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.
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.