Sony rebooting Starship Troopers

[TeknoNurd]

Rico is stunningly naive about all matters, sexual and social as well as military. If you want to say argue about whether "dummy" is the right word for that kind of real life person, that's one thing. Nonetheless the function of the character (if that is the right word) is to serve as a ventriloquist's dummy for the lecturing that is the tiny heart of this book.

I'm beginning to wonder... we are talking about THIS book, right?

I didn't get Rico as "stunningly naive" sexually, socially, and/or militarily. He is presented as fairly social, participating in several extra school activities. He was on the track team. As far as I could tell, he was Johnny Average.

I'm not saying Heinlein did a stunning job of making Johnny an interesting character. Having been an 18 year old once, and parenting some 18 year olds, and grandparenting a couple more, I can tell you with some certainty that 18 year olds ARE much more naive than they think. From 18 to 21, roughly the period we follow Rico through, perhaps not so coincidentally, are when naive kids start becoming interesting people.

Heinlein could have made Rico more interesting without a doubt. But, we're discussing the concepts of the book, not the execution.

Militarism is not a PR campaign for the common soldier, though it may entail that. But I think in practice that real militarism is much more likely to reward officers over the common soldier, who may even be mistreated as cannon fodder.

I think you missed my point. In a militaristic society, there is a lot of propaganda directed at children, encouraging them to grow up and join up. To join the military is to become the best you can be. Military = Great! Being a soldier makes you sexy. Makes you a better man/woman. Non-Joiners are slackers than never get laid.

We don't see this is Starship Troopers because precisely because it's NOT militaristic. They don't want you to join. If you do, you'll lose body parts, if you live at all.

Militarism involves things like the preferred use of war (or simple murder of victims too weak to fight back in a war) as standard instruments of government foreign policy; repeated misallocation of budgetary resources to unnecessary weapons to service a whole military sector of the economy; widespread use of military personnel in other capacities in government and business; determination of social and political policy to serve the military, which covers things like education of high school students to funding research in universities, and ideological portrayals of outsiders as enemies with whom we are essentially always at war, even war to genocide, which is much more essential to militarism than glorification of the common soldier.

And, again... this is what we DON'T SEE in Starship Troopers.

The military doesn't run government. Current Military are not Citizens. All jobs aren't militarized, to the contrary, as much is privatized as possible. The clerical folks are civilians. The Doctors, civilians. The MI has 90% of the people pulling the trigger. If you're not pulling the trigger, you're a civilian sub contractor.

None of this involves publicizing the actual activities of real soldiers. Indeed, since so much of it is pointless, or unsavory, or downright vile, genuine news is often to be avoided. Embedding journalists to limit them to personal stories from a limited perspective or simple secrecy or other military controls on the media are more typical of genuine militarism.

You're off a bit. Militaristic governments GLORIFY Military Service. They sell it to the youth, it will make them sexy, attractive, respected, etc. Starship Troopers government is NOT militaristic: They DO show people how vile, disgusting, useless, and dangerous Federal Service is. Militaristic doesn't even give you a choice, you're drafted. Starship Troopers, nope... even when you enlist, if you don't come back... they don't care and they are sure you know they don't care.

The concept of "totalitarianism" is a nullity. But even if you did believe in such an incoherent notion, isn't the required presence of every single high school student in the country in an indoctrination class run by a veteran HMP teacher notably "totalitarian?" It's the idiot Rico who thinks there are no official grades and therefore it doesn't matter. He doesn't even figure out any different when he finds out that he himself was reported on by his very own HMP "teacher." Just because it was a favorable report doesn't make the system any better. It's basically government provocateurs given the chance to make reports on every single child in the world.

First, I'm not defending ST as a desirable system. Only trying to be accurate about what was being presented.

My argument is that ST government is NOT Totalitarian.

Now were into an area were you and I are inserting stuff that wasn't explicitly stated. You present it more Totalitarian, every student has a report in a file on their HMP performance (not in the book).

Equally not in the book: The recruiting officer REQUESTED an assessment on Rico. Had that assessment been poor, Rico would have been testing space suits on Titan, because his mind wouldn't be right for MI. He STILL could serve and still get Franchise.

We each create details to get from A to B.

HMP is a propaganda class, and there really are no grades, no passing, no failing. In OTC, there were grades, and failing could lose franchise because Officers are leaders, and if they don't buy the system, they won't support the system.

Check history. Militaristic governments want everyone in the military. Not in ST. Militaristic governments are run by the military. Not in ST. Perhaps a fine line, but active military don't have franchise. As you said, Militaristic government wants everything under the military control. Not in ST, only pulling the trigger is military, everything else is civilian. ST discourages military service. ST has free and open press. ST is a capitalist society. There was Free Speech, you COULD openly critisize the military.

Could a society where franchise based on previous military service be Non-Militaristic? Sure, particularly if there is a strong Constitution / Manifesto that severly limits government power, strong power to judiciary, strong freedoms to the people. Like anything else, the Devil is in the details, and it won't last forever.

 

[Demiurge]

The party line that anyone who criticizes Starship Troopers hasn't read it is just a travesty on the truth

No one has said that all criticisms are based on ignorance. I'm sure there are a great deal of people who have read it that didn't like it. It's clearly not for everyone. However, there's clear assumptions that don't derive from the text implicit in many of the most common arguments, and the two most famous critics of the work, Voerhoeven and Moorcock, have admitted to having not read it.

As usual, you presume.

For example, anyone who read in the novel about the strike on Buenos Aires in the novel knows perfectly well that the enemy could have dropped a much larger rock and destroyed the Earth for any practical purposes. But it is still claimed that there's no reason to think the aliens has no capacity to destroy planets?

This was in the context of Mutually Assured Destruction. It is stated that the Navy has the capacity to destroy a planet, and has won space superiority in the book, and that the MI have to go in anyway because they need to retrieve prisoners and arachnid brains, the later to understand their thoughts to communicate with them. The culmination of the book is just such an exercise.

We don’t know that the arachnids have the capability of destroying Earth however. Because it is not stated as such. One asteroid destroys one city. We also know that the Navy establishes Space superiority because we are told so in the story.

Anything else is presumption. We don’t know anything about the arachnid capabilities, or intent in that specific mission. We don’t know about the detection capability of the Terran Federation, the role of orbital defenses, or the ability of the navy to intercept and destroy asteroids.

You presume you know these things, without any of it being detailed. Therefore, you presume there is some rough equivalency between the Arachnids and Terran Federation that equates to a similar construct you are familiar with, the real Cold War.

You presume. It’s not stated, it’s not in evidence, and you don’t get to establish that as fact because of this.

This is altogether typical of the novel's defenders. I believe this is because the novel is not really defensible.

Wide brush you paint with there. Personally, I believe this is just another example of your own presumptions being mistaken for verifiable fact.

For instance, supposedly everyone so foolish as to believe in the inalienable natural rights of human beings believes, for example, that everyone has the right to self-defense for the sake of survival. Those who believe in "constructed" rights, that have to be "earned" by some unnamed person(s), by contrast, sensibly believe that some unnamed person(s) can justly declared that this constructed right has not been earned. Or so the author of Starship Troopers and his mob of defenders would have us believe.

As opposed to the text of the book, which states: “What is moral sense? It is the elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derive from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the invididual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere, verfiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.”

He then goes onto discuss the moral imperatives that sometimes trump individual survival, such as for family or nation. There’s obviously quite some room for debate on that topic, but in general it’s usually true.

Col Dubois wouldn’t say that self-preservation is a right to be earned. He’d say that is irrelevant, because the fact that such rights themselves are constructs of the social environment, they would be trumped by personal instinct regardless.

This isn’t necessarily Heinlein’s view. Stranger in a Strange Land would likely argue form a very different voice.

To me, the true ignobility of such a position is shamefully obvious. It is much handier to "defend" the novel by claiming it is misrepresented.

It nowhere in the novel states any such thing. It’s a chain of your own assumptions predicated on the fact you didn't comprehend the work.

 

[Demiurge]

I'm beginning to wonder... we are talking about THIS book, right?

You are talking about Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. stj is talking about a book that exists solely in his head.

I didn't get Rico as "stunningly naive" sexually, socially, and/or militarily. He is presented as fairly social, participating in several extra school activities. He was on the track team. As far as I could tell, he was Johnny Average.

I'm not saying Heinlein did a stunning job of making Johnny an interesting character. Having been an 18 year old once, and parenting some 18 year olds, and grandparenting a couple more, I can tell you with some certainty that 18 year olds ARE much more naive than they think. From 18 to 21, roughly the period we follow Rico through, perhaps not so coincidentally, are when naive kids start becoming interesting people.

Heinlein could have made Rico more interesting without a doubt. But, we're discussing the concepts of the book, not the execution.

Concur, and lack of characterization was often one of the criticisms of scifi in it's early stages. Look at Asimov for example.

Another thing, we are seeing the vision of Rico as defined by Heinlein from a pre-information age portrayal. As far as I know NO ONE understood the implication of that as early as 1959 - indeed, important critical works like the Doomsday Book were missing it's role in the future in the mid 80s.

A 18 year old without information technology in his life is going to be much more naive than a comparative teen-ager in our society except in rare occasions.

You can make a critique against Heinlein for portraying Rico as a blank slate for his preferred political indoctrination to infuse (in this work, anyway), but criticizing the 'atomic space age' writers for portraying these characters compared to the technological and sociological sophistication we see today is not a very fair critique IMO.

As far as the rest, excellent analysis of what is actually discussed in the text.

 

[Jedi Marso]

It disenfranchises people who choose not to serve.

It would be more accurate to say that the franchise must be earned.

This was deliberately the way Heinlein wrote it. The premise is that if you want to be part and parcel of making the decisions and the policies that affect society at large, you must first prove that you can put others first by serving that society and by being willing to perish for its protection and betterment. If you choose not to, then you forfeit that right.

There was no draft, and someone who had 'signed up' could quit at any time without penalty- other than having NOT earned the franchise. If you weren't physically suited to serve in a military capacity, they would find some other way for you to serve and you could still earn the franchise. The whole point was being willing to sacrifice for the greater good- to be willing to do something for someone other than yourself.

You may or may not buy into that philosophy, but that is exactly what Heinlein was describing in the fictional society he created. In order to play, you had to have put some skin in the game.

 

[Jedi Marso]

I see that it took all of two posts for this to turn into a philosophical debate on Heinlein's work- fell prey to it myself, actually. Back to the topic title, I just now learned of this and haven't been able to find much info at all, or even a listing on IMDB. Anyone know if this is in the works or still happening?