I’m quite familiar with the Starship Troopers franchise, but it’s been described as a parody of Heinlen’s work rather than being true to it.
What were his philosophies, and were they actually so fascist and controversial that all the movies based on his work had to be made into parodies?
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I’m not sure what his “real” philophies were, but his novels had certain themes that ran through them.
1 – Variations on marriage, such as “line marriages” where the marriage has multiple husbands/wifes. People join (by vote of others) and then eventually die as they age. There are senior wives and husbands, with perogatives, often symbolic. The idea is the marriage can last an open ended amount of time. Based on all his stories, it’s clear he’s put a lot of thought into this.
2 – People should learn to be independant.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
3 – A weird combination of libertarianism, and devotion to the State. In some stories, the State is powerful and has hard rules we must follow to prove we are worthy of being citizens (Starship Troopers), to far more libertarian systems of minimal government and people running things locally (too many stories to list)
I’m assuming you didn’t read the book and have just seen the movie/tv shows?
Maybe my memory is faulty, it’s been several years, but in the book at least, I didn’t take it as fascism. It’s certainly a heavily militarized society on a war footing — maybe as an invented crisis to galvanize support. From what I remember of his description of society in the book though, it’s more like WW2 America than it is like a properly fascist country.
He was more right-leaning libertarian than anything else.
I personally don’t subscribe to his ideology, but I do like his books a lot! If you’re interested in his stuff, I’d suggest *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress* and *A Stranger in a Strange Land* for a more multi-dimensional and nuanced version of his personal political views.
*Stranger in a Strange Land* follows and paints a good picture of a free-thinking, free-love new-age religion and mocks mega church Christianity.
*Moon is a Harsh Mistress* is about freedom fighters trying to overthrow their colonial rulers.
They vary a lot over the years but basically they support anyone being allowed to do anything so long as it does not cause unnecessary harm to anyone else. And what doesn’t does not cause unnecessary harm or very depending upon one situation. So if you are in a situation where you can make sure your children don’t have double unhealthy alleles, you can afford to have sex with a close relative.
Obviously this gets more and more complicated the more you think about it. And eventually it just does not end up working at all.
For me, the biggest difference between the book and the movie was the scene where a recruit asks why the state needs a mobile infantry when they could just push a button and launch a nuke.
– In the movie, the drill instructor pins the recruit’s hand to the desk with a knife and says something like “you can’t push the button now.”
– In the book, Heinlein goes into a political discussion about the need and uses for limited warfare and police actions by the state. There is a line, iirc, about “you don’t spank a baby with a hand grenade.”
The movie continues in this vein, taking all the political points Heinlein tries to make and turning them into puerile trash.
The reason the film Starship Troopers is so different than the book is because the director, Paul Verhoeven, grew up in The Netherlands while they were under Nazi occupation and likes to make movies that satirize the more Fascist elements he sees in America.
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