Starship Troopers & right infantilism

jeffrey fisher jfisher at igc.org
Wed Jan 23 08:39:28 PST 2002


sorry i'm coming to this late, but i'm a bit surprised no one's yet mentioned the obvious SF rejoinder to starship troopers (a quite readable if in many ways obnoxious novel), joe haldeman's far superior "the forever war."

frankly, heinlein, while a good storyteller particularly in his early novels (like starship troopers), has always struck me rather more as the CS Lewis than the gramsci of pop libertarian thought: he appeals partly because he's highly digestible and sounds more profound than he usually is, and he's idolized by a crowd that thinks their views are being endorsed by a Recognized Big Thinker. Ursula LeGuin is a deeper thinker and a better writer by far . . .

personally, give me philip k dick, any day -- but i suppose that may be a separate long conversation. :-)

j

On Tuesday, January 22, 2002, at 05:08 PM, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:


> On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>> Heinlein is interesting because he played with social ideas, as
>> opposed to
>> technology for its own sake, more than any of the other "golden age"
>> sci-fi
>> writers,
>
> Asimov may have been the grandmaster of idea-mongering, all that Roman
> history cleverly stuffed into the Foundation series, and of course the
> informatic theology of the robot laws. Heinlein had a better sense of
> marketing, of course -- he's just at the cusp of the moment when
> science fiction turned away from machines which produce kinetic energy,
> and towards machines which process information. Like James Blish on
> speed
> or something.
>
> -- Dennis
>



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