The Exact Words of the Text

Thoughts on thirty years of memetic skirmishing over the meaning of Starship Troopers

Brad Wright

Opening shot: blackness.

Heavy, panicked breathing.

THUD

KA-THUNK

Extreme close shot, we only see an eye flying open, the polychromatic light of a heads-up display visible in the dilated pupils. The eye is wide, terrified. A timer counts down, reaches zero. Beside it, another digit rolls over, going down by one. The timer resets.

THUD

The scene shudders.

KA-THUNK

The second sound is accompanied by the impression of being roughly shoved to one side.

The eye slams shut.

Cut scene. We’re in the hold of a spaceship, a loading bay stacked with military hardware. A long row of large, circular metal hatches lines one of the walls. Shouting coming from inside one of them, pounding from the other side of the hatch. A pair of medics in white jumpsuits and red flashing rushes over, efficiently opening the hatch and gently helping out the soldier inside. He’s young, wiry, muscular, a hard-looking man, but he’s completely lost it. He falls to his knees, vomits all over the deck, then collapses, sobbing. The medics help him up, tenderly taking him by the elbows, leading him away.

THUD

KA-THUNK

Cut back as his eyes fly open again. Perspective has pulled back, showing both eyes and the bridge of the nose. His breathing growing increasingly rapid. Electrocardiogram showing his heart rate spiking.

Whispering. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

The timer counts down to zero. The indicator next to it rolls over, going down by one more digit, and the timer resets.

THUD

The camera jitters violently.

KA-THUNK

There’s the impression of sideways movement again. His eyes squeeze shut.

Cut scene.

Two men sitting in a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist is a middle-aged man, spare and lean, with a neatly trimmed greying moustache, wearing a grey, high-collared officer’s dress uniform, officer’s stripes on the broad epaulettes. He’s sitting across a desk from a young soldier in a similar, less-decorated grey uniform with corporal’s chevrons on the arm. The young soldier is a compact, handsome Filipino, with a shaved head and a scar running down his cheek.

“We’ve run as many tests as we know how to run, Corporal Rico. None of them indicate that you’re in any danger of falling out.”

“How can that be right, doc? Every drop, I think I’m going to lose it ... like I’m going to piss myself ... I start shaking, can’t control it ... Doc, I’m terrified...”

The officer shakes his head. “That’s not fear you’re feeling, corporal. It’s excitement. Adrenaline. Like a racehorse in the pen, before being let out onto the track. You’re a hunter, and you’re so eager for the hunt you start vibrating.”

“But the nightmares ... I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes...”

“Just an adrenaline hangover. Take one of these before racking out,” the psychiatrist pushes a pillbox across the desk. “They’ll stabilize your hormonal levels, keep them from getting out of control while you sleep.”

THUD

KA-THUNK

Cut back as his eyes fly open again. Perspective has pulled back a bit more. The bottom half of his face is covered by an oxygen mask. We’re inside a helmet, its inner surface illuminated by hovering, holographic displays.

The timer is counting down. The counter beside it reads 1. As the timer approaches zero, his breathing gets faster, shallower, more ragged, more terrified.

“You good, Rico?” comes a voice over a circuit.

“Never better, sarge,” Rico says weakly.

“By the numbers, trooper. Just like a drill.”

“Just like a drill, sarge.”

Cut scene.

Soldiers gathered in a loading bay, standing at parade rest in front of blocky armoured suits that look like gorillas crossed with tanks. A sergeant is doing an inspection, casting a gimlet eye over the suits. The sergeant is a short, swarthy, ugly, mean-looking sonafabitch, thick-set and muscled, seeming as broad as he is tall. The are wearing padded jumpsuits, studded with plugs for electrical leads.

Fuchsiart

The sergeant checks a biomonitor on one of the troops. “You’re running a fever, Jenkins,” the sergeant tells him. “Fall out.”

“I’m fine, Sarge,” Jenkins insists. “The Doc said...”

“‘The Doc said,’” Sergeant Jelal sneers. “The biomonitor says different. Fall out. That’s an order.”

“Sarge,” Rico says, “That’s gonna leave a hole in my line.”

“Better an empty position than an unreliable one, corporal. Improvise.”

Jenkins, furious, falls out.

Sergeant Jelal finishes the inspection. “What a gang of apes!” he growls. “Maybe if you’d all buy it this drop, they could start over and build the kind of outfit the Lieutenant expected you to be. I just want to remind you apes that each and every one of you has cost the government, counting weapons, armour, ammo, instrumentation, and training, everything, including the way you overeat — has cost, on the hoof, better’n half a Bitcoin. Add in the thirty sats you are actually worth and that runs to quite a sum. So bring it back! We can spare you, but we can’t spare those fancy suits you wear. I don’t want any heroes in this outfit; the Lieutenant wouldn’t like it. You got a job to do, you go down, you do it, you keep your ears open for recall, you show up for retrieval on the bounce and by the numbers. Get me?”

The men respond with grim silence. They get him.

“Five minutes for the padre. Make your peace with your creator, smoke em if you got em, and suit up.”

Several of the soldiers gather around the padre, kissing the cross and receiving blessings. Rico stays with his suit. His hand is shaking. The padre, dressed identically to the rest, and identifiable only by his clerical collar, comes over and puts a hand on Rico’s shoulder. “No heroics down there, son. You’re not going down there to win a medal, you’re just doing a job. Go by the book, don’t go buy the farm. This is your first drop as a non-com. Just remember your training.”

“Don’t gotta remind me, padre. I know what I’m doing.”

“Green as you are, I think that I will remind you all I want,” the priest says, then looks at Rico’s shaking hand. “You going to be all right down there, son? There’s no shame in falling out. No one can force you to do this.”

Rico bats the priest’s hand from his shoulder. “Doc says it’s just the shakes. Adrenaline. I’ll be fine. Look just bless me or give me my last rites or whatever so I can suit up, okay?”

The priest sighs and raises his hand. “Benedictio Dei omnipotentis...”

Cut back.

Rico’s eyes are wide, rolling, terrified.

The timer hits zero. The counter beside it rolls over to zero.

Rico’s eyes squeeze shut again.

Cut. We see a drop pod, a gracefully curving, predatory-looking stiletto-like glide vehicle with four long blade-like wings equally spaced around its circumference, its featureless raptor surface finished in matte black that seems to swallow the light. It resembles nothing so much as a spearhead, shaped for deep, rapid penetration.

THUD

The drop pod is fed into a long tube. Magnetic rails grab the four wings.

KA-THUNK

The drop pod accelerates down the launch tube, shooting from rest to high velocity so quickly it disappears from sight almost immediately.

Cut. We’re in space – total silence. The drop pod whips out of the troop carrier, down towards a nearby planet with blue oceans and vivid purple continents that fills half the sky. The planet’s at a crescent phase, with the local star mostly eclipsed behind it. A handful of other ships are visible in the background. The troop carrier is a blunt, brutish-looking thing, all angles and planar surfaces, covered in murderous-looking weapon blisters which are swivelling around firing particle beams in various directions. It looks like a double-barrelled shotgun gauged for smashing cities. On the side of the ship is written TFN Rodger Young, emblazoned under an angular double-headed eagle.

Cut back to inside the pod. Rico’s eyes are still wide and terrified, his breaths still coming fast and hard, but they’re slowing. He’s getting himself under control.

Cut scene. The platoon is gathered in a briefing auditorium. An animated holographic map is projected on one of the walls. This is clearly a veteran combat unit – their uniforms are far from parade-ready, ripped sleeves, muscly, tattooed, scarred, a mean, ugly-looking bunch of savages. Sergeant Jelal stands at the centre, chewing on a cigar. A relaxed aura of easy command surrounds him as he glowers at his band of killer primates.

“The goal is simple. We are here to put the fear of God into the Skinnies, who have made the grave error of finding common cause with the Arachnids. They aren’t outright hostile, but they’re providing logistic support, trading with them, letting the bugs move through their territorial space. The AIs back at High Command have wargamed this out a million times, the remote viewers in the Psi Corps are in agreement: if the Skinnies keep helping the Arachnids, it increases the probability that the Arachnids win this war by a small but very significant interval. So, we are here to explain to them that there are consequences to the passive-aggressive ‘neutrality’ they’ve adopted. A gentle, friendly love-tap on the shoulder, to remind them what we could do if they really pissed us off.” He pauses, smiles nastily. “You might call this a diplomatic embassy.”

The men respond with a round of rough laughter and ribald jokes, “I’ll give em a love-tap,” while grabbing their crotch and such.

Glowing points begin to move on the holographic map. Jelal chops his hand in its direction, smoke from his cigar mixing with the projection.

"You’re supposed to know the plan. But some of you ain’t got any neurons fir the AI to link to so I’ll sketch it out. You’ll be dropped in two skirmish lines, calculated two-thousand-metre intervals. Get your bearing on me as soon as you hit, get your bearing and distance on your squad mates, both sides, while you take cover. You’ve wasted ten seconds already, so you smash-and-destroy whatever’s at hand until the flankers hit dirt. Rico, Red – that’s you. Once they hit — straighten out those lines! — equalize those intervals! Drop what you’re doing and do it! Twelve seconds. Then advance by leapfrog, odd and even, assistant section leaders minding the count and guiding the envelopment."

Jelal gives Rico a significant look. "If you’ve done this properly — which I doubt — the flanks will make contact as recall sounds ... at which time, home you go. Any questions? No? Dismissed. See to your suits. Inspection is in T minus thirty minutes, drop in T minus forty. And remember! Rasczak’s Roughnecks have a reputation to uphold. The Lieutenant told me before he bought it to tell you that he will always have his eye on you every minute ... and that he expects your names to shine!”

Cut to the drop pod as it slices down into the atmosphere.

Cut to inside the pod. Thumping of turbulence from atmospheric entry. Rico’s eyes fly open again. The panic is gone. His breathing is even and calm. His eyes are steady and bright. Locked in, game on. It’s mission time.

Cut back to exterior. Rico’s pod is diving deeper into the atmosphere, as are dozens of pods around him. The other pods are lines of incandescent blue and violet fire pointed straight down at the surface. A brilliant plasma sheath envelops the pod, and the matte black exterior is quickly peeled off, revealing a mirror surface underneath. A layer of the liquid metal gets shucked off all at once, like a snake sloughing its skin; it billows out behind the drop pod, forming a metallic parachute, jerking the pod violently before coming loose and fragmenting into thousands of flakes of thin metal that scatter out in every direction. Moments later the process repeats. The air above the pod fills with metallic chaff.

Cut to the surface. Night-time. We see a beautiful city of graceful, soaring, ethereal towers in the distance, glowing with ghostly light. In the foreground is the dense purple foliage of an alien jungle. A river winds through it. In the sky above the drop pods can be seen, coming down fast like glowing spears. Weapon turrets hidden amongst the weird-looking trees swivel up towards the sky, and begin firing missiles, lasers, and particle beams.

Cut back to the plummeting drop pod. The anti-aircraft fire is mostly hitting the decoy chaff. Explosions all around, beams flickering through the air. Return fire comes down from above – particle beams from the Roger Young.

Cut to surface. Direct hit on one of the anti-aircraft turrets. The turret and the ground around it are instantly slagged into lava.

Cut back to the pod, now very close to the ground. The inner shell of the pod – now an ovoid – shatters apart into fragments, sending the armoured figure within tumbling out, free-falling towards the ground about a mile up. The armour is thick, heavy, and brutal looking, like a humanoid tank fucked an A-10 warthog and sired a bastard metal gorilla. The faceplate is carved with an angular, fanged death’s head.

Cut to inside the helmet, we see Rico’s face contorted as the world whirls chaotically around him. The HUD is now a 3D projection of the exterior environment overlaid with tactical information, as though the helmet is perfectly transparent.

Cut to exterior. Jump-jets on the suit’s feet and back stabilize the suit, until he’s hovering in mid-air.

Cut to inside the helmet. Rico activates a false-colour infrared overlay, rendering the view in stark black-and-white.

Feng Zhu

Cut to exterior. Rico tips forward and swan dives towards the ground, pulling up just before hitting to brake with his jets. He slams down in a crouch on the roof of a building, a shockwave pulsing out around him, cracking the roof from impact.

Ahead of him, those elements of the platoon that landed first are already converging on the city, making long, low, jet-enabled jumps that hug the ground, strafing the ground with heavy weaponry, incendiaries, and all manner of nastiness. Flame and smoke already surround the city. Explosions and the sizzle of beam weapons roil the air.

Cut to inside the helmet. Rico’s HUD shows a schematic, with the positions of his section indicated by alphanumerically labelled green dots, his own position indicated by a blue dot. The dots are arranged in a two very rough parallel lines. One of the green dots is visibly out of place.

“Ace! You’re out of formation. Dress your line!”

Cut to exterior. Rico drops a grenade, jumps off the building and across the river. The building explodes behind him while he’s still in mid-jump, knocking him tumbling. He lands on the other side of the river face first. Cut to inside. He mutters, “Remember your training, Johnny boy. By the book, don’t buy the farm,” and picks himself up to continue.

On the HUD, Ace’s position aligns with the rest of the squad, but Ace doesn’t respond. The squad is leapfrogging forward, converging towards the city.

Rico notices a cluster of ostentatious public buildings - temples or monuments perhaps - crowning crest of a hill. “Well, now, you look like you matter a lot to someone,” he says softly. He unhooks a launch tube, shoulders it, and sends a mini-nuke on its way. Then he jumps forward, continuing the advance as the missile winds towards the complex. The buildings disappear in an atomic flash, a mushroom cloud rising in the wake.

A Y-frame deploys from the suit’s back, and begins lobbing bombs at the top of each jump, while one of Rico’s arms sprays the ground with a flamer, setting the trees on fire.

Rico comes down close to a Skinny. The Skinny is a nine-foot-tall, gaunt-looking humanoid alien with an obviously non-human face: two large, protruding eyes on either side of its narrow head, capable of focusing independently; a long, vertical mouth slashing from chin to forehead; ears at the bottom, where the chin should be; nostrils on the forehead. The Skinny squawks in surprise and raises a weapon which looks like it was grown as a single piece rather than assembled, its grip specialized for its extremely long fingers and upside down thumbs. Rico torches the Skinny with a flamer.

Karl Kopinski

Soon he’s in the city, leaping across the tops of strange buildings with bizarre architecture and uncanny statues. He lands on the top of one of the towers and pauses briefly to orient himself. His gaze follows the river, and he zooms in on an industrial complex further up. “Those have to be the waterworks,” he murmurs to himself. “Sure would be a shame if the water supply was radioactive.” He takes out the mini-nuke launcher again, and sends another atomic on its way.

No sooner has the mini-nuke launched then the building crumbles beneath him. He jumps free just in time. Below there’s a team of Skinnies with a crew-served particle cannon. He comes down at street level on top of the weapon, crushing it in the process, mows down the Skinnies with a chaingun. A blinding atomic flash announces the destruction of the waterworks.

Rico begins bouncing ahead down the street, hugging the ground while his Y-frame and shoulder-mounted cannons fire explosive rounds and incendiaries into the buildings behind him.

A mosquito-like drone whirls out of nowhere to intercept him in mid-air. It buzzes close to him, clamps on from behind, and inserts a lead into his electronics, causing his system to lock up. His suit crashes to the ground from ten feet up, cracking the pavement and skidding forward before being brought to a stop by the wreckage of vehicle.

A mob of armed Skinnies comes rushing over while Rico desperately tries to reboot the suit’s computer. They start trying to open his armour, beating at it with pipes and cutting at it with plasma torches. Inside, Rico is visibly frightened. The HUD is down, the suit is dead, all he has are emergency backup lights, but he can feel the mob working on his suit from the outside.

There’s a long rip of chaingun fire. The clanging and jostling stops. Moments later Rico’s HUD boots back up, and he sees another Mobile Infantry trooper standing over him, the mosquito drone sparking wreckage in his fist. The nameplate on the suit reads FLORES.

“You all right, Rico?”

“Just shook. Thought for sure I’d bought the farm. Would have if you hadn’t shown up. Thanks, Dizzy. I owe you one.”

Dizzy helps Rico up. They slam their helmets together, and then the two take off in separate directions, spreading mayhem.

John Bolton

Rico bounces down a long avenue like a bowling ball skipping down the lane and smashes through the wall of a large building. There’s a crowd of Skinnies inside, which begin firing at him with small arms that do absolutely nothing to his armour. Rico tosses an explosive towards a large, complex-looking industrial machine in the middle of the building. The bomb expands semi-liquid ligaments that stick it to the wall, and immediately starts speaking in an alien language (translated via subtitles): “I’m a thirty-second bomb! I’m a thirty-second bomb! I will explode in twenty nine, twenty eight, twenty seven...” The Skinnies shriek and start running in panic.

Rico runs through the building, killing a few Skinnies who get in his way, blasts a hole in the other side, and jumps out. The building explodes behind him.

Cut to inside the helmet. The HUD shows the two lines have become chevrons, the arms of which are beginning to converge.

Cut to exterior. Rico is rushing forward as fast as he can - as one of the flankers, he has a lot of ground to cover to close the circle. The streets are flooding with water. Pillars of smoke rise from all over the city.

Rico’s HUD shows two of the troops are missing. One of the points isn’t moving, and the other is moving away from the rendezvous point.

“Ace! Dizzy!” Rico shouts, “Stop fucking around and get to the rendezvous now!”

No response.

“Ace! Dizzy!”

“Dizzy’s down!” Ace replies. “Already on my way to pick him up!”

“Shit. Everyone else, stay here! I’m going to help!”

Rico bounces off to assist. Just as he leaves, a haunting song plays on the radio: “... to the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!” Rico looks up, sees the shuttles hurtling down towards the city on pillars of blue rocket flame.

“Launch in three minutes, Rico!” comes Jalal’s voice. “Do NOT be late, the shuttle WILL NOT wait!”

“You don’t gotta tell me twice, sarge!”

Rico finds Ace struggling to dig Flores out of the rubble of a collapsed building, occasionally pausing to exchange fire with the Skinnies, who are starting to arrive in force. Rico lays down withering cover fire as he approaches, then bounces forward to help. Together, the two of them throw off the last of the rubble, casually chucking man-sized boulders out of their way.

Flores’ suit is cracked and blackened, leaking blood everywhere.

“He’ll die if we try to take him out of the suit,” Rico observes.

“We can’t leave him,” Ace says.

“What do we do?”

“Shut up and grab an arm.”

Ace squats down to grab one side of Flores’ inert suit. After a short pause, Rico takes hold of the other. The two begin heading back to the rally point with low, labouring jumps, shoulder-mounted cannons returning fire to the Skinnies harrying their retreat.

In the distance, the shuttle lands.

“We aren’t gonna make it!” Rico shouts.

“Keep jumping,” Ace snaps.

Another suit comes bouncing over at high speed towards them from the direction of the shuttle. When it gets close, the nameplate reads JELAL. Jelal grabs hold of Flores’ Y frame, and the three of them carry him back to the shuttle. Gun turrets on the shuttle are laying down suppressive fire in every direction. They slam into the landing bay, and the shuttle lifts off while the bay door is just starting to close.

Jelal squats on his haunches, exhausted, stripping his helmet off and closing his eyes. His shaved head looks tiny inside the armour’s massive bulk. “All present, Lieutenant,” he whispers, as the roar of the engines picks up. “Three wounded, but all present.”

“You idiots have fucked us!” comes the hysterical voice of the shuttle’s pilot. “These launch windows are calculated down to the second! We’re all fucked!”

Jelal doesn’t open his eyes. “Just get us up there. Deladrier’s the sharpest pilot I’ve ever seen,” he says, with unflappable calm. “She won’t leave us behind.” He looks at Flores. Medics are opening his suit, performing emergency first aid. “We don’t leave our own behind,” he reiterates forcefully.

A medic looks over, shakes his head silently as Flores’ biomonitors flatline.

“Not while there’s even the smallest hope,” Rico whispers.

Liam Feng

And that is how the cinematic adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal military-SF masterpiece Starship Troopers should have started: with all of the pathos, action, and emotional intensity of the novel’s famous first chapter. I’ve taken extensive liberties with the source material, but in my head, this is what the first ten minutes or so of the movie would look like. If it had been a good movie.

But it was not.

Instead, director Paul Verhoeven served up Saved By the Bugs, a cheesy 90’s high-school drama cum college movie which felt more like Beverly Hills 90210 than Full Metal Jacket, liberally slathered with unnecessary sexual drama and drenched in hamfisted satire of the source material, with all of the coolest elements – the powered armour, the orbital drops, the backpack nukes – conspicuously stripped out.

I’ve read that Verhoeven claimed the powered armour was left out for budgetary reasons, but this has always struck me as a weak excuse. The budget had enough for CGI bugs and CGI spaceships, so CGI powered armour wouldn’t have stretched the budget at all. That’s like Blizzard saying that after they animated the Zerg, they didn’t have enough left over for the Terrans. Utterly absurd.

AlienT

That’s to say nothing of the gaudy high-tech training facility the film set the boot camp scenes in, which was an utterly superfluous waste of money. In the novel, the boot camp was deliberately low-tech: some tents out in the middle of a grassy field a hundred miles from nowhere. The recruits didn’t learn how to use high-tech weapons until they’d learned to make their entire body, their entire being, into weapons; that’s the origin of the famous scene in the movie in which Sergeant Zim chucks a knife through Ace’s hand (in the book, Zim merely describes the possibility of doing this as an example of how a warrior armed with a low-tech weapon can disable someone with a high-tech weapon: can’t use the high-tech weapon if you can’t use your hand. Zim doesn’t actually stab one of his own troops). Graduation includes a fun exercise where they’re dropped naked and alone in the middle of the Rockies, with the objective of making it back to civilization alive; recruits were expected to hunt their own food and make their own shelter, using whatever tools they could improvise from the natural environment. They were expected to be just as dangerous as cavemen as they were wearing powered armour. That’s one of the many scenes from the novel which is sadly missing from Verhoeven’s movie.

You may be getting the idea that I am not a big fan of Verhoeven’s execrable adaptation, and you would be correct. Some of you may be surprised by this. I expect many readers have only seen the movie, and of those who have read the book, the younger readers probably saw the movie first, and have a nostalgic attachment to it.

Look, you might say this is personal for me.

I was ecstatic when I found out Starship Troopers was being brought to the silver screen. This was, by far, my favourite science-fiction novel of all time. Not only was it the pioneering archetype for the military science-fiction subgenre, but it introduced at least three novel concepts that have since become tropes: powered armour, which went on to inspire half of Japanese anime, along with Ironman, the Adeptus Astartes of Warhammer 40K, the Terran faction in Starcraft, Halo’s Spartans, the Battletech games, and by now makes an appearance in practically every science-fiction universe you can name; the orbital drop, in which armoured space marines are fired down to the surface in drop capsules like living bullets, which also appears in 40K and Halo, and plays a prominent role in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series by way of the planet-breaking Iron Rain tactic; and the insectoid alien hive mind, seen also in 40K’s Tyrannids, Starcraft’s Zerg, and numerous lesser-known works. As if this creative efflorescence was not enough, Heinlein’s novel grappled with the weighty issue of the moral philosophy of organized violence and its relationship to human politics in a deeply serious way, using the coming-of-age story of a young man turned soldier during an existential war for the survival of the human species as the dramatic frame for the philosophical exposition. Heinlein did all of this in just over 80,000 words – a short, fun read accessible to a bright ten-year-old.

James Warhola

Ignacio Bazan-Lazcano

Evan Pavich

Akshually a depiction of an Iron Rain from the Red Rising novels, but also kind of what I imagine an orbital drop looking like. Jovan Dosenovic

The travesty that confronted me therefore filled me with a hot rage.

The reason Verhoeven left out the powered armour is quite simple: it was too cool, and his intention was not to make the Mobile Infantry look cool. His intention was to ridicule the philosophical position that Heinlein put forward in the book: that violence is at the heart of the political, and cultures – or species – who forget this, get rolled by the ones who don’t.

Liberals have been appalled by Starship Troopers since it was published, considering it a work of warmongering crypto-fascist apologetics, with very light emphasis on the ‘crypto’. They’ve been somewhat baffled by it, as well: how could the man who wrote the hippie free love bible Stranger in a Strange Land, or the libertarian anti-state manifesto The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, argue so compellingly for a society in which ‘service guarantees citizenship’, thereby ensuring that political power forever remains firmly in the hands of the military (or, rather, veterans of the military)? What sort of right-wing maniac gleefully smashes the beloved idol of ‘violence never solves anything’ to replace it with the dictum that nothing in history has solved so many issues so decisively as violence; insists that communism isn’t only a bad thing but wholly unsuited to human beings (although very well-suited to insectoid hive-mind aliens); and insinuates that letting the scientists run society ‘rationally’ according to the principles of managerial technocracy would bring about its ruin?

Verhoeven, as a good liberal, therefore set out to make the novel’s arguments look ridiculous.

Not by arguing against them – there are no good arguments against them, only the liberal’s favoured old chestnut ‘this gives me the sads’.

No, Verhoeven just surrounded the arguments with ridiculousness.

The powered armour had to be taken away because showing the Mobile Infantry as titanic forces of destruction, a single platoon of which could reduce an entire city to smoking ruins in a matter of minutes, would be way too cool. Can’t have that. Instead, they were given Stormtrooper armour and little peashooters that were comically underpowered next to the beasts they were meant to be fighting.

Next, the bugs had to be changed. In the novel they are a technological, space-faring species, the equal of humanity in every way. The reason for the war is that bugs and humans need exactly the same planets, but cannot share them. Once they started rubbing against one another, skirmishes were inevitable. Eventually, possibly in response to one of these numerous incidents, the bugs dropped an asteroid on Buenos Aires, which is when the Third Space War, the Fourth Space War, the First Interstellar War (depending on which historian you ask), or the Bug War (if you ask one of the grunts fighting it) formally starts, but one way or another war was always inevitable.

In the movie, Verhoeven removes the bugs’ technology, and has them fling an asteroid via unspecified means from the other side of the Milky Way. This is obviously stupid, and can be taken one of two ways: screenwriters are scientific illiterates with no sense of sheer scale of universe and who don’t know the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, and these MA Fine Literature graduates came up with the idea in a coke-fueled mania surround by the purple haze of bong smoke; or this was a deliberate choice, meant to subtly imply that the asteroid attack was an inside job, man, and the Terran Federation’s propagandized masses are too thick to pick up on the obvious inconsistencies in the official narrative. The second option is a fan theory much beloved of the film’s leftist apologists. Unfortunately for this theory, Verhoeven himself has confirmed that the bugs really did drop the meteor that destroyed Buenos Aires, thus confirming my own instinctive impression that the absurdity goes no deeper than the usual stupidity of Hollyweird’s hack creatives.

The rest of the movie’s attempt at satire is largely aesthetic. There are lots of little propaganda interludes thrown in to demonstrate the Terran Federation’s hamfisted approach to managing public opinion (‘Would you like to know more?’). Just to make sure you get the message that the Federation are fascists, they’re done up in knock-off Prussian greys, peaked caps, and Gestapo trench coats. Finally, there’s the general atmosphere of unserious silliness that pervades the entire film: the characters are all portrayed as vain, shallow children inhabiting a neon-lit laser-tag playground, in order to drive home the vibe that everything you hear in the movie – the lectures in the history and moral philosophy class especially – is obviously silly.

This is similar to the Hollywood trick of putting true things you want to discredit in the mouth of the bad guy, in order to refute them, not by arguing against them, but by getting the audience to associate those ideas with villainy, and then reminding the audience of what happens to villains by shooting the bad guy saying the bad true things in his bad face for good measure. It’s a neat, emotionally manipulative trick, and they’ve been doing this for decades.

So anyhow, my first reaction to this movie was to forget all about it in disgust.

Imagine my surprise when, many years later, it resurfaced as an underground cult classic in the dissident right, given a second life by memes.

It seemed that a whole generation of young guys had watched the movie when they were kids, responded with “this is the coolest thing ever, actually,” casually peeled off the clumsy satire and chucked it aside, and imbibed the lessons about service, citizenship, sacrifice, and the salutary effects of decisive and disciplined organized violence that Heinlein had been trying to impart in the first place. Verhoeven’s attempted hermeneutic gatekeeping was wholly a failure.

The left absolutely hates this, which has led to a perennial argument that flares up now and then over the correct interpretation of Starship Troopers (it’s flaring up again now (it’s partially my fault)).

Almost 700k views, did not expect that.

The debate goes something like this:

Leftists: “You chuds are clearly too stupid to realize that the movie was a satire! The Terran Federation are obviously the bad guys! The bugs are good boys who dindu nuffin! The asteroid attack on Buenos Aires was clearly a false flag so the fascist imperalists of the Terran Federation could have an excuse to invade the innocent bugs and take their planet! You guys are too stupid to understand basic media literacy!”

To which rightists respond, as we are wont, with memes:

You might infer from this that the right is media illiterate. If so, you would be a midwit. What this demonstrates is, in fact, an effortlessly instinctive high mastery of media literacy, one that transcends the left’s increasingly ineffectual narrative control.

The argument the left always advances in this case is that, because Verhoeven intended his movie as a satire of fascism, any use of symbolism from the movie for rightist ends is ipso facto a misapplication, and evidence that the rightist user was too stupid to understand the actual meaning of the film.

What is actually happening is simply that the right has used memes to appropriate the meaning of the film, and alter it towards its own ends. This is fair game because this is precisely what Verhoeven did in the first place. Verhoeven didn’t so much ignore as invert the authorial intent, presenting a twisted version of Heinlein’s narrative in order to make the story say what Verhoeven wanted it to say, which was the opposite of what Heinlein himself was saying. In effect he wrapped a creative work composed in one form of media in a second form of media, which he used to invert the meaning of the original, like flipping an image upside down by sending the light through a lens. The right then simply wrapped Verhoeven’s film in a third layer of media – memes – and used this to invert the film’s meaning. In doing so, the right actually restored the original authorial intent: by subverting Verhoeven’s subversion, Heinlein’s intended meaning is once again made clear.

Ivan Vujovic

I think this is a very obvious thing, and it seems to me that there is almost no one on the right who needs this explained to them – it’s intuitively obvious to everyone. At the same time, it seems there is no one on the left to whom this can be explained, but then, they’re trapped in the position of arguing that the authorial intent of a film director is sacrosanct for reasons that mysteriously do not apply to the authorial intent of the original writer. If leftists didn’t have double standards they’d have no standards at all.

Look, I’m not even arguing that one must only interpret a text according to the author’s intent. That’s not remotely true – but it was also the left who announced ‘the death of the author’ and set about deconstructing texts to insert whatever imagined meanings they want into them, and it’s always amusing to find that somehow the only authors meant to die are the authors the left doesn’t like. Sorry, doesn’t work that way. Hoist, petard.

What’s much more interesting than the characteristically dishonest style of debate the left adopts on this subject is that the communists seem to instinctively identify with the alien over the human. This preference for the far over the near – oikophobia masked as xenophilia – is a well-established leftist trait.

If you haven’t seen that graph before, it is the result of surveys asking people where the furthest reach of their moral concern lies, from the self out to the entire universe. Conservatives are far more concerned with their immediate families than they are with underprivileged Ethiopian children or inanimate rocks orbiting a lifeless white dwarf on the far side of the Andromeda galaxy, whereas liberals claim to be as concerned with the well-being of the Cosmic Microwave Background as they are with their own babies. There’s some debate over the meaning of the graph, with pedants loving to point out that the study was actually demonstrating only that liberals cared about the Cosmic Microwave Background as well as their own babies, not necessarily more than or instead of; however, the actual truth is that one has only a limited supply of love, for the simple reason that one has only a limited supply of energy and time, and it follows from this that if one directs one’s energy and time towards care for the distant, one necessarily deprives the near of the attention and affection one might give them ... and I think we’ve all encountered enough liberals who claim to love humanity but treat the actual humans in their lives like garbage to know the truth of that.

If love gets spread too thin, it becomes meaningless. You’re supposed to care the most about the people closest to you: family over neighbours, neighbours over strangers, nation over race, race over species, species over xeno.

Marek Okon

You see the same sort of divide in the left’s identification with the alien Na’vi, whereas the right instinctively identifies with the human invaders of Pandora.

Rare right-wing textwall

But the left’s rabid identification with the bugs is far more revealing. The Na’vi are easy to love: they’re charismatic and noble, and after all they are simply defending their home from invasion. Conversely, taking the side of the greedy, ecologically callous humans of the Avatar universe requires a fair bit of distance from the narrative.

The bugs, on the other hand, are hideous creatures with an incomprehensible hive consciousness who have a taste for human flesh and consider human neurological tissue a particular delicacy.

The schizo I’m quote-tweeting here spammed the same Sartre quote like a dozen times in my mentions.

This is almost like an unintentional long troll on Heinlein’s part, which came to fruition several decades following its initiation. The bugs are a metaphor for communism, and this is not particularly subtle. We see this first in the Terran Federation’s backstory, which emerges from the wreckage of a world shattered by a global war of the West against the communist Chinese Hegemony. This is made more explicit later in the novel, when Rico reflects that the bugs – unlike humans – are perfectly evolved for communism, and that this means the human species is for the first time facing the full, terrifying efficiency of the communist system.

Heinlein depicted communists as hideous world-devouring giant insects, and a couple generations later, the idiot descendants of the communists that have degenerated from his own time come along and say, yes, we identify with the hideous world-devouring giant insects, actually. I don’t think for a moment that Heinlein ever expected the commies to say “Yes, we are the bugs.” I expect he would have shaken his head and declared that these must be the Crazy Years.

Commies seem to have an unerring instinct to side with whatever is ugly, vicious, and murderously opposed to human civilization, and indeed the continued existence of the human species itself.

You have to wonder why that might be.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to suggest that communists reliably adopt every anti-human policy one can imagine, working tirelessly to retard or pervert the scientific, technological, economic, biological, and spiritual development of our species in the service of hostile hyperdimensional xenomorphs whose interests are diametrically opposed to our own.

That would be crazy.

Besides, that’s the plot of another science fiction franchise entirely.

Jeff Brown

But while leftoidardation is probably mostly just an emergent effect of high mutational load, it’s striking how the left reliably behaves just as if it were the cat’s paw of hostile xenos.

And if I was a hostile alien intelligence working tirelessly to subvert the will of the human species, I would absolutely hate to see a faithful adaptation of a story depicting a united humanity unapologetically crushing its extraterrestrial adversaries in the cold titanium fist of a Marauder suit.

If you would like to know more, this essay shows the influence of Starship Troopers’ history & moral philosophy lectures rather plainly:

As always, my gratitude towards my supporters is impossible to exaggerate. You are what makes it possible for me to spend all day doing things like writing about my favourite science fiction novel. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much I enjoyed writing it. And if you did, and perchance find yourself amongst the crowd who enjoy receiving Postcards from Barsoom for free, and further perchance feel a tickle of conscience over that fact, and would like to be able to say ‘I’m Doing My Part’, well all you have to do is