Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers did nothing for me. Its cover advertises controversy and boasts of the exciting journey of Johnnie Rico through the intergalactic military camp of the future. It sounded promising; unfortunately, I was not awed or entertained. If anything, I was pleased the novel was a quick read so that I could more readily set it aside.

To follow a character through the ups and downs of boot camp and warfare and to revel in his victories and sympathize with his failings, it’s nearly essential that you like him. Or, for the opposite effect, hate him. I neither liked nor hated Johnnie. I was completely indifferent as to his plight. It just didn’t seem like he had much of a character at all. Maybe Heilein left him underdeveloped because he was going for a sort of Everyman approach. If he was, it was ineffective. If he wasn’t, it was still ineffective.

Next, the novel seemed to be constantly moving to a climactic ending that it never reached. Sure, the last chapter was a nice wrap-up and finished a nice cycle to connect it to the beginning of the story (and I do love that structuring), but all the training for warfare and battle and the one great war scene was cut short and lacked any real action. Johnnie spent pages and pages training, but the reader never gets to see him master what he learned. It’s like watching the Karate Kid practice that Crane Kick for an hour without seeing his victory at the end.

Admittedly, my predisposition toward war did not especially jive with the ideas that Heinlein’s book seems to present. When I read a war book, I wanna read The Red Badge of Courage or some equivalent that critiques the devastation of war, rather than pages and pages of dialogue in which characters argue for a state ruled by soldiers, support a "colonize them before they colonize us" policy, and praise cruel and unusual punishment. It all seems to scream satire, but when the dialogue is compounded by the author’s apathetic treatment of death the dreams of satire fade away. (Apparently the movie satirizes the book, but I haven’t watched it yet.)

So maybe if my vision of the perfect future included military rule, maybe I would like Starship Troopers. But it doesn’t. And I don’t.

I picked out this quote but I’m the wishful thinker that it insults:

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms” (Colonel Dubois).