/lit/ - Literature

Starship Troopers, Childhood's End and The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Would recommend them all for sci-fi lovers.

>destroys nonfiction fags just passing by

>>19718070
Unironically this. Join a fight against aliens and come out a changed reader.

Will the world be better if the smartest rule? Will society work better if we let scientists make the decisions? Nay, Heinlein claims, scientists are often some of the most selfish men, and the requirement for proper rule derives from social virtue, which in turn comes from the ability to place your body between home and the terrors of war. Self-sacrifice is not practiced by the scientists. Has not history shown that a warrior caste of equal citizens make for the most enduring civilizations?

>>18855371

Compared to the movie that bears its name, the book is a different beast. Whereas the movie is almost a fascist ridicule and comedic take on a grave topic, the book is geared towards actual philosophical and political questions. Such a shame it took me so long to get around to it.

But on the topic of Heinlein's works, have anyone else actually read another of his works? Would you recommend those?

Seriously, fuck Starship Troopers. Why did Heinlein write a military book when he had absolutely no idea about how militaries work and absolutely no interest in describing what it was like to be in combat? After an admittedly cool intro sequence that I can only assume his editor forced him to include at gunpoint, Heinlein spends the rest of the book outright refusing to describe fights that he himself put Rico in. Battles are over in a paragraph, fistfights in a sentence that could be cumulatively summed up as "Rico beat them up with one hand tied behind his back and a rubber chicken in the other," except that's far too descriptive to be accurate. Every character that's not Rico is either A) A badass military man who regularly gets possessed by the author to explain his political views, B) A sadly misguided person who disagrees with the author's political views at first but eventually comes around or C) A woman. Or "girl" as he insistently refers to them. I don't think any word for vagina-possessing individual is ever used but "girl," which is impressive since he dedicates a fair amount of page space to laboriously assuring you that Rico is into them and is definitely not gay. At one point Rico mentions he went on a date, and he feels the need to include (with a girl, of course, and a pretty one too!). That's almost word for word, including the parentheses. Heinlein, after the two paragraphs you spent describing why Rico likes girls earlier in the chapter, I would give the guy the benefit of the doubt that his date was not a dude. You don't have to beat me over the head with it - except he does, because that's the only way Heinlein explains anything. This is a book about a future sci-fi shock trooper in powered armor who fights by either blowing things up with mininukes or burning them to death, and most of it is dedicated to what some asshole told him in Highschool.

>pick up expecting rip-roaring adventure story about killing bugs
>get 300 page tract on spanking children
what the fuck

So why do people think it's Fascism anyway?

is it really fascistic?

>Dad enlists at age 40 and gets assigned to the same ship
>Zim quits being a a career drill sargent and gets assigned to the same ship

What kind of retarded bullshit is this?

How does it answer the religion question?