I've always liked Bob Heinlien's work, he was head and shoulders above the field for many years. He had a couple of duds: early on
Rocketship Galileo needed a rethink and much later on, after his illness, he fell victim to rambling novel syndrome. Yet his characters shone and the action pulled you on. For a long time the battle for best work was between
Podkayne of Mars (yep I fell in love with Poddy) and
Starship Troopers. There were other good 'uns, especially the 'juveniles' which did an excellent job of pitching the whole cosmos around so it was examined from a child's perspective.
Starship Troopers is challenging to some because, like
1984 and
Brave New World before it, it looks into an area they would rather not look. It's societal model is based on Timarchy, one of Plato's five forms of government (
Republic, Book VIII). Orwell and Huxley were fine by me though, with hindsight, 1984 was overpoweringly 'in your face'. Starship Troopers is a fine yarn and one I am comfortable returning to. Your species is under threat, what are the exigencies of state? Permanent war footing - conquer or die, convert or die, submit or die (you might die anyway). Why wouldn't you explore different systems of government? Don't go on a war footing until it's too late and you end up like all the lost civilisations of the past: smashed up and consigned to the rubbish bin of history.
Let's peer into the mindset of a West that has 'moved on'. Conquest of empire gathered pace from the mid-C17th when the Porte last failed to take Vienna (rescue courtesy of
John III Sobieski) and peaked in the C19th (bearing in mind Spain & Portugal had a head start). Germany was late to the game - a key cause to the tensions behind WW1 & WW2. Except these were only world wars in the sense of empires bringing foreign soldiers to Euro-soil. While we built empires, the Balkans felt the heel of the Turk. Liberating the oppressed was second place to managing rival European ambitions which in turn was not to interfere with Empire, the foundation of trading wealth. The dominance of Europe ended with WW2. Post WW2 there have been attempts to spread Western ideals to the rest of the world in the grand aspiration that this will somehow better mankind. There's little keeping the Malthusian conclusion from coming into play... dystopias with starving hordes on the move, I'm up for that. Compare this to the Mamluk system (Mamluk = warrior slave) they turned empires on their heads. It was brutal and relentless and it also pre-dates the West, going back to the Turco-Mongol hordes of the C13th, and before. The last Mamluk empire didn't end until the C20th - the Ottoman.
The refrain is 'now we have more enlightened times' yet when you peek under the cover of any recent election or referendum - those who rule and those who feel entitled to rule, play dirty politics. The ingredients: a pit full of greed, the morals of a rat and a sprinkling of Machiavelli.
We don't know what we'll find out there; eventually we'll work out how traces of organic compounds come to be bombarding the Earth, and presumably everywhere else; and even how there come to be ice asteroids. It'd be comforting to think we're all alone in the universe.
