Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein is a great-book adjacent manly book, or so Dr.

I started my foray into Heinlein’s works with Stranger in a Strange Land. That was a mistake. I hated the book and I almost never hate books. I kept waiting for the turn, the “hey, just kidding, this hippy nonsense is actually not the way to the good life” but it never came. I felt like I got sucked into the mind of a dirty old man and it was a total bummer. So, I swore off Heinlein (I am open to being wrong about Stranger, I was just so viscerally disappointed with the ending that it tainted the whole book).

But then I saw Jacob Allee’s post on Starship Troopers. I had heard the book was much different from the awful movie and I had meant to give it a read as part of my journey through the Hugo Winners but that was derailed by the bad experience with Stranger. After reading Allee’s post I decided to give Starship Troopers a read.

He got me with a line about how ST is a manly book. I like nuance and philosophical rigor and esoteric concepts as much as any hipster book nerd, but I also love a good manly book. I can’t help it, I’ve been a wrestler for most of my life. So the idea that a good SF book is also a manly book which can help call boys up into manhood was very intriguing to me.

So I read the book. I liked it way more than Stranger. And I agree that it’s a manly book. Heinlein hit on a lot of good tropes and themes which resonate with my experience with my own mentors. And he popularized the mechanical SF combat suit which Warhammer 40k took and absolutely ran with. So, there are some really good SF items in here as well. Also, you like the movie The Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise, you’ll love this book, and vice versa.

After reading the book, I thought it’d be great to get Allee on my Parker’s Pensées Podcast to talk about it. I did. It was great.

In our conversation, Allee mentioned that Starship Troopers is great-book adjacent, since it is conversant with some of the great ideas listed in Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon—a compendium of the great ideas present in the Great Books of the Western Tradition. I absolutely love this idea of being great-book adjacent. It’s really really hard to add another book to the list of “Great Books™” but idea of being adjacent to the Great Books is brilliant. Is it conversant with the great ideas? Great! I don’t know if it should make the official list—I don’t care too much about the sanctity of the list anyways—but it’s a good book that broaches great ideas and will help the reader reflect on them. I love that. I am definitely going to be using ‘great-books adjacent’ often. So thanks Jacob Allee.

Watch our podcast episode below. It was a really fun conversation and we get into other sub-plots and themes present in the book. We also compare and contrast the book with the awful movie, because you kind of have to. So check it out and go follow Study the Great Books as well! Here’s Allee’s post that convinced me to read the book in the first place:

Study the Great Books

Starship Troopers

This is a manly book. Allow me to clarify what I mean by this. This book is about what it means to be a man. This book is about how one becomes a man. This book connects with men on an instinctual level. It’s hard for me to imagine a young man reading this book and not being deeply moved towards the desire to serve something greater, to protect the vuln…

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6 months ago · 23 likes · 13 comments · Jacob Allee

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