Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein

May 1987 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

In Robert A. Heinlein’s controversial Hugo Award-winning bestseller, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe—and into battle against mankind’s most alarming enemy...

Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids.

Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job...

“A classic…If you want a great military adventure, this one is for you.”—All SciFi

Ratings and reviews

The book contains very interesting ideas that made me think, especially where the political views are concerned. However I'm personally not a fan of the slower pacing and there were some things that I wanted to see more of, such as interaction with the actual enemy. I'm not sure that would be necessary to convey the messages Heinlein wanted to get across but it's something I would have liked personally.

Starship Troopers was a fun read, and felt very realistic - you can read the author's military service without ever having prior knowledge of it. This works as both an advantage and disadvantage - it often feels like listening to former service member friends of mine trade old war stories with each other: amazing to listen to, but easy to get lost without a frame of reference for the military jargon and hierarchy. Still, this book is one that reads quickly and stands up well to the test of time.

Not your standard Sci/Fi. Starship Troopers is a military story packed with discussion of rank, protocol, and duty. The sci/fi theme is a definite secondary to the military duty and brotherhood (the ladies are in the Navy, while the story focuses on the men in the infantry). I was lost in the minutia of the military life at times, but I also got a look at that life in an unexpected and ultimately enjoyable way. Not much of the book made it into the movie.

About the author

Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907, and was raised there. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, but was forced by illness to retire from the Navy in 1934. He settled in California and over the next five years held a variety of jobs while doing post-graduate work in mathematics and physics at the University of California. In 1939 he sold his first science fiction story to Astounding magazine and soon devoted himself to the genre.

He was a four-time winner of the Hugo Award for his novels Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Starship Troopers (1959), Double Star (1956), and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). His Future History series, incorporating both short stories and novels, was first mapped out in 1941. The series charts the social, political, and technological changes shaping human society from the present through several centuries into the future.

Robert A. Heinlein’s books were among the first works of science fiction to reach bestseller status in both hardcover and paperback. He continued to work into his eighties, and his work never ceased to amaze, to entertain, and to generate controversy. By the time he died, in 1988, it was evident that he was one of the formative talents of science fiction: a writer whose unique vision, unflagging energy, and persistence, over the course of five decades, made a great impact on the American mind.