Johnnie Rico is a trooper in a tough force of mobile infantry during a future war between the Terran Federation and the Arachnids, spider-like aliens from a planet called Klendathu. Through Rico's experiences, revealed mainly in flashback, Heinlein tells the story of the grueling training inflicted on recruits to the mobile infantry (fewer than one in ten survive the rigors of the boot camp), the previous history of the Terran Federation and the development of its political structure, and the record of his hero's progress through the ranks from naive recruit to battle-scarred veteran in charge of his own band of commandos.

Few SF novels have aroused such controversy over the decades as Heinlein's militaristic epic. Although it won the Hugo Award in the year following its publication, Starship Troopers has been accused not merely of glorifying military values but of endorsing fascism. (The Terran Federation, which Heinlein clearly expects us to admire, is said by his most extreme detractors to be analogous to Nazi Germany.) If critics are not attacking Heinlein's politics, then they are badmouthing his literary skills. The writer and editor Anthony Boucher is not alone in arguing that the main difficulty with the book is that its author 'forgot to insert a story' and that it rapidly degenerates into a series of lectures about politics, history and philosophy thinly disguised as a novel. Despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy that has swirled around it since its first publication, Starship Troopers is an undeniably significant work in the history of the genre. It pioneered an entire subgenre of military space opera. In addition, many later writers, from Joe Haldeman to Orson Scott Card, owe a paradoxical debt to Heinlein in that they have written fiction in conscious opposition to the philosophy embodied in Johnnie Rico and his comrades. Starship Troopers is undoubtedly right-wing in its politics and unashamedly militaristic in outlook but it is also one of the finest coming-of-age stories in SF, a narrative that follows Johnnie Rico's rites of passage with the kind of detail and empathy that can be appreciated even by those readers to whom Heinlein's politics and philosophy remain anathema.

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