Agree that it might actually read better with a healthy dose of irony, but just as with Henlein's awkward sex scenes, that's not really the intent.
I always thought Starship Troopers was meant to be a satire, not praise for war. Just like Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. isn't a patriotic song.
Now the movie, that was definitely meant to be satire. Which is why so many fans of the book hate it.
Ironically, many people hated the movie because they didn't recognize that it was satirizing the (apparently) pro-military book.
It wasn't satirizing anything. It was just capitalizing on name recognition.
But if they didn't do that, fewer people would have watched it, and we would not now be discussing movie vs. book, because they would have always been two separate things. They still are, really.
When I read the book, I didn't see it as either pro-military or anti-military. It was a fictionalization of actual contemporary military experiences into a future sci-fi setting. The reaction should be in the eye of the beholder. The book may have seemed to glorify the military, because the entire premise of the book was that the military had essentially staged a coup against every human government, this making it the keystone of all human society. The rest is just how Heinlein thought things would work if the military were in charge of everything. Some things would work better; some would be worse.
I must admit that I haven't made much of an attempt to evaluate the movie on its own merits, as it already started off on the wrong footing with me, due to the attempt to trick people into watching it by pretending to be something it was not. It might have been just fine as Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine. But they chose to wallpaper a licensed property over the facade instead.
As a film adaptation of a book, it is the least faithful interpretation I have ever seen. It wasn't even sci-fi. It was more like a World War II movie, except I couldn't actually tell if the humans were supposed to be the Axis, or the Allies, or a little of both.
It was actually intended as (per Verhoeven) a satire of right-wing, fascists elements perceived in modern American culture that directly associated them with Nazi propaganda; the movie was largely written independently of the book, with rights to the book secured later after superficial similarity between some elements of the movie and the book were pointed out, at which point names, etc., from the book were added. Verhoeven says he only read two chapters of the book.
The film was a satire, but not of the book.
I don't so much hate the movie because it was satire, I hate it because it was cheap, lazy, unnecessary satire of either a phenomenon to which the book is at best distantly connected or of a very distant reading of the book.
Edit: So I assume that downvotes now are a form of disagreement rather than a measure of contribution to the discussion.
I don't think that's the case; I think that it isn't simplistically prescriptive the way that shallow readings usually take it, but I don't think its satire either. Its more complicated than that.
I think that there are a number of things that come together in ST:
(1) Heinlein's concern about what he saw as a then-current political current to dismiss what he saw as clear, current, existential threats.
(2) Heinlein's enduring strong opposition to conscription and view that it was equivalent to slavery.
(3) Heinlein's general frustration with the bureaucracy and politics of the day and feeling that it was due in large part to the incompetence and lack of civic mindedness of the governing class and, the electorate more generally.
ST, though, wasn't utopian -- it wasn't describing the way things should be -- it was an exploration of ideas related to these topics (and, in some ways, a release of Heinlein's frustration around them.)
> But its a common misconception that its some sort of military love-letter.
There's definitely an element of military love-letter -- particularly, to the individual infantryman -- to it.
That's actually one of the few things the common shallow readings get right (Heinlein himself has written as much, subsequently.)
At the same time, based on large swaths of what Heinlein has written (including non-fiction), there's also no particular reason to think that we're supposed to roll our eyes and take as satire the various lectures about honor and duty in the book. Nor take it as a general condemnation of the "military mind" or anything like that.
Even if the novel was strictly prescriptive, it wouldn't be saying that: federal service wasn't exclusively, or even mostly, military; federal service included the military, but it also included pretty much everything that would be considered "civil service" positions in today's system, and those positions significantly outnumbered the military ones.
In Starship Troopers it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of teh federal civil service."
Here's some reading: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-...
Its been quite a long time since I read Starship Troopers, but IIRC it doesn't read like much of a paean to the military on any but an extremely shallow reading.
I always took that as a way to keep the economy and the war-machine separate. You get the general vibe that it's an otherwise post-scarcity society.
If you were a citizen, you were part of the part of society that used force. It's the basic Libertarian trope about force in that regard.
SFAIK, ST was based on ideas from the Swiss system, obviously drawn to the exponential.
Catch-22?