Starship Troopers & right infantilism

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Wed Jan 23 19:02:34 PST 2002


You're right -- it was Haldeman's 1997 novel, Forever Peace, that so appalled me. And, on the basis of these two examples, it does seem that arrested psychosexual maturation is required to write science fiction. --CGE

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, jeffrey fisher wrote:


> you misread me. see nathan's reply to me. he and i appear to agree
> that haldeman's novel is superior to both versions of ST (heinlein's
> and verhoeven's)--not that i want to put words in his mouth. and
> certainly haldeman's "puerile and obsessive sex scenes" are no worse
> than later heinlein. imo.
>
> j
>
> On Wednesday, January 23, 2002, at 12:23 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
> >
> > I agree that Haldeman's is an "obnoxious novel." I can't understand why
> > serious people praise it: it was pressed into my hands by an intelligent
> > friend (a NY Times reporter, as it happens) who insisted it was
> > marvelous.
> > It's not. Wooden writing, cardboard characters, enough plot-points for a
> > soap-opera Seurat, a conception of future history that would be fine
> > with
> > Francis Fukuyama -- and much too much stock in a deus ex machina... (The
> > puerile and obsessive sex scenes should be submitted for the Literary
> > Review's Bad Sex Award -- if the judges would agree to consider them to
> > be
> > written in English.)
> >
> > Heinlein could write, perhaps better than any of the sci-fi authors, and
> > Nathan's right to say that "he played with social ideas, as opposed to
> > technology for its own sake, more than any of the other 'golden age'
> > sci-fi writers." From his earliest books (including his juveniles, like
> > Between Planets), he was something of a Libertarian avant la lettre,
> > more
> > a Taft Republican in fact. Even the semi-fascism of Starship Troopers
> > is
> > more thoughtful and more entertaining than the semi-liberalism of
> > Forever
> > Peace. (Of course as political fantasies, neither can hold a candle to
> > The Dispossessed.)
> >
> > Asimov's "idea-mongering" made him a low-level version of Gertrude
> > Stein's
> > village explainer ("excellent if you were a village, but if you were
> > not,
> > not"). But he led me to Marx, who wasn't part of my secondary-school
> > curriculum: he said that he'd based the Foundation series, which I'd
> > liked, on Toynbee -- so I went to Toynbee (in the Somervell abridgement)
> > and found that there was only one other meta-historical account...
> >
> > --CGE
> >
> > On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, jeffrey fisher wrote:
> >
> >> 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" ...



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