In 1959, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers won the Hugo award as the year's best science fiction novel. Critics and reviewers have been apologizing for that fact ever since. Even admirers of Heinlein as a logician and story-teller condemn Starship Troopers as a "militaristic polemic" glorifying a violent, proto-fascist ethic, creating a polarized society in which heroic war veterans rule over "draftdodgers, effeminate snobs, pacifists, and other animals of low standing." (p. 113)

Evaluating [the charges of fascism and militarism] is complicated by the fact that Heinlein's society is not presented in detail. It is a framework supporting an adventure story, and any scholarly analysis runs the risk of pedantry, of burdening the novel with such a weight of footnotes that it sinks without a ripple. Nevertheless, consideration of the social structure outlined in Starship Troopers in the context of recent scholarship on fascism and militarism suggests that, in fact, neither...