And Haldeman's FOREVER WAR is of course a far better work and much better response to Starship Troopers than Verhoven's movie.
Actually, the best movie response to Starship Troopers and I think a homage to Haldean is ALIENS, which explicitly has the tough marines going at it, only to get blown away and need to be saved by "mom" Signorney Weaver. There's even an explicit reference to Starship Troopers when one of the grunts snarls, "I hope this isn't going to be another bug hunt."
The whole corporate-military complex underlying the Aliens series is a far more interesting view of things than Verhoven's pop fascist version.
Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "jeffrey fisher" <jfisher at igc.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 11:39 AM Subject: Re: Starship Troopers & right infantilism
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
>