third one (Starship Troopers 3: Marauder) featured real powered armor, for all of like five minutes.

So yeah... Lotta skub there.

The Remake?

Talk circulated in late 2016 of a possible remake of Starship Troopers, supposedly more faithful to the book. Remakes are the vogue in Hollywood in the 2010s, and it would not be difficult to make a more faithful adaptation than Verhoeven's, but "more faithful" doesn't mean "particularly faithful", and it's easy to talk about movies but much harder to make them. In short: we'll believe it when we see it.

Then... the light

In 2012, Director Shinji Aramaki (the genius behind much a mecha anime, the Gen-1 Transformer toys, and the co-owner of a CG-animation studio) gave us the CGI-animation movie Starship Troopers: Invasion. A Direct-to-DVD movie set after the events of "Starship Troopers 3: Marauder". Featuring a new cast, as well as return of Johnny Rico, now a eye-patch wearing Big Boss clone. It also gave us awesome power armour. The movie revolves around an incident aboard the Starship John A. Warden, and follows two squads of MI troopers as they attempt to stop the Bugs and save Earth. The movie is so much closer to what Heinlein wrote about and envisioned that you can practically feel the fanboying of the creators for the book. Other characters include Carman Ibanez and Carl Jenkins, although none of the original three protagonists from the first movie retain their actors as their voice.

That changed in the 2017 movie "Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars". Another CG-movie by Shinji Aramaki, and starring Casper Van Dien as the voice of Colonel Johnny Rico; the movie features Rico as the main character again (finally!). Improving on the depiction of power armour from the last film, it is set during a Bug outbreak on the surface of Mars, where Rico leads a team of barely-trained Martian MI recruits against an army of Bugs. The movie was released for the 20th anniversary of the original movie's release, and features the return of Dina Meyer as Dizzy Flores...I can feel your confusion already. Just watch the film. All will be revealed.

The OVA?????

BELIEVE IN DREAMS AND YOUR DREAMS WILL COME TRUUUUE

Yes, believe it or not, there is an anime of Starship Troopers. Supposedly, it the most "faithful," adaptation so far, although this is mainly due to it being based off of the Japanese edition of the novel, so it's honestly not wrong... While not 100% faithful, it comes pretty close, and has the benefit of coming well before the Vehoeven movie and the associated controversies. The biggest differences are:

• The lack of emphasis on the difference between civilians and citizens.
• The aliens are more blob-like rather than insectoid.
• The story is more linear as it follows Rico from high school until his post-deployment.
• Several characters are dropped or never seen again.

The verdict of whether or not it's any good is up to you. Side note: check out the mobile infantry helmets in OVA and tell me they weren’t nicked to be Master Chief’s helmet in Halo.

Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles

A 1999-2000 CGI cartoon adaptation of the movie. The computer animation looks its age, but the show otherwise combines the better elements from the book (e.g. the aliens and small-squad focus that the movie left out) and the movie (e.g. a slightly cynical take on the Federation, without Heinlein's lectures or Verhoeven's over-the-top satire). It was cool, but it was also plagued by budget and production troubles. The series progressed from Pluto, through the galaxy, to the Bugs' homeworld of Klendathu, and then the Feds got word that the Bug Queen escaped and is invading Earth.

And then production stopped, with the last four episodes not produced.

Commentary from the production staff indicates that the final episodes would have featured the Queen's final attack destroying SICON headquarters and turning it into a volcano, followed by a Federation counter-attack themed after Dante's Inferno, culminating in a final showdown between one of the main-character squad members vs. the Queen herself, but sadly we'll never get to see it. The material leading up to it is still worth watching, though!

Games

There have been a few video games, none outstanding, but Avalon Hill made a two-player board game way back in 1976 -- in fact, a review of it was included in the very first June-July 1977 issue of White Dwarf. One player takes the role of the Arachnids and draws up a hidden map of where the bugs are hiding and where their tunnels run, and then the human player tries to root them out. It was re-released following the movie.

Mongoose Publishing produced a d20 System RPG and a miniatures game from 2005-2008. Both represented a valiant attempt to gather every extant piece of Starship Troopers material to date, contradictions and all, and make them coexist in their own distinct universe. There were plans to port the RPG to the Traveller system and produce a second edition of the miniatures game, but they no longer have the license.

Alternity came out a year after the Verhoeven movie hit screens, and it's flagship Star*Drive setting included a vaguely trooper-esque storyline. At the very edge of explored space the Silver Bell colony is wiped out by a spacefaring insect hive, forcing the Galactic Concord to dispatch a military force to investigate the new threat and drive them from the system.

Movie Props

Whatever its flaws, the Paul Verhoeven movie was still one of the last big-budget science fiction war movies done before the advent of full CGI battle sequences (which it helped pioneer with the bugs). Outfitting a small army of extras for the action scenes required a large quantity of costumes and props, which would continue to be recycled in television and movies for the next decade. The Alliance soldiers in Firefly were using these props, only slightly modified, as were the baddies in the Gundam G-Saviour movie. Hell, they were even used as is for Power Rangers Lost Galaxy!

External Links

• A free audiobook of Starship Troopers on YouTube.
• Klendathu Drop, from the first movie's soundtrack, and one of the only features of the movie that everyone agrees is awesome. Very useful in Deathwatch and Only War games.
• The OVA equivalent. For those fast paced Mecha skirmish games.

Gallery

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  Trators of Mars Feturing Rico as Big Boss