[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by EatingPie

As taught in my Science Fiction class, Heinlein was frustrated by his inability to fully serve in the military. Frustrated even further that he had very good ideas for military theory and strategy that he thought would benefit the country. But his illness cut his career short, and he didn't have the chance to gain a rank in which to properly convey his ideas.

With all due respect to you and your class, I think they got it utterly wrong.

I met Heinlein. I know people who knew him reasonably well. He was certainly unhappy about being invalided out of the Navy and unable to serve actively in WWII, but ST is not a product of his frustration.

The very point I'm making is that I do recognize the type of book he was writing! You are confusing "type of book" and "audience of book."

Nope.

You are confusing structure with theme, and do not recognize the type of book he was writing.

I say again, _Starship Troopers_ is a coming of age story. Johhny Rico is the spoiled only son of a wealthy manufacturer who assumes he will finish high school, go to college, and eventually inherit the family business. He signs up for a term of government service because his friends are and he wants to be with them and follow their lead. He certainly doesn't do so for the the abstract privilege of the right to vote. His own position in society makes clear that right is not essential to success or happiness.

The target audience was probably the YA market. And were I Heinlein, I would have thought that perfect! Young, moldable minds that he could influence with his notions of military theory. Certainly having a young soldier, and three (or so) short stories about his battles, make great YA fiction. But the military theory is still there, between missions.

Reread the book. Heinlein isn't pushing military theory (and the theory would be of dubious value if he were, because the concepts rely on technology unavailable when the book was written.)

Heinlein was pushing responsibility and the notion of citizenship. He's discussing what is required to be a member of a functioning society, and that the converse of rights is responsibilities. If you do not accept and discharge responsibilities, you will be unlikely to get or retain rights, because rights require a functioning society to grant them.

Johnny Rico grows up in the MI. He learns to be responsible, first for himself as a Trained Private, then for his mates as an NCO, and finally in part for the human race as a commissioned officer. It's a story of moral development, and Rico's growth and change can be charted by the different answers he gives to "Why we fight" at different parts of the book.

Essentially, Rico is a character in literature. He is presented with a challenge, and must either grow and change to meet the challenge or fail and possibly die. In his case, the challenge is a threat to the existence of his society and his species by an antithetical alien society, but the story is fundamentally about growth and change.

Note that what I am saying does not contradict anything said about Johnny Rico. The theme of personal responsibility is there, sure. But the military theory is there too. A (very politically minded) friend of mine loves to cite Heinlein's philosophy that only those who served in the military could vote or (I believe) hold office. You had to earn it, to prove your mettle, or to prove you cared.

Yes, you did have to earn the franchise. But the military was only one form of government service that qualified. What was essential was that you successfully completed your term. What you did while serving was another matter.

The difference lies in the source... or the purpose. Heinlein wanted to teach his military theory, and that's exactly what he does. And he takes those theories to their logical conclusion, so to speak.

If you think what he was teaching was military theory, you probably shouldn't attempt to read Heinlein, because you've completed missed his points. He's saying stuff that was sometimes covered in high school social studies classes. (Hopefully it still is, but I'm cynical about current education.)

Essentially, whenever people live together in groups, there must be agreement on what constitutes acceptable behavior, and what the ground rules of the society will be. There have been a wide variety of approaches to societies throughout human history, and ST touches on an assortment. But as ST makes clear, the one that exists in the world it portrays arose after the collapse of a previous one in the stress of a major war. It's hardly the only kind possible, nor is it necessarily the "best". But it passes the utterly pragmatic test: it works, and continues to function and provide a society most folks find acceptable.

Heinlein was friends with Hubbard, and the earliest form of Dianetics first appeared in "Amazing Science Fiction" magazine, published by John Campbell... who I believe was already noted as Heinlein's editor for a while. So Dianetics was very much known to him, and while Heinlein may not have accepted the philosophy, it proved a good basis -- a bottom-floor philosophical framework -- to justify the military society.

Nope. That chain of logic is not strong enough to support that conclusion.

Yes, Hubbard published the first material on Dianetics in the pages of John W. Campbell's Astounding. He did it, among other reasons, to win a bet made at a party that he could con John Campbell. Campbell had a penchant for oddball theories. He was firmly convinced there was a military-industrial complex that was ignoring or deliberately burying promising ideas that didn't agree with the prevailing wisdom, and gave space in his pages to things like astrological weather forecasting and the Dean Drive (which appeared to violate conservation of energy. Hubbard told Campbell among other things that it would cure his chronic sinusitus, and Campbell bit. The result was runaway early success for Dianetics, which later morphed into Scientology after Hubbard sold his interest and retired to a yacht in the Mediterranean.

But I don't think you'll find much of Dianetics underlying the philosophy in ST. Dianetics is largely a straight rip of Freud, though Scientology is firmly against orthodox psychiatry and considers Freud an abomination. I suspect Hubbard was mostly filing off the serial numbers and preventing people from discovering where he got the ideas. But Freud had published _The Interpretation of Dreams_ in German in 1899, and it had been translated to English by 1911. It seems quite likely Hubbard was aware of Freud's work.
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Dennis