Starship Troopers

Juan Rico signs up on impulse the day he leaves school, mostly because a friend is doing it, and because in this future only veterans may vote or hold office. Everyone else has every other civil right and no franchise, on the argument that the ballot should belong to people who have demonstrated they will put the group ahead of themselves.

Most of the book is training. Boot camp at Camp Currie under a sergeant who breaks recruits methodically, floggings administered for offences the reader is expected to agree deserve them, an attrition rate above ninety percent, and eventually the powered armour: a suit that jumps, carries tactical nuclear weapons, and drops from orbit in a capsule.

The war against the Bugs, an insectoid hive species, happens largely between chapters. Heinlein is far more interested in the classroom, and the novel repeatedly stops for History and Moral Philosophy lectures in which a teacher explains why this system is correct and why the twentieth century's was not.

Which is why it has been argued about for sixty five years. Readers have called it fascist, militarist and a recruitment poster, and others have pointed out that service is voluntary, mostly not military, and that the franchise argument is at least seriously made.

Read as a novel rather than a manifesto it is a very good account of basic training, and the details of drop procedure, unit cohesion and the responsibility of a junior officer are handled with a care that later military science fiction copied wholesale.

Around two hundred and sixty pages, brisk and readable, with more classroom than combat and almost no description of the enemy.

Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film is a satire of the book rather than an adaptation and its director has said he never finished reading it. Best for readers who want the argument the whole genre has been having ever since, from the source.