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Starship Troopers

Decent Essays

I have since heard the book and its message described as fascistic, provocative, irresponsible, unpalatable. This it may well be. Yet I found reading his book to be an amazingly sobering and dispiriting affair. One can really drink up the spirit of a man in reading his prose, and I fear Heinlein to be not someone with whom I want to share a beer or be friends. I read later that he was a career military officer who developed tuberculosis and was invalided out of the fleet to a literary career. There hangs about this book a severe and cynical air of wounded world-weariness, as if life is a dreary and dangerous affair requiring toughness and discipline to survive. He nearly models Sparta in his apotheosis of rigorous military training as …show more content…

But what about the heroes of the mind and the spirit? What about those heroes who give inspiration to fallible persons prone to despair? What about the battle between good and evil which rages inside everyone of us everyday? The struggle to find meaning in a life worth living? I would argue they are at least as important to a society worth living in. Who among us in the dark of a long night has not contemplated suicide? Who will make the argument in Heinlein's world not to do so? In my opinion, Heinlein's world is one in which I daresay not many people would like to live - where suicide might even be understandable! Our world - for all its barbarity, "decadence," hatred, chaos - is also one with art, love, and, most importantly, hope. We might live in a "hard cold world" where "life sucks and then you die," as one hears cynically stated in the streets. But that is not all that it is! Not by a long shot! And I would argue that point until I am blue in the face! Of all the evils - disease, cruelty, poverty, death - which Zeus placed in Pandora's box, he did place one good thing lastly without which life is unbearable: hope.

I dare to hope my descendents will not be hopping around hostile planets in powered suits dropping thermonuclear weapons onto alien creatures; that homo sapiens will be as cruel and violent a species in the future as they are presently is a concept almost enough to kill hope. I would kill if I have to; but I will live for my fellow

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