OptionalBooks

You gotta be a Trooper to finish this piece of reprehensible trash

On a recent re-watch of Starship Troopers (1997), I was disappointed to find the satire not holding up—because there isn't much satire to speak of. The film features no commentary, working only with hyperbole to mark its critique. But reality has since caught up and what once seemed ridiculous, today instead looms as a frightening possibility.

Maybe the book is better, I thought. How wrong I was!

Starship Troopers, the book, is not a satire at all. Written in the first person, it recounts Johnnie's military career. From enlisting against his parents' wishes, to learning of the dangers of communism and the advantages of beating children, to finally genociding a dehumanized enemy.

The writing itself is boring and uninspired. The book features a lot of dialogue and most lines start with “huh?”, which makes all characters and the writer seem like idiots.

The plot isn't any better. Many pages are dedicated to describing military training and a couple of battles. We stay in Johnnie's perspective and never get to understand why anything happens or what the big picture looks like. It's always just about managing a handful of guys and sometimes one of them dies.

Most pages are not the plot though. The plot manages to wind and contort itself in such terrible ways that, more often than not, the author is lecturing the reader through some guy's monologue. Some authority figure will be talking down to a group of people (students or cadets) who are all in awe of how cool and smart he is. He will then explain why their society is much better than earlier ones (i.e. our reality now).

For example, one teacher explains that crime rates are so low because judges hand out harsh corporal punishments and because the death penalty is on the table. Another time he explains that children are so well behaved because parents literally beat them into shape while in the past they were too soft. A girl agrees: “I didn't like being spanked any more than any kid does, but when I needed it my mama delivered.” They further fixed democracy by only letting people vote who've served their term in the military. And they've achieved world peace by... uniting against the bugs. Ugh. Okay, let's talk about the bugs.

In Umberto Eco's essay on Ur-Fascism, the eighth trait describes that the enemy of the fascists must be painted as strong and weak at the same time. Strong, because the image of the enemy needs to stir hatred and fear, to motivate against them. But to the fascist “might makes right”, so the enemy has to be weak as well. The fascist in-group has to be unquestionably above the enemy.

The Nazis called their enemies, especially the Jews, “parasites” or “vermin”. It's very understandable for an author with fascist ideas to make the enemy in their story into bugs.

These alien bugs in Starship Troopers are described as huge creatures with a shape similar to spiders. When the infantry comes into contact with them, the individual bug remains anonymous and impersonal, a bullet sponge first and foremost. On a larger scale however, the bugs are able to attack other planets, most notably destroying Buenos Aires... somehow. Thus, these bugs manage to be dangerous enough to be a credible threat to innocent life, weak enough to mow down on the battle field, alien enough to make peace negotiations impossible, familiar enough to project motivations onto, and inhuman enough to feel no empathy towards.

Overall, the boring plot around the perfect enemy scaffolds the author's badly written diatribes in which he tries to sell you his fascist ideology. His contempt for humans is reprehensible, his little attack on Marxism is laughable, and his book is completely and utterly worthless and disgusting.

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