[link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers|Starship Troopers]
Very nice. Starship Troopers is actually a hard book to understand because it is nothing but a political tract in a scifi format. It is very easy to mistake or trivialize Heinlein's posistion. The article manages to get this across without taking a side for or against the book.

Personally I think the book goes a bit far in glorifying the military. In particular, the way in which military service is essentially required to get the right to vote strikes me as going to far. In theory other types of service are possible, but it is up the government to decide what sort of service it needs from you, opting out of military service is not possible and it appears that the vast majority serve in the military.

And it is obvious that Heinlein intentionally setup a relentless, and inhumane foe for his soldiers to fight. I don't think this is any form of racism, but simply a desire (concious or not) to setup a foe that justifies the militarism of his society.

The same goes for many of the complaints that the society he describes is a military dominated government. It isn't clear from the book who started the war, but it is clear that neither side has much interest in taking prisoners. And in such a massive and genocidal war it is inevitable that military concerns dominate everything.

On an unrelated note, Wikipedia really needs to lock down articles the day they are a featured article. Prior to today the article was running one or two minor tweaks a day. Today they are already more then 150 edits, many of which where nothing but vandalism.

Jay

The idea of "mathmatical ethics" was pretty funny. There is a certain amount of logic that can be applied to ethics, it is not however amiable to formal expression as mathmatics. But I think his real point in that part of the book was about MIAs. The book was written right after the Korean war, and rumors of US MIAs being held in North Korea where common. The point he hammers there is that risking another war to recover one soldier is worth it.

And much of the book was a direct counter point to the overly idealistic science fiction of the period that talked about future civilizations that had gotten past all warfare and or that it is possible to negotiate your way out of all violence. It just doesn't work like that, there are times when war is both unavoidable and necessary.

Even more interesting is how good a job he did of creating a coherent and sensible system for his powered armor troopers. He was one of the first to grasp that in a scifi system where orbital bombardment is easy, the only reason to send in the foot troopers is to occupy something you want to capture intact.

Jay