BUG-WARS
Already Starship Troopers is shaping up to be the first cineplex sci-fi Blockbuster of 98. It has waves of ferocious Arachnoids, monster bugs boiling up out of the ground, and outlandish fast-track spacecraft, all made vivid pulsating red, brown and yellow flesh through the good graces of director Paul Verhoeven. The style of the movie, from highsSchool, to boot camp, to war is really a classic build-up, like the war movies of the 40s and 50s, Verhoeven explains in thick wedges of Dutch accent. Except this is 5,000 years into the future, and the Terran Federation is at war with a race of giant alien insects.
Juan Johnny Rico is one of the Troopers who are blasted towards hostile planets like cartridges feeding into the chamber of an old-style automatic weapon from orbiting Starships. The Troopers are narcotically-primed, hypnotised, and strapped into individual tank-like carapace-suits. Each suit is fitted with a battery of A -Bomb rocket launchers each providing a two kiloton nuclear-yield, with flamers, and infra-red snoopers, plus talking HE bombs launched from shoulder-borne Y -Racks. And each posseses a pseudo-musculature of jump-jets, giving them the ability to leap tall alien buildings at a single bound.
The Trooper s assault on Klendathu, the aliens home-world, is the movie s centre-piece. Their disastrous attack hits fanatical resistance from fire-bugs who eject lethal energy-buzz comet-bursts like the grotesque pollination of hideous flowers, and ferocious warrior hyper-Mantids. Burn off one leg, two legs, three legs, and he just keeps on coming, explains Rico, burn off four on one side and he topples over but keeps on shooting. You have to spot the nerve case and get it . . . whereupon he will trot right on past you, shooting at nothing, until he crashes into a wall or something.
The computer-generated effects are state-of-the-art. But this movie is all of 40 years in the making . . . for here you see not the next instalment, but the origins of 2000 AD s genetically engineered Rogue Trooper, or TV s militaristic Space: Above And Beyond. You might think extraterrestrial Top Gun , or G.I. Jane in Space , but it all began long before that. The story debuted in 1959, serialised (under its then-title Starship Soldier) through the October and November issues of The Magazine Of Fantasy And SF.
Its author never lived to see the resulting movie. He died on the 8th May 1988. Controversialist Robert A (for Anson) Heinlein was one of the great iconoclasts of early SF, a sage whose mind teemed with an awe-inspiring repertoire of enticing mechanistic hardware capable of programming the wildest and most extravagant of adolescent dreams. And the capacity for making the most personal of visions seem touchable. In person he could be demanding and charismatic, a theatrically handsome man with a little black moustache and a suave, self-possessed manner (according to L Sprague de Camp). But from the start his fiction was also sullied by a poisoning of authoritarianism. To fellow writer Frederick Pohl, Heinlein was not only great, but defined what was great in science fiction . Yet even Verhoeven talks of Heinlein s crypto-fascist tendencies.
Was Heinlein a fascist? Such responses as exist come wriggling with ambivalence. He was virulently, but unpredictably Right-Wing. He never missed an opportunity to attack the tragic wrongness of liberal education and was fiercely opposed to what he called the magnificent fraud of Communism. But that s not necessarily the same thing. Was he a fascist ?
It s all here in Starship Troopers. Implicit in all that shiny technological killware. All that hyper-megaton machismo. It portrays the kind of boneheaded excessively masculine culture that Harry Harrison brilliantly and accurately spoofs in Bill The Galactic Hero. Yet bizarrely, Heinlein s other notable novel, Stranger In A Strange Land, became a caring, sharing hippie Bible with its messianic message of transfiguration and communal sex. Even if one of those hippie collectives mesmerised by its beguiling mystique and enacting its water-sharing group-groping rituals was the Family led by well-known liberal and mass-murderer Charlie Manson. I recall a drooling hippie pleading with me, where to find this most holy grimoire of esoteric wisdoms, this Stranger In A Strange Land? and his expression of total mind-fuck when I told him . . . W.H. Smith s, SF paperback section!
I d given up being surprised by Heinlein long before that. I read Starship Troopers as a kid. Enjoyed it. Not as much as I enjoyed Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg or H.G. Wells. But I enjoyed it as good, unremitting, hard SF, while missing most of its political subtext. Re-reading it now in preparation for the movie, it s impossible to miss.
HISTORIAN OF THE FUTURE
Robert A Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri, in 1907 and although supposedly space-happy since I was a pup , his first story Lifeline, didn t appear until the August 1939 issue of Astounding, published the month that World War II broke out in Europe. He d begun as a US Naval Gunnery Officer, serving a six-year stint until pulmonary tuberculosis forced him to quit prematurely in 1934. Health problems also affected, and eventually curtailed, his subsequent studies at UCLA into maths and physics. So instead he moved into real estate, engineering, politics, silver mining, and architecture. He designed his own house in Colorado Springs, allegedly defaulted on the mortgage repayments, and finally took up writing SF to make up the cash shortfall.
By then he was already 32 years old, but to Arthur C. Clarke this relative late-comer was to dominate the Science Fiction sky for the next half century, and effect a permanent change upon the pattern of its constellations . Science fiction, to Clarke, forces one to think . . . which is why so many people dislike it , and Heinlein s complex political algebra is a perfect illustration of his theory. With the teeming galaxy and all of time at his disposal Heinlein soon incandesced the pulp market with novels and 30-odd short stories in which he constructed his Future History (using aliases as diverse as Anson MacDonald, Lyle Munroe or Caleb Saunders to disguise the fact that he was appearing more than once in the same magazine issue).
He predicted war in 1987, in which a Russo-Anglo-US Alliance fought the Chinese Hegemony. I read the papers, but I must have missed that one. While between 1975 and century s end, millionaire Delos D Harriman finances the first lunar trip (in The Man Who Sold The Moon), providing a privatised moon-base as the first step in human colonisation of the solar system . . . until revolution in the USA brings the space programme to a halt !
In an interview in the current issue of the excellent SFX magazine Paul Verhoeven points out that it s not clear from the novel who are Starship Trooper s aggressors humans or arachnoids. Buenos Aires gets smeared to radioactive dust . But the situation, seen from Rico s point of view, merely escalates from incidents to police actions to interstellar war. It s not Rico s place to know. And that s typical Heinlein. Unlike previous fantasists to whom characters were single-dimensional ciphers standing in for scientific theory, from the beginning Heinlein sketched out huge galactic changes as background dressing for his plots.
Starship Troopers, despite its lavish Starships, genetically engineered neo-dogs, and convincing alien species, is essentially concerned with Rico s progress from a raw recruit who never really intended to join up , through his coming of age, into Officerhood, over the spiritual hump and into Heinlein s uncompromising definition of maturity , which is as follows: not just a producing-consuming economic animal . . . but a man . He s the cadet who learns to be a warrior leading his own platoon, in preparation for the kind of conflict America would soon learn to abhor. Vietnam is just around the time-bend, and here is Heinlein, for the first time, explicitly setting his face against liberal values. Questioning honour and duty are poisons that sap American manhood. And it s somewhere here, within this brutish back-slapping militarism, that Heinlein sees the resolution of the apparent contradiction between individualism and authoritarianism.
Rico finds himself in a boot camp which uses disciplinary floggings as an integral part of a military training programme so intense that brainwashing is a rest-cure by comparison. Harry Harrison invents a ferocious drill-sergeant called Deathwish Drang who has implanted fangs to further terrify his troops. He appears in a sequence satirising the one in which Rico is told: I want to remind you apes that each and every one of you has cost the gov ment, counting weapons, armour, ammo, instrumentation, and training, everything including the way you over-eat, has cost, on the hoof, better n half a million. Add in the thirty cents you are actually worth and that runs to quite a sum. So bring it back! We can spare you, but we can t spare that fancy suit you re wearing. Rico is taught that Liberty is never unalienable, it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots (Heinlein misquoting Thomas Jefferson!), and democratic rights must be earned, only ex-Troopers are entitled to vote. But in the meantime, Rico s is not to reason why. He s just the universal soldier who gives his body as a weapon. Such tendencies exist in Heinlein s earlier stories, but it s here in Starship Troopers that he first nakedly sets himself up as an objectionable ideologue of the Right.
HIS MACULATE ORIGIN
Soon after his first SF successes Heinlein was obliged to re-enter military service to do war-work. He specialised, according to SF lore, in radar and other hush-hush high security projects as a civilian engineer for the Naval Air Experimental Station. But following the cessation of hostilities, which he d already ended fictionally with a Nazi-busting radio-active dust, he effected further changes. Estranged from his former mentor, John W Campbell Jr of Astounding magazine, he relaunched his career with what began as a cycle of juvenile novels. And although never a card-carrying rightist, his new fiction progressively promulgated contentious notions about politics, race, gender and military values. Even his new publishers, Scribners, initially balked at presenting a story as savage as Starship Troopers to what they perceived as an essentially adolescent readership, so rival Putnam s took it.
Increasingly thick and ponderously didactic novels followed, ditching all regard for social or editorial taboos along the way. There was digression over development, and tedious harangues, in equal part fascinating and irritating, spelt out with undisguised clarity in which he mercilessly dissed liberals, Commies, ecologists, do-gooders and Government apparatchiks. An elephant is a mouse built to Government specifications, he sneers, while of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous .
There s some weird racism in Farnham s Freehold in which blacks keep herds of white slaves as meat animals for cannibalism. That s meant to be a satire on apartheid, surely ? (After all, isn t Juan Rico by implication Hispanic ?). There s sexual imperialism in I Will Fear No Evil where an old man s brain gets transplanted into the body of his female secretary. And in Time Enough For Love, Heinlein pens a time-spanning trawl through the exploits of the immortal Oedipally-inclined Lazarus Long. He s spunky, spermy, pugnacious and argumentative, he s always right, and usually right-wing. Women count it a privilege to have sex with him, even though the sex is unconvincingly portrayed ( He touched her right mammary gland !!!). He even time-travels back to breed with his own mother and populates an entire town with his progeny.
Heinlein had always portrayed the competent dominant male. Now that general tendency was hardening into greater rigidity as novel followed novel. And if I m using phallic analogies here, then yes that too. The many characters in The Number Of The Beast all seem to speak a single Heinleinian vocabulary that brooks no argument, and all at the expense of the plot. Radical heroes and flag-waving messiahs indulge in long rambling sermons about zero tolerance and exaggerated respect for law and order, self-discipline and individual freedom earned, not granted as a right.
Stranger In A Strange Land published in 1961, was not only the longest and fattest SF novel ever, but also the first to cross-over into the domain of the mainstream blockbuster. It was re-released in 1991 in an even-more massive un-cut edition. Yet it remains the genre s most notorious book, by turns talky, gripping, prolix and very subversive. Superbeing Valentine Michael Smith, raised by psionic Martians, finds human society incomprehensible. Ageing Jubal Harshaw, Heinlein s voice , acts as his radical libertarian guide in passages of interminable verbosity. Experience everything with your magic touch, urges Valentine s cantankerous fatherly protector, from group sex without guilt or commitment, to cannibalism. Smith, by now the Guru of an invented religion, finally discorporates to a higher astral plane of consciousness in a vague religious fug.
To Heinlein, individual action is always valued over regard for others. And debate-sequences are contrived as early as Starship Troopers. to lecture on his ideas. There is no natural morality. There is only the survival imperative. Peaceful societies get devoured by predators, be they nations, races, or species. Neither humans or Arachnoids are the bad guys . And neither have a greater claim to rightness . They merely compete to inhabit the same universe. It s left to galactic posterity to determine fitness. As a thinker, comments SF historian Brian Aldiss, Heinlein is primitive . He just has an adroit way of dropping in telling detail when needed, to provide a convincing illusion of authenticity.
The posthumously published Grumbles From The Grave reveals a profoundly unhappy man, mawkish and grouchy, plagued by the returning ill-health that would affect him throughout the 1970s. While disciple Charles Manson, out on federal parole as early as the mid- 60s, was already talking Heinleinian Strange Land terminology, using Grok (to look or understand), Thou Art God and Share Water to enhance his dubious mystique. He even nick-named his Parole Officer Jubal . . .
TO GROK, OR NOT TO GROK ?
Starship Troopers was not Robert A. Heinlein s first movie. Destination Moon (1950) got in first, beating Verhoeven by nearly half a century. It began as a juvenile novel called Rocket-Ship Galileo, but a modest effects bill of $750,000 and the sympathetic direction of George Pal worked Heinlein s script up into what was then considered a pseudo-documentary of plausible speculation. A sober, serious, and brightly lit little film. Having private enterprise mount the mission says more about Heinlein s political bias than it does about realistic astronautics, plus there s the use of a sleek streamlined rocket with flash tailfins but no multi-stage launcher technology.
Yet enthusiastic TV astronomer Patrick Moore burbles on about how the vastness of space dominates the whole film, despite the fact that the studio with a little help from SF artist Chesley Bonestell redesigned a carefully faked lunar surface because a realistic moon was considered too dull. It was, nevertheless, one of Hollywood s earliest attempts to take astronautics seriously, and was followed by the less successful low-budget Project Moonbase (1953), poster-billed Up! Up! Up! to a new world of adventure !!!
With typically Heinleinian humour the US president is a woman (Starship Troopers uses women pilots because their reactions are faster and they can tolerate more ) while complex ideas of space travel are introduced using a Disney-style cartoon sequence much as Jurassic Park will do. But, beyond a TV adaptation of his The Green Hills Of Earth for ABC sTales Of Tomorrow series, there were to be no further visual adaptations from the man John Clute called the most influential figure in the history of American SF . . . until now!
Paul Verhoeven s Science Fictional credits are similarly impeccable. He directed Robocop (1986) and based Arnold Schwarzenegger s finest movie moment Total Recall (1990) around a Philip K Dick short story. And, erm, he did Showgirls too (the less said the better). He knew that the creature designs for Starship Troopers were of pivotal importance, for this movie demands the most radical new monsters since the first Alien not just the Arachnoids who happen to look like a madman s conception of a giant intelligent spider , but a complex biosphere of other alien races too. So the effects come through Verhoeven via Phil Tippett, whose prior credits include Jurassic Park s retro-menagerie of velocoraptors and ravenous T Rex. And he s well up to the job. This is Arachnoid-phia on a one-way ticket to hell in stop-motion scenes of horror. Then there are the wide-screen space-scapes enhancing Heinlein s visions of future war . . .
But, of course, things have changed over the decades since Heinlein invented his galactic war-scenarios. In the novel, fingerprint identification is carried out, not electronically, but with a Jeweller s loupe ! And anyway, it now looks increasingly as though the design of future wars will eliminate the need for ground troops entirely. Even at the height of the Cold War, tacticians were dealing global exterminations triggered by protagonists bunkered continents apart to whom eye-to-eye contact was already a vague anachronism, while the Gulf War was media-gimmicked with electronically-targeted Smart laser-guided kill-ware that reduces conflict down to the level of a Sony Play Station programme with add-ons. More effective by far than the panoply of death in which Verhoeven s Heinlein s Troopers are dressed. But still, it makes for stunning viewing.
So was Heinlein a fascist? And should that even bother potential movie-goers? Well probably not, and perhaps. He was certainly way out on the extreme edge of what we now call the Libertarian Right. The catch-all fringe of anti-authoritarian Survivalist crackpots who fuel the pro-Gun Lobby and the X-Filed cults. But probably not, because he was far too much of an oddball to toe anyone s dogma. And for Heinlein s generation, war was a monstrously unavoidable reality. What followed, reacting against their parents propaganda-programmed patriotism, was a Cold War generation which fought guerrilla street-battles of anti-war protest against their continuing legacy of militarism.
To get to the second point, the generation Starship Troopers is targeted at is the first this century to whom war is just a tele-visual option. And all this alluring high-gloss Boys-2-Men Shoot- Em- Up Rites-of-Passage Top Gun testosterone machismo with its sleek pornography of mass global destruction can seem like hugely interactive fun. To Verhoeven, who claims the movie draws on his own childhood wartime memories in Nazi-occupied Holland, it might be saying War is Hell , but it s also saying, Whambo! Tech-War can be fun! It s a man s life. It could almost be sponsored by army recruitment with the shadowy presence of the military-industrial complex dealing the hardware of megadeath, smiling approvingly in the background . .
So, whether you decide to grok or not to grok, it s worth remembering that Starship Troopers began 40 years ago with the disturbed power-dreams of a crypto-fascist fantasist . . . you scan me? n