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Originally Posted by Ilex  Starship Troopers is one of his better books. It's vastly different than the garbage that made it into the movies. The book is a lot more about what human culture would be like under a quasi-facist/socialist world government and examines social issues like suffrage. Combine those themes with a decent story and some surprisingly futuristic stuff (considering the book was written in 1959) and it's a great quick read. Interestingly, it's the only Sci Fi book on the Marine Corps. reading list and the tactics and weapons in the book are pretty meticulously detailed. The military is still chasing some of the concepts first outlined in this book (powered exo-skeletons) almost 50 years after it was written. |
I know... I own his complete works. ^.^ He was good at predicting technology. He wrote a story in 1939 (was either Blowups Happen or Solution Unsatisfactory, can't remember which) a couple months later the FBI comes to his door and ask him who told him how an atomic reaction works. Apparently one of the guys working on the atom bomb read the story and, other then the amount of mass required to start a chain reaction (Heinlein over-estimated) he was spot on about how such a bomb could be made. His answer, incidentally, was he figured it out from his highschool physics textbook and the periodic table of the elements.
Also, not to be picky, but the government in Starship Troopers was neither Fasicst or Socialist. It was a an elected Republic with a restriction on who was allowed to vote. And, as Heinlein pointed out in the book, every Republic has always restricted who can vote (age/gender/skin color/religion/etc.) the only difference is in ST it was done by whether or not you'd engaged in a minimum of two years military service and then retired. Note the retired part, active military personel don't vote. Explain to me how a democratic Republic ignores personal property (socialism) or is a dictatorship (fasicsm)?
Oh, Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" are both excellent books. "Across Realtime" is good to. I haven't read his short story collection yet.