What can I say, Starship Troopers is an absolute classic.

I’ve been reading military sci fi since I was a kid, and I never really understood what a lieutenant was until now.

Strict discipline is something that’s frequently the target of literature. The protagonist’s journey is away from discipline, toward freedom. It’s seldom that a novel defends discipline. Of course, the best defense of a thing depicts its trade-offs as well; its ugly side. And Starship Troopers does that with military life as well. That frankness lends the argument strength.

A great book opens up some aspect of human life in an authentic way. This book does that for military life. If it wasn’t set in the future, that feature might shine through better. But on the other hand, the extra science tech gives it an interest that pulls you through. It wouldn’t have that if it was set in Vietnam.

The war-saving heroic ending feels tacked-on. The novel was never about the conflict itself. It was about the protagonist’s military career. The conflict was only a setting.

Ultimately, it’s place as an American sci fi classic is well-deserved.

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The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was pretty entertaining. There are some problems with it, though. The worst one is that it starts off like a mystery, by asking a question, and by the end of the book, that question isn’t answered. Other questions are answered, and the final questions are much grander than the first ones, but there’s something unsatisfying about solving the big cosmological mystery but not the little everyday mystery that led to it.

I did enjoy that different groups of supernaturally powerful mysterious beings have different cosmologies. Just because you can teleport doesn’t mean you know where the world came from and what it is.

All in all, this is trying to be a PKD short story. But it’s not quite good enough.



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