25 Facts About Starship Troopers

1.

Starship Troopers is a military science fiction novel by American writer Robert A Heinlein.

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2.

Starship Troopers has been identified with a tradition of militarism in US science fiction, and draws parallels between the conflict between humans and the Bugs, and the Cold War.

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3.

Starship Troopers brought to an end Heinlein's series of juvenile novels.

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4.

Science fiction critic Darko Suvin wrote that Starship Troopers is the "ancestral text of US science fiction militarism" and that it shaped the debate about the role of the military in society for many years.

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5.

Starship Troopers's motivation arose partially from his anger at US President Dwight Eisenhower's decision to suspend US nuclear tests, and the Soviet tests that occurred soon afterward.

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6.

Starship Troopers is narrated by the main protagonist Juan "Johnny" Rico, a member of the "Mobile Infantry".

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7.

Starship Troopers is from a wealthy family, whose members had never served in the army.

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8.

Starship Troopers is assigned to the Mobile Infantry, and moves to Camp Arthur Currie on the Canadian prairie for his training under Sergeant Charles Zim.

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9.

Starship Troopers is visited in school by Carmen, now an ensign and ship's pilot officer in the Navy, and the two discuss their friend Carl, who had been killed earlier in the war.

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10.

Commentators have written that Starship Troopers is not driven by its plot, though it contains scenes of military combat.

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11.

Starship Troopers has been referred to as a bildungsroman or "coming-of-age" story for Rico, as he matures through his tenure in the infantry.

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12.

Starship Troopers had so much technical stylistic mastery of the craft of writing science fiction that he could [tell the story] 'backwards and in high heels' and get away with it.

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13.

Author Ken MacLeod's 2003 analysis of the political nature of Starship Troopers stated that it was "a book where civics infodumps and accounts of brutal boot-camp training far outweigh the thin and tensionless combat scenes".

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14.

Starship Troopers is generally considered to promote militarism, the glorification of war and of the military.

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15.

Starship Troopers has stated that the novel made an analogy between its military conflict and those of the US after World War II, and that it justified US imperialism in the name of fighting another form of imperialism.

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16.

Dennis Showalter, writing in 1975, defended Starship Troopers, stating that the society depicted in it did not contain many elements of fascism.

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17.

Starship Troopers argues that the novel does not include outright opposition to bolshevism and liberalism that would be expected in a fascist society.

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18.

Slusser wrote in 1987 that Starship Troopers depicts a world that is "hell for human beings", but nonetheless celebrates the ideology of its fictional society.

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19.

Authors and commentators have stated that the manner in which the extraterrestrial beings are portrayed in Starship Troopers has racist aspects, arguing that the nicknames "Bugs" and "Skinnies" carry racial overtones.

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20.

In 1978, Moorcock wrote that Starship Troopers "set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic" stories.

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21.

Starship Troopers calls this form of masculinity "all body, so to speak, and no brain".

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22.

Science fiction critic Darko Suvin states that Starship Troopers is the "ancestral text of US science fiction militarism" and that it shaped the debate about the role of the military in society for many years.

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23.

Starship Troopers included concepts in military engineering which have since been widely used in other fiction, and which have occasionally been paralleled by scientific research.

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24.

Starship Troopers had a direct influence on many later science fiction stories.

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25.

Dark Horse Comics, Mongoose Publishing and Markosia hold the license to produce comic books based on Starship Troopers, written by authors including Warren Ellis, Gordon Rennie and Tony Lee.

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