Phil Gochenour’s essay “Utopia of Pain: Adolescent Anxiety and the Ideology of Narrative in Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers” in the Space Warriors issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction (#269) is an excellent and illuminating piece of criticism. Rather than ask which moral transgression the author is guilty of, a popular game, but not necessarily a useful one, we are asked to consider what sort of ideal the characters are being pointed towards.

It is an ideal that comes from within Heinlein as imaged for adolescent males. One which fosters the separation from the mother and the development of a self view in which the boy becomes a man, where the military replaces the family, and challenging replaces protecting. Continue reading →