"Starship Troopers" is one of the classics of science fiction. Young Juan Rico joins the mobile infantry and experiences the war against the alien "bugs" as a soldier. Heinlein's dark vision of a militarized future describes the missions of the "Star Warriors" (the title of the first German edition in 1979).
The book is considered as controversial as it was influential on the science fiction genre. In particular, it shaped the idea that the military and science fiction have anything to do with each other. For example, customized combat suits were already considered as a concept for exoskeletons in this novel. Former US Marine General and later Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has also admitted that Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" inspired him to have soldiers train with realistic combat simulations long before they even set foot on a battlefield.
"Reading [Starship Troopers] is one of the reasons I wanted to develop infantry simulators, and Hollywood was a big help. Often, an infantryman's first ethical or tactical decision against a thinking enemy is made in the first firefight," Mattis said in an interview. "You wouldn't buy a 747 or an Apache attack helicopter without getting the pilot simulators, and yet we didn't have high-quality infantry simulators." - Read the full story on Task & Purpose .
Together with the 1997 film adaptation, the book, which was once on the Marine Corps reading list, Commanders confessed, has long been a cult classic among "grunts" - especially in the Marine Corps, whose motto "Every Marine a rifleman" is strikingly similar to that of the Mobile Infantry in space: "Everybody drops and everybody fights."
“Starship Troppers” by Robert A. Heinlein, Mantikor Verlag, 385 pages, €15.40
HERE with us: the patch for the book with the logo of the Mobile Infantry from Starship Trooper.
