Five Works of SF That Undermine Their Own Thesis

[james_davis_nicoll]

Stories that lead to different conclusions than the author intended...

Five Works of SF That Undermine Their Own Thesis

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

The thing that struck me about Starship Troopers was the failure rate Juan sees among his comrades that start training with him. I got the impression that everyone who washes out of training loses their chance at full citizenship, which means his society has an underclass many times the size of its regular armed forces which is permanently disenfranchised and in possession of some combat training. I expect that one guy who had big ideas about how society should be changed comes back a few years later as one of the leaders of the inevitable revolution.

[jbwoodford]

IIRC, the way Heinlein addressed that in the novel was not internally consistent; Rico ends up in Mobile Infantry because he's supposedly unqualified for anything else, but elsewhere he comments that if e.g. a blind person tried to sign up for service a niche would be found for them. I don't know how much of the inconsistency is Rico being an unreliable narrator vs. Starship Troopers having been oddly edited, or Heinlein losing track. "Any sufficiently unreliable narrator is indistinguishable from a poor author," or something like that.

[patrick_morris_miller]

YRC: the book goes back and forth whether busywork will be consed up for someone incapable of doing anything useful, or duty has to be potentially lethal to get you out of helot status.

[mmcirvin]

I remember this being an essentially perpetual running argument on Usenet, and part of it was because Heinlein also said stuff about his worldbuilding later that perpetuated the inconsistencies and wasn't necessarily consistent with the text.

[patrick_morris_miller]

"We return you to our regularly scheduled Heinlein argument, now in progress" was a joke that never got old.

[james_davis_nicoll]

As I recall, SST was simultaneously supposedly egalitarian and also locked women out of career paths leading to high command.

[(Anonymous)]

If I recall correctly, most of the navy was run by women. Women were considered to be better at mathematics and physically better suited to handle zero g and high g maneuvers. Most, if not all, starship captains were women.

Although, now that you mention it, anyone with more overreaching authority was male.

-Awesome Aud

[petrea_mitchell]

Yes, early on there's the speech about how some job can be found for anyone, no matter how limited their abilities, but once Rico is in training it's all about he survives when the big talkers, would-be tough guys, etc. fail. The way I managed to reconcile that in my mind is that the system decides what opportunity to offer a person based on their assessed abilities, and then they get their citizenship or not depending on how they do with that one chance.

Stepping back and considering the existence of the author, I think maybe Heinlein set up the society so as to answer all objections to it, and then got too worked up about writing a manly-man military adventure novel when he got to the training section.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Can't have improved his reasoning skills that he wrote the book in vein-popping fury over the idea that Unistat might stop setting off above-ground nukes for testing purposes (hence the weird aside about the planet with low background radiation).

[jbwoodford]

That was an "unreliable narrator is indistinguishable from a crank author" moment, and Heinlein had more than a few of them.

[adrian_turtle]

My understanding was that alternative service niches were all dangerous, and most were uncomfortable. So if you wash out of infantry training because you aren't strong enough, you can change to a different track. Maybe sitting-down work in a freezing cold munitions factory that's liable to explode? But if you wash out because you aren't brave enough? You're stuck as a helot. Or if you say, "fuck this shit, officers can't tell me what to do."

[patrick_morris_miller]

Yeah, I would be a little happier with the text if the older recruit who washed out of Camp Currie for being, well, older had shown up later in the book as a fobbit.

[ckd]

He became a Navy cook and Rico met him again later.

[jreynolds197]

I like to think that some volunteers are given the task that Bugs Bunny had at the end of one of his cartoons: in a shell factory, whacking each shell as it came by him, and marking each as 'dud'. "In thirty years, I can retire!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKcdlj-Uiw

[mmcirvin]

It strikes me that this is a setup that actively disincentivizes making Federal Service jobs less dangerous. Crunch all you want, we'll make more!

[agharta75]

He was unqualified for anything else that he listed on his choice of placements.

If only he had left "Infantry" off the list, maybe he would have been put in a nice safe job somewhere. :-)

[patrick_morris_miller]

The Probability Broach

A Bear walks into a Libertoonian universe?

install fascist governments in the belief that these are efficient

I don't see how anyone could think that post-1945.

(awkward Troy McClure grimace)

[(Anonymous)]

There was a brief discussion of Professor Nazi's opinions in that episode, "Patterns of Force". Besides allowing the story to be the Enterprise crew vs. Nazis.

Capt. Kirk: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?

John Gill: Planet... fragmented... divided. Took lesson from... Earth history.

Capt. Kirk: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.

John Gill: Most efficient state... Earth ever knew.

Spock: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated; rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.

Capt. Kirk: But it was brutal, perverted; had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?

Spock: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.

They don't say that "efficiency" was partly achieved by murdering and robbing a lot of the population, including but not only the underproductive disabled. Apparently, racial eugenics has returned in the program of action by the United States of America in 2025, our time line. Kirk does say at the end that anybody who accepts the absolute power of a Fuhrer won't live up to the requirement that the society is "run benignly". You'll mess up. One way that Gill specifically messed up is that his less benign deputy took over absolute power and kept Gill drugged and used to make "inspiring" speeches. Like Big Brother or the Wizard of Oz.

Robert Carnegie

[(Anonymous)]

They also don't say that "efficiency" was _total bullshit_, which I feel is an important point.

[(Anonymous)]

I suppose in the 1960s, the sheer chaos of the German regime during that period wasn't as well known as it is today. It was ferociously inefficient

[(Anonymous)]

"We're from the Federation, and we're here to help." 😉

The premise that Star Trek most undermined was the 'sacred' Prime Directive of non-interferance.

-Awesome Aud

[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 548, 2025 article 17

452 articles to go to article 1000.