Books by author: Robert A. Heinlein

Kind of "pre-summer" trash...This had an interesting plot idea: the brain of a wealthy industrial leader (male) is transplanted into the body of his beautiful young female assistant. It could have gone in a lot of directions from there. Heinlein chose to explore a few of the psychological problems that might arise from such a ridiculous premise. I think the ending was successful, but he could have cut out about 1/3 of the book's length without losing much.

Starship Troopers is a lot better than I expected it to be. I haven't seen the movie, but from what I'm told, it couldn't be more different from the book. I was expecting a lot of fighting action and high-tech gadgetry, but this novel is actually about military psychology, philosophy, and politics. There are cool gadgets and alien "bugs", but they are peripheral to the story of how the protagonist, Juan Rico, progresses from clueless high-school student to an officer in the Mobile Infantry (an Army Airborne-like fighting unit that drops from spaceships instead of helicopters). Along the way, there is a lot of fairly deep discussion of how and why the military works the way it does. It reinforced much of my scant knowledge of the military and gave me new respect for the command structure and the way that the armed forces manufacture "brotherhood".

Heinlein has been criticized by many for the way he seemingly glorifies the military (the Wikipedia entry is extensive and worth reading). I choose to think of the world of Starship Troopers as a possible end result of a particular line of thinking rather than any kind of ideal.

This book is very relevant to the war in Iraq as well. It brings harsh criticism to "chickenhawk" leaders like Bush and Cheney who eagerly rushed into armed conflict sacrificing many thousands of lives without ever having served in the military themselves.

I first read the 1962 Hugo-winning version of Stranger in a Strange Land about fifteen years ago, so when my book club picked this book, I decided to read the "uncut" version that was published in 1991. The characters and basic plot are the same: Valentine Michael Smith is a human born on Mars and raised to adolescence by Martians. As a young adult, he travels to Earth, and the novel focuses on his entrance into — and impact on — human culture.

I liked this book a lot better fifteen years ago, and in part, it's because the "uncut" version moves too slowly. Also, I think some of the ideas were fresher then (at least to me). My four-star rating is more about what I remembered than what I just experienced, but this is still a worthwhile and important book.