Starship Troopers

"This is a story of war in the future with advanced weaponry against aliens. This story is so grounded, and so realistic – the way that the characters interact, their language, their lingo, the way the military is set up, the way they utilise their weaponry – everything is just pitch perfect. When you read it, you pretty quickly find – at least I did – that you aren’t worried that it is science fiction. I was thinking, ‘This is just so real, these are soldiers, and this could be Spartans fighting shoulder to shoulder – this could be a war that had occurred at any time.’ It’s just human soldiers fighting together, dying together, and that’s really what I took away from this – not the technology, or the crazy sci-fi aspects, and certainly not the political overtones. The politics are not my favourite part about this book, although Heinlein fans might have a different perspective. What really is great about this book to me is that all the science fiction just dissipates in the face of absolute veracity. And that’s something that I think if you’re writing this kind of stuff, you should aspire to. You shouldn’t focus on the gizmos. In this, the power armour is a suit of armour that powers your joints and makes you a lot stronger. These are commonly known as exoskeletons, and I’ve actually worn one of those at Berkeley Bionics. It’s really exhilarating to see that that is something that is already 100 per cent true, but here it just becomes part of the background and the flesh of this story, without ever becoming a huge focus of it. The story ends up being about the characters and a story about war and soldiers suffering, and that’s an amazing accomplishment, I think. I’m sure exoskeletons had been around before this. This book came out in the 1950s, and there was the General Electric Hardyman prototype that was around then – I don’t know if it was before or after. But this is definitely one of the most famous usages of an exoskeleton in any area of our culture. Another exoskeleton that you see is Ripley fighting the alien queen in Aliens . But this idea of putting on a suit of armour that can make you super strong is obviously a very popular idea, based on how popular Iron Man is right now. It’s the same story, but this has actually become real research. For instance, Berkeley Bionics and Sarcos both worked off grants from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to build real-world instances of exoskeletons. And these things really do work. One thing is that if you put these things on, they basically anticipate where your legs and arms are going to move – and their goal is to get out of your way. The whole interface goal of the machine is that you’re not supposed to feel like you’re wearing anything. You just move and it has joints that are very similar to yours and it moves too, and so you’re just walking around inside it. The only difference is that whenever you pick something up all that weight is transferred all the way down to the ground through the frame of the exoskeleton and you don’t feel a thing. So you can obviously pick up heavy loads and carry them for long periods of time. Also, while they anticipate your movements they can also pick up on your gait. When you’re walking, you do one movement and repeat it a lot, as long as your terrain doesn’t change. So if, for instance, you’re marching down the middle of a highway, these machines can pick up on your gait cycle and then just start replicating it and you don’t have to move your legs at all. Which means you can fall asleep. So you could potentially have a column of soldiers wearing current existing exoskeletons, carrying 250lb backpacks each and not feeling it, marching down the road, catching some zzzs. That’s really just cool."

"I love Starship Troopers . Maybe not so much for Starship Troopers as it exists, but because of the conversations that we keep having around it in 2025, even though the book was written in 1959. We talk about the book, and we talk about the 1997 movie as well, because that movie gave us so many classic memes, like ‘I’m doing my part.’ For those who don’t know Starship Troopers … It’s about a war that Earth is having with a bunch of aliens who are a bug-like species. The movie is a satire of military propaganda. It is one of those movies that, by today’s metrics, is so bad that it’s good. The book is very contentious, because I think a lot of times folks watch the movie, then go to read the book, and they’re expecting the same level of critique and very obvious satire – and then they get to Heinlein’s writing, and it’s not that. In fact, it reads like Heinlein was pro-military – like he supported a militarised state, felt it was good for the citizens and taught them civic responsibility, and that basic training was a way to make really soft men into functional members of society. The more you read it, the more you begin to think that it’s so heavy-handed that he couldn’t possibly mean it in earnest. But at the same time, it’s not like Heinlein’s other works were completely unproblematic, even by the standards of the 60s. So maybe he did mean that… That’s a little scary, and also makes sense given that this was written during the Cold War . A lot of folks take this book and make allegories to communism and the Red Scare. Others are dissecting it for the craft and saying that it’s very interesting how Heinlein doesn’t mention the race of his protagonist, or what his mother tongue is, until much later in the book. Is this deliberate? Or was Heinlein just trying to do a self-insert, and then remembered suddenly that people from other places in the world exist? This is a book that was written in 1959, and we’re still continually going back to this work and dissecting it. A lot of modern military sci fi calls back to Starship Troopers . And again, the film is great if only for the memes. As authors, we have to be very careful when we’re writing: there is a specific way in which you can write your enemy that justifies the violence. If the genuine desire here was to justify the violence, then making your enemy very alien and trying to remove the empathy that your reader may feel for them is a way to get the reader on your side, and it’s a tried and true technique of propaganda by authoritative governments. When you begin to remove humanity from a particular group of people, it makes it much easier for some to commit violence against them. As authors, we have to be very, very careful about how we portray ‘the enemy’, because we don’t want to perpetuate the same kind of ideas, especially today."