At some point between 19, Heinlein put aside the novel that would become Stranger in a Strange Land and wrote Starship Troopers. His experience in the military profoundly influenced his fiction. Heinlein served in the US Navy for five years after graduating from the United States Naval Academy in 1929. In contrast to the others, Heinlein firmly endorsed the anti-communist sentiment of the Cold War era in his writing. Clarke they were known as the "big three" that dominated US science fiction. Robert Heinlein was among the best-selling science fiction authors of the 1940s and 1950s, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. The cover of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (November 1959), illustrating Starship Soldier The story has been adapted several times, including in a 1997 film version directed by Paul Verhoeven with screenplay by Edward Neumeier that sought to satirize what the director saw as the fascist aspects of the novel. Later science fiction books, such as Joe Haldeman's 1974 anti-war novel The Forever War, have been described as reactions to Starship Troopers. Heinlein's depiction of a futuristic military was also influential. The novel has been credited with popularizing the idea of powered armor, which has since become a recurring feature in science fiction books and films, as well as an object of scientific research. Science fiction critic Darko Suvin wrote that Starship Troopers is the "ancestral text of US science fiction militarism" and that it shaped the debate about the role of the military in society for many years. Ken MacLeod stated that "the political strand in can be described as a dialogue with Heinlein". ĭespite the controversy, Starship Troopers had wide influence both within and outside science fiction.
Heinlein's depiction of gender has also been questioned, while reviewers have said that the terms used to describe the aliens were akin to racial epithets. Others disagree, arguing that Heinlein was only exploring the idea of limiting the right to vote to a certain group of people. The ideology of militarism and the fact that only military veterans had the right to vote in the novel's fictional society led to it being frequently described as fascist. Reviewers were strongly critical of the book's intentional glorification of the military, an aspect described as propaganda and likened to recruitment. It also became enormously controversial because of the political views it seemed to support. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960, and garnered praise from reviewers for its scenes of training and combat and its visualization of a future military.
It became one of his best-selling books, and is considered his most widely known work.
Starship Troopers brought to an end Heinlein's series of juvenile novels.
A coming-of-age novel, Starship Troopers also critiques US society of the 1950s, arguing that a lack of discipline had led to a moral decline, and advocates corporal and capital punishment. Starship Troopers has been identified with a tradition of militarism in US science fiction, and draws parallels between the conflict between humans and the Bugs, and the Cold War. Interspersed with the primary plot are classroom scenes in which Rico and others discuss philosophical and moral issues, including aspects of suffrage, civic virtue, juvenile delinquency, and war these discussions have been described as expounding Heinlein's own political views. Rico progresses from recruit to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between humans and an alien species known as "Arachnids" or "Bugs". The first-person narrative follows Juan "Johnny" Rico through his military service in the Mobile Infantry. The story is set in a future society ruled by a human interstellar government dominated by a military elite, referred to as the Terran Federation.
Written in a few weeks in reaction to the US suspending nuclear tests, the story was first published as a two-part serial in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as Starship Soldier, and published as a book by G. Starship Troopers is a military science fiction novel by American writer Robert A.