THIS MEANS WAR!

Heinlein’s original vision

Robert Heinlein’s 1959 young adult novel

Starship Troopers is one of the best-known science fiction novels in history. However, it is also immensely controversial due to its seemingly right-wing portrayal of an unabashedly militaristic world in which the rights of citizenship can only be acquired through service to the state, including armed combat. Heinlein’s message was about personal responsibility, summed up by the line: “the noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.”

Starship Troopers’ director Paul Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied europe during World War II, didn’t

finish reading it.