Science fiction is my guilty pleasure. Sure it's escapist and most of it serves as tripe for socially undeveloped white males living in their parents' basement, but there is the occasional rare gem that is uncommonly fascinating. A worth-while sci-fi author uses the future to stage his view of the present, and will concentrate less on the technological innovations that dominate lesser novels, but instead on the social and political change. People of the future will often be portrayed as having a difficult time understanding things about the "past," which is of course our present, or perhaps the futuristic society will exist a particular way because of the way the our present is. It's an opportunity for the writer to act as a prophet, looking at humanity, and trying to divine where we will go from here.
There is plenty of opportunity for an author to get up on a soap box and lecture his readers about the evils that are perpetrated today, and how they can and will influence the future that our ancestors will have to inhabit. Or to go on philosophical tangents that have little to do with the plot of the book. Most good sci-fi writers avoid making such things too obvious, and just let the events and the futuristic world speak for themselves.
I just finished Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. If you've seen the movie, just forget completely about it. It's a $0.25 movie, and does the book absolutely no justice. I saw it, and laughed at it, but I did realize that it was spawned from what could be a very interesting book. After a few weeks of looking around for a copy, I got ahold of one this afternoon, and spent a few hours giving it a read-through. I guess I haven't fully digested it yet, but I am quite intrigued by it. It satisfies my hunger for futuristic gadgets and technology. But the real measure of any good science fiction novel is being able to integrate the scientific prophecy with the social prophecy.
The novel does offer a lot to think about. Through the mouthpiece of philosophy teachers, Heinlein gives his opinion on basic human rights, corporal punishment, the nature of citizenship, and how all of these and other subjects should integrate themselves in a society. One of the more interesting features of the futuristic society is that citizenship, and hence voting rights, are only granted to those who have served at least two years of military service. The idea is that responsibility is the counterpart of authority, and one should not exist without the other. If you have authority without responsibility, you turn into a despot, and if you have responsibility without authority, you grumble and eventually revolt.
So, the social prophecies exist, but do they exist seamlessly with the technological prophecies? Not really. Though I can see applications of the more cerebral discussions in the rest of the novel, I constantly found myself asking, as the pages in my right hand dwindled, just how he was going to come to a climax that brought everything together. It turns out that he doesn't. Throughout the sequence that should be a climax, it is all guns and aliens and futuristic suits. Nothing but fluff and special effects, really. I couldn't help but feel that the real climax had occurred when the main character had decided to extend his military service to a career. That was the true moment that embodied all that had been discussed about the moral duty of a citizen, and how it must be voluntary. The rest was secondary, and only appealed to my visceral nature.
This isn't to say that I didn't like the book. I loved it. But I never felt fulfilled. The lectures on philosophy and politics could have existed independently as essays, with Heinlein talking directly to his readers rather than couching his ideas within a story that never brings them to fruition. In this aspect, the book was startlingly similar to the movie in that they both had flashes of insight and brilliance indicating that there was much more beneath the surface, but it never quite fully materialized.
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