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Originally Posted by EatingPie
Starship Troopers was not a novel, but his treatise on military theory -- again, espoused by a fictional character -- sandwiched between three short stories. He leveraged atheistic-Scientology as the philosophical backbone for a military society. I'm absolutely sure the movie had RAH spinning in his grave, which was the only reason I liked the movie!
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Absolutely not. Neither atheism nor Scientology are part of the underpinning. (To my knowledge, RAH was agnostic and Libertarian.)
Starship Troopers is a "coming of age" story, which I believe was originally intended for the Scribners Juvenile/YA line he did an assortment of earlier books for. Johnny Rico grows up and learns to take responsibility, first for himself, as a Trained Private in the Mobile Infantry, then for others, as a non-commissioned officer in the MI, and finally for the human race, as a commissioned officer. His moral development can be charted by the different answers he gives to "Why we fight" at different stages of the book.
You may disagree with the author's philosophy, but you won't get very far if you don't at least recognize what kind of book the author was writing.
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Like L. Ron Hubbard, he is on my list of Golden Agers avoid at all costs (sad that I even have such a list, since that is my favorite era of SF).
-Pie
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Hubbard isn't "avoid at all costs". He was a competant pulp writer, who did some nice stuff for John W. Campbell's Unknown Worlds fantasy magazine, and some at least readable SF. (I carefully
exclude the "Old Doc Methuslah" stories from that list.) By all means
do avoid Dianetics and all things subsequent to it.
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Dennis