 Hello hello hello folks, welcome back I'm Philip Magnus and today I will be talking about Starship Troopers, just as I promised in the last video. And just as I said back then, I do not particularly enjoy this book. It's got me in a bit of a bind in fact. It's easy to relegate it to one of two neat classifications. Either a straight-faced satire that takes the piss out of the military, industrial complex or else a fully realized celebration of the serving man's fraternity, of the sacrifice of the individual for the collective's greater good and of militarism at large. The problem is whether you choose one reading or the other, you'll find out before long that the text is sabotaging you, delivering one blow after the other to any degree of certainty you might place in either position. So it is to be a bit of column A and a bit of column B then. Okay I'll be honest, I fall harder towards column B but I've got several good reasons for that before I get deeper into it. Let me give you the quick rundown in case you're unfamiliar with Robert Highline's Starship Trooper. It is the grandaddy of all military science fiction presenting the experiences of a marine by the name of Rico, one of the few things that the movie got right. Yes there was a 90s B movie which wasn't particularly great. It took the piss out of fascism but not in any way that is recognizably that of the book, what the book is doing, what book do as some might say. Now so Rico, he is preparing to serve a militarist federation at war with an alien species carrying the derogatory moniker of bugs. Here in is the first issue I had with the novel structure. After what is an explosive opening chapter that sees Rico use deadly power armor in tandem with the rest of his platoon, we are dragged back in time to his humble beginnings, a flashback that lasts a good two thirds of the novel. Highline renders in detail the molding of Rico into a marine presenting with exquisite detail the brutal training regimen he and his fellow trainees are forced through. Here perhaps it is fine a point as any to mention that Highline had himself served in the United States military, it shows that he was drawing from experience. The book has that particular brand of veracity that shows true expertise or truly impeccable research. In Highline's case the former rather than the latter although I'm sure that there was plenty that he researched as well just based on his body of work. I'm getting distracted let's get back to it. More time is given to the construction of a creed that places military service as the highest calling one can answer. Some have used sermonizing as regards to the nature of the narratorial voice of this play in the book. Officers are drawn as benevolent tyrants whose consciences bleed for their recruits whose cruelty comes from the necessity to mold these men into perfect cogs of a machinery that trades in death and yes I said men unlike the movie which again led me to expect many things from Starship Troopers that have nothing to do with the text. Only men serve in the Mobile Infantry. All the women are pilots and sexualized. Yay and the notion that some of these instructors the officers I was discussing previously might be sadist in nature say is momentarily considered and then dismissed. I quote I may have given the impression that boot camp was made harder than necessary. This is not correct it was made as hard as possible and on purpose. It was the firm opinion of every recruit that this was sheer madness. Calculated sadism, fiendish delight of witless morons in making other people suffer. It was not. It was too scheduled, too intellectual, too efficiently and impersonally organized to be cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty. It was planned. My surgery for purposes of as unimpassioned as those of surgeon. Oh I admit that some of the instructors may have enjoyed it but I don't know that they did and I knew and I do know now that the psych officers tried to weed out any bullies in selecting instructors. They looked for skilled and dedicated craftsmen to follow the art of making things as tough as possible for a recruit. A bully is too stupid himself to emotionally involved and too likely to grow tired of his fun and slack off to be efficient. That is rather a bad attempt at an American accent. I can see the point outside of the accent of those critics who have described Heinlein's work here as a novel sized pamphlet the way military comradery is drawn. I have wanted to join up myself. Not to mention that the right to vote is only available to those members of society that have served in one of the military's arms. Although you are completely disenfranchised as long as you are an active member of military command. A career soldier is then just as disenfranchised as anyone who hasn't served at all. So why not judge this book and what I dislike and be done with it? Because a narrative voice, never mind character speech, is not a tutorial voice. A fact all too commonly forgotten. A speculative novel is not an 18th century morality play as someone on Twitter rightly pointed out and then that someone was screenshot and that screenshot was shown off to me by a friend. If that's not enough, let's look at the text itself. Some of the aside's Rico makes some of the philosophizing he's subject of open themselves up to critique all too easily. War is not violence and killing pure and simple. War is controlled violence for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy, just to be killing him. To make him do what he want him to do. Not killing, but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine. To decide the purpose or the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how or why he fights. That belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide when how much. The generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence. Other people, older and wiser heads as they say, supply the control. Which is as it should be. What might at first reading appear a monolithic statement opens itself up to criticism with surprising ease. Control violence. But the first thing that goes out of work when violence is at hand is control. Make the enemy do what he want him to do by killing him. In the short term, perhaps, but half a dozen armed conflicts the USA has and taken in the seven decades since the publication of this book, make the opposite argument as does war overall. War much more commonly creates conflict. It creates the need, the demand for revenge amongst those who have been wronged by its violence. Perhaps even more egregious is the statement. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how or why he fights. If we're at trade you can certainly make the argument that this society highline portraits here has fascist under or overtones. It's not a phrase far removed from just following orders, is it? Now it could be that we're supposed to take this in a straightforward way as it's written unquestioning, but Highline was a clever guy and he has banked some credit with me thanks to Double Star, the review of which you can see here or somewhere probably at the end. It might be that I'm putting too much of my own beliefs here, but you might argue that it's good literature that opens itself up to more than one reading. By that mark, Starship Trooper is an interesting and engaging work. My personal preferences go the way of others among his works like the aforementioned Double Star or Stranger in a Strange Land, which I will discuss two, three Chigo award-winning videos from now. I'm kidding, these videos will never gain a Chigo award. I don't think they even give Chigo awards for YouTube videos, but if they don't, they should. They should give it to me, god damn it! Anyway, Trooper was an easy novel to get through. Easier than some others in my Chigo reading project, but a lot less of it will stick around in my mind in the long term. I enjoyed a lot less of it and I don't think I will ever pick it up again. I checked it out through the library and I don't think I will ever want to have it in my own personal collection. Do you think you'll read it though? Let me know in the comments down below and also let me know if you saw that movie back from the 90s. I remember it well. I was a kid and I had a VHS tape. I would rewash it a lot, not from a very, very, very young age. But yeah, those movies, the first one wasn't very good and then all of the sequels were direct to video, I think, and each one was many times worse than the previous. I'm so glad I never saw anything but the first and tiny little bits of the other ones. Just enough to know that I should never see them. Anyway, this is not a movie review. Let's not ever talk about Star Trek Trooper, unless you want to tell me something about your impressions of it in the comments down below. And I'll see you next time. Bye!