The book is 100% serious. It’s fucking ridiculous. But Heinlein is pretty sincere and uses it as his philosophical treatise. There’s more than one section where he sits everyone down in a classroom for a lecture.
The movie is satire. It takes the themes presented and makes sure that everyone who espouses the virtues of the militant fascist state is horribly disfigured.
As I understand he wrote SiaSL to be deliberately provocative. It read to me as if he was just dreaming up the most bizarrely counter culture things he could think of and mushing them together.
Stranger was considerably more thoughtful and deliberate than you’ve described, but even still how is that different than Starship Troopers? Heinlein used his novels to explore worldviews, not really to endorse them. If you start trying to pin down his sincere beliefs with any one book, you’re pretty quickly going to run into inconsistencies with the others.
Just have to ask…you do realize it’s satire, right?
The book? Or the movie?
The book is 100% serious. It’s fucking ridiculous. But Heinlein is pretty sincere and uses it as his philosophical treatise. There’s more than one section where he sits everyone down in a classroom for a lecture.
The movie is satire. It takes the themes presented and makes sure that everyone who espouses the virtues of the militant fascist state is horribly disfigured.
I have a hard time getting a read on Heinlein because he also wrote Stranger in a Strange Land which is as left as Starship Troopers is right.
As I understand he wrote SiaSL to be deliberately provocative. It read to me as if he was just dreaming up the most bizarrely counter culture things he could think of and mushing them together.
Stranger was considerably more thoughtful and deliberate than you’ve described, but even still how is that different than Starship Troopers? Heinlein used his novels to explore worldviews, not really to endorse them. If you start trying to pin down his sincere beliefs with any one book, you’re pretty quickly going to run into inconsistencies with the others.
The film adaptation was satirical, but the novel that it was based on was not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
The exact words of the text