C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the eagerness to show that you’re not a child any longer and to reject your childhood tastes is a sign that you haven’t grown up yet; an adult should be able to enjoy things that children enjoy.
But it varies from work to work. I can read the Just So Stories, or Heinlein’s juveniles, or The Hobbit, with as much pleasure as they gave me in childhood; but I only had access to a few of the Oz books (Baum was considered trash by librarians in the 1950s), and reading them as an adult I don’t find them magical any longer.
I should say though, those are the general impressions of the book and film that have reached the public, I’m absolutely no expert on either of them! It sounds like @whswhs has done the actual reading on this.
There’s a lot to debate about Starship Troopers. But a reading of it as “fascistic” seems really strange. He portrays a society that has constitutional government; that has the franchise, and takes it really seriously, to the point of guaranteeing that anyone, even a blind paraplegic, can perform some kind of federal service and earn the right to vote; that does not practice conscription (was there ever a fascist society that had a volunteer military?); that in fact takes the avoidance of conscription so far that you can be given orders for a combat mission, decide you don’t want to accept it, and resign from the armed forces on the spot, with no penalty except that you never are allowed to vote; that has no elite officer corps but requires every officer to have started out at the bottom—in fact if you want to be high command you have to do that twice, once in the army and once in the navy. I don’t think any of that looks like fascism, and calling it that is only explainable if you suppose that any admiration for the military is “fascist”—and such admiration can be found in societies as varied as ancient Athens, both sides in the American Civil War, and the major Communist states of the twentieth century. If you call all of those “fascism” then I think it deprives the word of any possible meaning
What Heinlein is trying to get at is the basic Platonic dilemma of “Who will watch the watchmen?” Aristotle says that the good political systems, whether rule by a just king or by the vote of the people, treat political power not as something you own and use for your own gain, but as something you hold in trust for the whole people and use in their best interest. But how do you ensure this? Heinlein suggests that one way is to limit political power—the vote—to those and only those who have already shown that they care about the welfare of their society, sufficiently to put their own lives at risk to protect it. And that may not be a sufficient solution, but it’s an important question, and a problem that we are a long way from having solved.
That’s really interesting! And even more interesting that the impression of the novel is often very different. I do think critics jumped straight to guessing at his personal politics in order to decide what the novel was trying to say - it sounds like the book is actually much clearer than that.
I have; I first read Starship Troopers over fifty years ago, and I reread it most recently last year. And I’ve read the three volumes of Heinlein’s letters, including the ones where he discussed it. But on the other hand, I have never seen the film, so I’m going only by what I have read about it.
This is not the place to discuss Starship Troopers the book. Certainly not this thread, probably not this board.
Personally I do not believe anything can be said about it that hasn’t already been said, again and again, to the point of getting people thrown off boards because they refuse to believe that they won’t convert everyone to their way of thinking if they just say the exact same things one more time.
I would suggest you watch the film. You may be curiously intrigued.
Verhoeven is very clever in how he layers a heroic B movie about the “kids” from Earth against the Alien bugs, essentially a gung ho war movie that the society itself might have produced, and then hints at how such a society may go awry. Nor does it reject nor endorse the political ideas. They’re all there. With huge explosions save teenagers being stupidly brave.
Of course Heinlein’s idea of an elite military democracy is very fascist in its original Roman or even Greek sense. After all, most representative democracies have an element of a ruling elite presenting choices to the demos as a whole. The Italian fascists and the Nazis were more following Imperial Rome than the Republic.
At the same time you can just ignore that and it’s a cracking fun OTT SF war movie. It’s not as “B” IMHO as some might think. I view the sequels as much less nuanced B movie action fun. All good fun, but the first one is IMHO worth a watch.
And the dumb chicken is really funny.