ENDER'S GAME, Hive Civilizations, and STARSHIP TROOPERS

A few days ago, I hosted a guest post by my fellow writer Matthew Stienberg about how Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel Starship Troopers would make an excellent television series, which would allow for a greater exploration of the characters and world than a feature film would. I followed it up with a post of my own on how the novel's depiction of a conflict between the Merchant Marine (whose personnel don't earn the franchise for service) and the military (which does) could allow for a nuanced critique of the Federation without descending into Verhoeven-level idiocy and provide for complex storylines.

Well, here's my third post, on how we could explore the civilization of the Pseudo-Arachnids, the "Bugs" that the Federation fights against. In the novel it's never really described, although the warrior and worker bugs are depicted as being non-sentient and under the direction of senior bugs never depicted on-page. The 1997 film gives us the Brain Bug, whose appearance I didn't really like. The role-playing game book The Arachnid Empire apparently has some description of the Bugs' history and culture, such as it is, but it's not in the free-to-read material and I don't like this stuff enough to buy it to find out.

However, if that back-story proves lacking, Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game, which was adapted into a movie I enjoyed, has an interesting explanation for how a "Bug" civilization might function. Here there be spoilers...

Among the Formics or "Buggers" of Ender's Game and its spin-offs, the only truly sentient beings are the queens, with the majority of the species being non-sentient workers and drones. In the vein of Earth's insects, queens would be born in existing colonies and would leave to start a new colony. Each new colony would battle the others until one day a queen managed to persuade a daughter to work with her rather than attacking her (and only leaving to establish a new hive if she failed to topple her mother but survived). The mother-daughter pair spawned new queens that they kept as allies, pattern leading to a Formic civilization consisting of a coalition of sentient queens commanding billions of drones that defeated all single-queen nests and united the species.

The Arachnid caste system in the novel is a bit more complicated, with the Brain Bugs being the overall commanding intelligence of an Arachnid hive, to the point if a Brain Bug is killed, the colony will die with it (novel) or the subordinate Bugs will run mad without them in control (the Roughnecks animated series). However, there are queen bugs whose purpose is breeding that warrior-bugs will kill queens to keep them from being captured, which could imply the queens have some degree of sentience, or at least there's something about them while alive that makes it too risky (for the Bugs) for humans to capture them. Either way, the "ordinarily-singular sentients with masses of non-sentient slaves learn to cooperate" theory could apply, only with Brain Bugs instead of the queens.

In the Starship Troopers universe, human prisoners are discovered when the Federation invades Arachnid-controlled Planet P, which in Matt's chronology would be Season Three. That would be a good time for the viewer to learn about this, since these humans would have the most interaction with the Bugs, possibly including the leadership caste if the Arachnid leadership is interrogating them or studying them. Alternatively, if the viewers are getting impatient, this is something the Federation could learn from the Skinnies, since Matt suggested Season Two would consist of an attempt to forcibly detach the Skinnies from their alliance with the Bugs in which the Federation learns of the Brain Bugs. The Bugs might've been more forthcoming about their history with their allies than with their enemies, or the Skinnies might have found this out on their own. After all, they might be concerned that they could be next if the Arachnids triumph over the Federation.

Some Ideas on a Small-Screen STARSHIP TROOPERS From Me

A few days ago, Matthew Stienberg wrote a post on my blog about how he'd do STARSHIP TROOPERS as a TV series. Although there's already been one ST television show (the 1990s animated series Roughnecks I watched in middle school) and there's talk going around of a remake of the 1997 film, I think we're in agreement that a television show would be a better way to tell the story. Think Game of Thrones or The Expanse in which each book is a season. Although Starship Troopers is a relatively short novel, it covers what's probably multiple years of war and has enough incidents that can be fleshed out. As Matt's post lays out, basic training to the botched Federation assault on Klendathu is Season One, the rebuilding after Klendathu and Johnny earning his officer's commission is Season Two, the planning and execution of the assault on Planet P is Season 3, etc. Although Johnny apparently dies during another attack on Klendathu, he could always be Spared By The Adaptation or the second assault on Klendathu and Johnny's death could be Season 4.

Now here's where Matt's ideas and mine differ. The Starship Troopers novel references "incidents," "patrols," and "police actions" that occurred before the Bug War, which is also considered a "third" or "fourth" space war but the first truly "interstellar" war. Matt thinks this indicates there are other human societies besides the Federation. However, large-scale space colonization seems to happen only after WWIII, the collapse of most of society, and the reorganization and rebuilding by a trans-national alliance of veterans. There's a Starship Troopers role-playing game that explores the timeline and how the Federation functions day-to-day, but it's been so long since I flipped through the manuals at DragonCon that until I dug up the manuals on Amazon I couldn't remember much about it beyond telepaths not being legally allowed to gamble or trade stocks and how the veterans who founded the Federation decided that the years of war and collapse were so violent that every adult who lived through it should be considered a veteran and allowed to vote.

(That would make the Federation's system of earning the right to vote through either military or sufficiently-strenuous civilian service a much easier pill for the surviving populations to swallow, since nobody is actually losing the franchise--it's just their children and grandchildren will need to earn it later. This RPG manual here has the entire history of the Federation, which also suggests that at least one of these "incidents" might've been a pirate raid on a new colony by the Skinnies and that off-world space colonization was something the Federation started after the unification of Earth.)

Therefore, with the possible exception of people who dislike the Federation's limited franchise fleeing and establishing colonies elsewhere (more on that later), it seems more likely that there aren't human societies outside the Federation. Who then, is the Federation fighting? If these incidents were with aliens other than the Arachnids or the Skinnies, I would think there might be some mention of that.

And that leads us to a possible darker side of the Federation. I don't buy the hysterical claims that the Federation's system is fascist or militarist--if it were, it would be more overtly authoritarian with a Gestapo, a Fuhrer, etc. and Johnny wouldn't talk about "the poor bloody infantry" who protect home from "war's desolation." Real fascists and militarists would think war is a positive good and not a necessary evil and there are always personality cults, suppression of dissent, etc. That's one reason I'm not a fan of Verhoeven's bastardization, which you can see in my review of the movie. If the Federation were fascist, Johnny's father would be dead or in a work camp for complaining about Johnny's classes at school. Hell, Johnny might even be so brainwashed that he'd turn his own father in. That's what real totalitarianism looks like.

That said, the fact only veterans can vote hearkens back to another historical evil. During the lead-up to the American Revolution, the British claimed the Colonies, even though they lacked representation in Parliament, had "virtual representation" because Parliament would represent their interests regardless. The Patriots didn't buy that then, and we know that politicians generally only care about their immediate constituents, not the national good. That's why gerrymandering is such a problem. Even if the Federation's citizens represent a cross-section of race, class, creed, etc. (in the book Johnny is Filipino and comes from a wealthy family), they could still put their own interests above that of the "civilian" population that still greatly outnumbers them--there are colonies where half the population are citizens, but I don't think the figure of citizens on Earth itself is that high. Imagine, for example, lavish funding for programs that only benefit citizens but civilians aren't eligible for. There's a reason our forebears pushed for "no taxation without representation."

Furthermore, in the books it's made clear that the Merchant Marine wants its members granted citizenship after service like the military and (presumably at least some of) the civil service, but they don't get it. That explains the hostility between the Merchant Marine, which makes an interplanetary/interstellar peacetime economy possible, and the armed services, that occurs in the book. Johnny and some other military recruits on liberty get into a fight with some (surface) Merchant Marine sailors in a bar in Seattle, and apparently it's not an isolated incident. The same rules might apply to civilian shippers in space, although one would think that would be so dangerous it should guarantee citizenship in the same vein military service does.

So it could be that some of these "incidents" involving the Mobile Infantry weren't conflicts with external powers, pirates, etc. but something like suppression of a Merchant Marine strike or if you want to be even more extreme, wars of conquest against non-Federation human polities. For example, if we don't use the RPG timeline for our hypothetical television show, there might have been colonies within the solar system founded before WWIII that didn't collapse like their parent societies did Earthside and might have been conquered by the early Federation (hence multiple space wars but only one truly interstellar war). Once the Federation has control of the solar system, then you start seeing the massive united effort needed for establishing colonies around other stars. The Federation conquest of the solar system would be so distant in the past it would be like the Indian Wars to the modern U.S., but the Merchant Marine issues are in the book itself.

The more I think about it, the more a suppression of a Merchant Marine strike or strikes would be something to include in a hypothetical TV series before the beginning of the Bug War. If the entire Merchant Marine went on strike until their personnel got citizenship rights, the Federation's peacetime economy would collapse and the strikers could win without violence, but if only some of them did, there's a lot more potential for mayhem. Striking (armed) Merchant Marine ships could attack non-striking or "scab" ships, while on the other end, the Federation might be more willing to physically attack striking Merchant Marine vessels if they know that most of the Merchant Marine will stay loyal. The survivors of a Federation attack on strikers or a defeated attack on "scabs" by strikers could even go full-blown pirate, requiring a prolonged campaign to defeat.

Furthermore, widespread civil unrest within the Federation could be what tempts the Arachnids and their Skinny allies to attack the Federation--Saddam Hussein invaded Iran to take advantage of the chaos of the Iranian Revolution, after all. If the Arachnids and humans are competing for a relatively small number of habitable planets, a pre-emptive strike on humans could be a matter of species survival, especially if the Arachnids are fast-breeding and need to expand rapidly to avoid overpopulation and collapse.

And if you want to generate lots of discussion on the Internet, it could be hinted that the Federation's leadership provoked the Bugs as a "short, victorious war" to end internal strife within the Federation. It would provide an outside enemy to unite the people against (much like how opponents of the Argentine junta publicly embraced them after the conquest of the Falklands) and a prolonged war could generate a lot more veterans who can vote, reducing social pressures within the Federation. Only 400,000 Americans died in WWII, but 16 million or so served in some capacity; only 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam but 2.5 million served in the war itself and many more than that were in the military at the time.

Furthermore, the old show Space: Above and Beyond featured a human polity at war with the alien Chigs that had internal problems--there were cloned humans who had been mistreated, rebelled against said mistreatment, and now had to serve alongside their former tormentors in a war, while exiled artificial intelligences who'd rebelled against what was essentially slavery are allied to the Chigs. Having recent problems between the military and Merchant Marine could provide for some really interesting episodes--say after Klendathu the military requisitions some civilian ships for raids on the Arachnids and the civilian crew hates having to work with soldiers, some Merchant Marine extremists collaborate with the Arachnids, blocked by fraternization rules from romance with Dizzy or Carmen Johnny gets involved with a Merchant Marine sailor and both of them get trouble from their friends, etc.

If a TV show followed my or the other Matt's ideas, it would be more faithful adaptation of Heinlein's work AND would provide a more realistic, subtle critique of Heinlein's Federation than Verhoeven's straw-manning.

Guest Post: Getting STARSHIP TROOPERS on the Small Screen

The other day I was having a conversation on Facebook with Matthew Stienberg, an aspiring writer from Canada I know from the alternate history forum, about what the Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers would look like as a television series, in light of a possible remake of the 1997 film. I suggested Matt write a guest post and he was up for it.

So here goes...

Getting Starship Troopers in the Small Screen

By Matthew Stienberg

Recently I blogged about how Starship Troopers would not be “too controversial” to be made in the 21^stcentury as a more faithful adaption. I think it could play a role in generating discussions around voting rights and even military service. However, in conversations with Quinn, we discussed how it would be possible to use the story and expand it into a television series.

Now this may seem crazy at first, how do you expand a single novel into a television series? Well this isn’t as ludicrous as it sounds. A sadly unremembered series aired way back in 1999 and ran for a single season, but that was the Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, which managed to take the content from the book and expand on it. Using ideas and imagery from both the original novel and Verhoeven’s film the series was, in miniature, what a successful and entertaining Starship Troopers television series could end up being.

Now before you say if a movie is controversial surely a television series would be even worse, well look at it this way, the market isn’t exactly saturated with sci-fi television epics at the moment. The Expanse is probably one of the best known, with the emerging Altered Carbon coming up on its heels through Netlfix, but the genre is currently missing something like Battlestar Galactica or even a fun serial series like Stargate, and something that might explore complex ideas and stories like Deep Space 9 did back in the day. All those previously mentioned shows (Galactica especially) proved that the market could handle a serious military themed story, and people wouldn’t be repelled or turned off by it (unless there was a writer’s strike but that’s another story). Even The Expanse shows you can have successful, thoughtful, intense, and interesting military action when it is attached to a good story.

And one thing to remember is that Starship Troopers can certainly provide a good story. It has good characters who are built in, can be fleshed out, and added to. Juan “Johnnie” Rico for instance would be a Fillipino main character (and with the stunning success of Black Panther that can hardly be a bad thing) and has numerous friends and comrades to add to his journey. There is a strong female character in the form of Carmencita "Carmen" Ibañez who becomes a fleet pilot, and then there’s the supporting characters such as Carl Jenkins who is Rico’s best friend, Sergeant Jelal and Sergeant Zim, Isabelle “Dizzy” Flores (again easily kept as a woman as in the 1997 film), Jean V. Dubois, and even the only briefly seen Fleet Captain Yvette Deladrier of the Rodger Young could be given an expanded role alongside her ship. All of these characters can be expanded on and given a place in the building story, and they all could shape the complex tale that we can tell with this world.

There are numerous themes which can be explored too. One of the books oft overlooked themes is that the entire reason Johnnie joins the Mobile Infantry is because he is rebelling against his wealthy father and striking out against the “free ride” he feels like he would otherwise get. A coming of age story for all the main characters would be good, and could add to their growth as the series progresses. Military life itself is a theme which, like in Galactica could be explored with more depth. Then of course, the main contention of the novel that citizenship is a right which must be earned through Federal Service is an issue that could be referenced time and time again as one of the reasons men and women are serving.

On that issue, what kind of society is it where only a few have to care about politics? In the books most civilians don’t care so much about the franchise but there are some who resent their jobs not being seen as Federal Service and are pissed about it, so a plot could revolve around those conflicts. How to civilian contractors and citizen soldiers (well, not yet citizen soldiers) get along and interact? How do these upcoming citizens clash with their peers who are citizens? The novel also mentions that the Federation fights other planets, so how do other human worlds get along with the Federation? All of these are stories that can (and should) be explored.

Though when it comes down to it, how do you go about telling this story? I would see each season having 10-12 episodes each in order to keep the writing tightly paced and the action suitably exciting. It also cuts down on bloat and gets any messages that would be conveyed across much clearer.

Personally, what I would do is mix and match some with the original novel, and the Roughnecks series.

I would begin the pilot episode with, as in the novel, the raid on the Skinnie homeworld, showing off the abilities of the powered armored soldiers and the destructive nature of futuristic warfare. This action scene then is revealed to be in medias res and we cut to Rico back in class, being bored with a lecture from Professor DuBois and the remainder is the conflict with his father. From there the show branches out into the training all Mobile Infantry go through, discussions of why they do things, and the emotional moments when the three main characters get split up. Next we get to the beginning of the Bug War with the Arachnid attack on Buenos Aires (and how it personally effects Johnnie and his friends) and then get to the attack on Klendathu as the midpoint of the season, the reaction to that disaster (like in the book Lt. Rasczak dies and he has been mentoring Johnnie here), and end the first season cutting back to the attack on the Skinnie homeworld as Johnnie is evacuated while wounded.

Season Two would begin explaining that presently the war is not going well and the Bugs have mankind on the back foot as they underestimated them. Unlike Verhoeven’s film where waves of grunts with futuristic assault rifles are sent to their deaths against bugs that only fight in close combat, instead have the bugs (who have spaceships and lasers in the books) be a technologically advanced foe who fight with both numbers and cunning. Keep the basic bug design we saw in the 1997 film (and the TV series) but give them welded on lasers and armor. Even keep some of the cool specialist bugs like bombardier monstrosities, and flying bugs, but they can be made much cooler. This serves to make the action scenes intense as bugs swarm individual powerful, but grossly outnumbered Mobile Infantry with deadly fire.

We would pick up Season Two with the Terran Federation trying to strip away some of the bug alien allies and make them our own, while perhaps struggling to keep many of their own allies on side. This could have episodes (like in the TV series) where humanity is trying to give a rough wooing to the Skinnies by showing the Arachnids cannot protect them so they change sides. The main driver of this season could be understanding the aliens as Johnnie overcomes a now deep seeded xenophobia of all nonhuman life and could even have him and others making friends with a Skinnie as they try to understand their culture. Smaller plots could include humans who desire a separate peace and some planets trying to leave the war effort so the Federation has to hit them as well, bringing some moral complexity into the war for all involved. Season Two would then end with the revelation form the Skinnies, of the Brain Bug which leads the characters to be ordered to Planet P.

Season Three (which I would envision as the last season) starts off heavy. Rico is on a station (a fleet base, or even Sanctuary) where he meets with all his friends for the first time in a while, but a huge Bug attack fleet appears and engages. Here Carl would be killed, Dizzy wounded, and Rico given a field promotion when another officer above him is killed. Carmen will command the Rodger Young when Captain Deladrier is killed in the battle and everyone realizes that now they’re playing for keeps. The second episode is again picking up the pieces as they are sent to battle. This would be a combined Federation and Skinnie offensive to show the progress the two sides have made together, and the Skinnies will help capture a Brain Bug. You can even get into the minutia with psychics being used, the special K9 units sadly absent from the movies, and the not so frontline engineers who pack suit mounted flamethrowers. These could all be shown earlier, but could be brought out in force for this arc.

The last half of the season would revolve around the fighting on the planet, and the triumphant capture of a Brain Bug, as well as the surprise discovery of human prisoners on Planet P. The revelation would be that each side is trying to understand the other, and so they’re taking prisoners. The series could then end with the idea they will be returning to Klendathu which will hopefully end the war. Ending it on a hope spot is good in my opinion as it would give all the characters the closure they need, and if desired leave plot openings for a fourth season while tying all the major stories up in a nice bow.

Through all this you would have minor stories, Rico and his parents (or dealing with their loss after Buenos Aires), the mentor-student dynamic between Rico and his commanders and Carmen and Captain Deladrier, discussions on the reasons why they fight, and the political problems they face with the war, and the loss of friends.

With these stories and overarching themes you have lots of room for good writing and good stories to go with it. The action would be an undeniable plus though.

Now this is just how I would envision the series going, others might disagree, and I think here there’s still room for improvement over a rough draft such as this. Even so, I think it shows that there is a lot of material that can be covered to flesh out this world and the stories it can tell.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Starship Troopers (1997)

For the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we decided to watch the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers, an adaptation of the Robert Heinlein novel. Nick had intended for the podcast to be split up between himself and Daniel, who loved the movie, and a friend of ours and I, who didn't like what Verhoeven did with the movie. Sufficient to say, real-life intervened, but we still managed to get four people on-panel. You can listen to the podcast here.

And now for the review...

The Plot

In the 23rd Century, humans have begun colonizing other worlds under the auspices of the Federation, a rather strict government in which the right to vote and other rights are dependent on serving in the military. The humans encounter another race, the insect-like Arachnids, and soon war breaks out. A group of friends from Buenos Aires--Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), and Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris)--enlist in the military and soon join the fight.

The Good

*The movie has a great soundtrack. I was not allowed to see the movie in theaters when it came out, but I did get the soundtrack for Christmas that year. I particularly like Klendathu Drop.

*Although I complain mightily about Verhoeven mocking the book's ideas (at least some of my complaints might have been edited out at my request to avoid being too rant-y), the movie was far more faithful to the book than I remember. The novel starts out with Rico and his comrades dropping into battle before beginning his story in Buenos Aires and the film starts out with the rout on Klendathu before shifting "one year earlier" to Rico and his friends in high school. Also, Rico's dad is an egregious pill in the film, just like in the book, while his mother is more reasonable.

*There are some decent character arcs. Johnny begins the film as not really believing in the Federation's ideology of citizenship--his teacher even points out that he's repeating the textbook verbatim when he's asked what differentiates a citizen from a civilian--but by halfway through the film, when a character close to him dies, he's coming to believe in civic virtue, sacrifice, etc. wholeheartedly. Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon), who starts out the film a rival for Carmen's affections and is kind of an a-hole, informs her that Johnny actually did survive Klendathu, gets both of them to safety during the attack on Planet P, and goes out defiant before nothing less than a tractor-trailer-sized swarm-leading Brain Bug.

*Some characterization is done very subtly. Dizzy has a crush on Rico from the beginning, which is exposited via some long glances and rather catty, high-school-girl type behavior toward his then-girlfriend Carmen. And we see shades of Barney from How I Met Your Mother in Carl when he dances with Dizzy when Johnny rejects her. For a gay guy, Mr. Harris is really good at playing heterosexual womanizers for some reason.

*The film has some well-done battle sequences. Although a lot of the film is rather dull (more on that later), the fight scenes aren't.

*One of the great writing maxims is, "Show, don't tell," and Verhoeven illustrates the ugly side of the Federation without explicitly saying "THIS IS BAD! THIS IS BAD!" A criminal is tried and sentenced to death far too fast for a proper investigation to take place (and I say this as a supporter of the death penalty) with the execution being televised for good measure, the government is obviously spinning a natural disaster to justify a war, one character openly admits she's serving so she can get permission to have children, there's some incredibly goofy propaganda involving children, etc.

*Verhoeven does retain the multinational/multiracial character of the Federation from the novel. In the book the protagonist is Filipino, he has Turkish and even Japanese comrades (the book wasn't written long after WWII so this is especially significant), etc. With a downright alien foe like the Bugs, prejudice-prone humans have a more other-y "Other" to hate on and stuff like racism, sexism, etc. seem really petty. The film's main cast is entirely too Anglo for people who live in Buenos Aires, but there a fair number of background characters (fellow high-school students, various soldiers) who aren't white.

*Although in the book the Bugs had roughly the same technology humans had, including energy weapons, the Bug designs are generally pretty cool. I especially liked the warrior bugs with their coloration and sharp edges. Slap some laser cannons on them and they'd be perfect. I'm glad the television series Starship Troopers: Roughnecks retained the design, even if they skipped out on the "Bugs have guns" stuff too.

*Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in the post-WWII era and although the war saw women serving in military roles like the WACS, WAVES, etc. I don't think the idea of women in combat would have occurred to most Americans. Verhoeven depicts the sporty Dizzy Flores as a capable fighter and Carmen, despite not being a trained infantryman, can hold her own even while wounded. I'll give him points for that.

*The scene where the telepathic Carl prompts his ferret to harass his mother was pretty funny. So is a scene where Rico is handing Carmen dissected Bug organ after dissected Bug organ, oblivious to her growing disgust, until things get a little crazy.

*In one of the boot-camp scenes, one trainee questions why they're still training with knives. In the climax of the film, a knife comes in very handy. Chekov's Gun. :)

The Bad

*A lot of the film is really quite boring, especially the high-school and boot-camp sequences. I understand their importance for characterization, but they just were not that entertaining. And they took up a lot of the film.

*Xander is Carmen's flight instructor once she starts actually navigating capital ships, but he's around the same age as her and Johnny. He's explicitly depicted as being a football player for a rival school when Johnny and Carmen are seniors. If he were, say, the older brother of a friend of Carmen's who shipped out for the military some years before and is back in town on leave, that could explain Carmen's "man in uniform" attraction to him and how he's realistically that much more experienced.

*Carmen takes a wound that should either kill her or at least cripple the affected limb, but she's able to run around, fight, etc. not long afterward.

*It's generally a bad idea for a director who hates a book to do the adaptation. Verhoeven only read part of the novel and didn't like it. Don't take my word for it--check out the relevant Wikipedia section here. Verhoeven had his own vision--to satirize militarism, right-wing politics, etc--from the beginning and only shoved Starship Troopers in after pre-production began. He didn't like the message of the novel and deliberately mocked it by associating it with fascism, aggression, etc.

(No fascist book would pity "the poor bloody infantry" who are all that stand between home and "war's desolation" the way Heinlein's novel does. A fascist book would glorify death in battle, and the book does not. Heinlein and Verhoeven would agree that war is awful, but Heinlein would recognize that it's necessary sometimes and Verhoeven likely wouldn't. I can understand why Verhoeven would see all sides in a war as morally the same--he grew up during WWII seeing Dutch civilians killed by Allied air strikes against occupying German forces--but he had to totally warp Heinlein's Federation into a bunch of Nazis and then make them the aggressors against the Bugs in order for this to work.)

For my left-wing readers, I imagine if I produced a film adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale depicting the Republic of Gilead as a Christian utopia in which women are happy to be at home and out of the rat race, various minority groups are better off "in their place," the persecuted Quakers are dangerously naive idiots, and the Baptist guerrillas in the Appalachians and the "Libertheos" (I'm guessing some relation to Liberation Theology) fighting the regime are murderous war criminals who aren't really Christian at all. Fans would justifiably howl. That's how fans of Starship Troopers feel when faced with this "adaptation."

(For the record, I actually liked THMT, even though the idea that the U.S. military would overthrow the government to install a Christo-Taliban regime in which women are forbidden from reading and writing is ridiculous. It's well-written and far more nuanced than I'd expected when I started reading it. I still wouldn't be the best director for it, even if I wouldn't deliberately do a hatchet-job the way Verhoeven did.)

We need to move on, but I'll leave you with this criticism of the film and its differences from the book. And if you want a more overtly antiwar military sci-fi novel, check out Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Starship Troopers is the better book, but TFW has much better characterization. I've got a spoiler-iffic review of TFW here.

*Per Verhoeven's hatchet-job, the History and Moral Philosophy class depicts the notion of voting equating to force, the idea that "violence never solves anything" as naive at best, etc. in the most vicious, bloodthirsty light possible. Funny, I remember violence solving the problem of Nazism very well, and only the most ardent "violence is wrong no matter what" pacifists would disagree with me there.

Furthermore, as has been pointed out, the boot-camp sequences are full of needless sadism--in the book, for example, when someone wonders why they're still training with knives, the sergeant explains the appropriate levels of military force for different situations instead of pinning the recruit's hand to the wall with a knife. And Johnny is flogged for something completely different in the book, not for getting a soldier under his command killed in a highly questionable live-fire exercise. The scene where Sergeant Zim breaks a soldier's arm for challenging him is much uglier than in the book--in the novel, Zim breaks his arm in the process of beating him, but in the film, Zim puts him on the ground and then breaks his arm to make a point.

*The book was notable for introducing the trope of powered armor into science fiction, but there isn't any. People are wearing what look like SWAT gear and small arms and trying to beat an enemy with inexhaustible numbers by attrition. There's air support in one scene, but no artillery or tanks. Seriously, the Federation's military tactics and equipment really suck, and this is a society that has really cool prosthetic limbs for Michael Ironside. The book depicted initial assault on Klendathu as a disaster, but it didn't fail for lack of proper equipment on the soldiers' part.

The Verdict

Daniel makes a good case that this is a great satire that was ahead of its time. However, I don't like how Verhoeven deliberately mocked the source material and a lot of the movie just isn't that entertaining. See it once. 5.5 out of 10.

Social Justice Warriors and How "Punitive Medicine" Might Come to the United States

I came across this article by Andrew Todd and although I agree with his macro-point that people who threaten women who disagree with them with rape need to be stopped, one part I did disagree with. See below:

“Social Justice Warriors” is a term used often by these sort of people, and it’s a term whose pejorative use perplexes me, because aside from the source of its invention, it sounds like a really badass thing to be. I’d much rather label myself a Social Justice Warrior than a warrior for...whatever it is that these people are warriors for. Social justice is such an inherently positive thing - literally everyone benefits from greater equality - that it’s impossible to see its enemies as anything but sociopathic. Hatred of Social Justice Warriors can be seen as a broader hatred of social justice itself.

Apparently Mr. Todd can't distinguish between people opposed to the cause of social justice (i.e. people who are racists, sexists, etc) and people opposed to the actions and attitudes of belligerent Internet left-wingers. And furthermore, he claims that people who are racists, sexists, etc. aren't simply immoral people, but sociopaths. Assuming the notion held by some Internet left-wingers that right-wingers have something congenitally wrong with them is true (it's not), that doesn't explain why left-wingers have come out against SJWs like this gentleman has here.

Let the record state that I am strongly opposed to racism, sexism, sending rape threats, and all the various a-hole things that take up most of Mr. Todd's denunciation. Those people deserve every ounce of opprobrium that can be rained down on them--and legal action too. Let's see how tough they are when they get charged with terroristic threats and get put in the cooler with really bad dudes.

However, I've criticized the SJWs myself a fair bit because of their propensity for swearing and many occasions when their claims get ridiculous--claiming J.K. Rowling is some kind of creepy Calvinist, which strikes me as quite absurd given the amount of criticism she's received from conservative Christians. Being a blowhard is so essential to these people they've invented a term that makes calling them out for their incivility immoral--"tone policing."

Obviously one should not ignore legitimate evidence just because the person presenting said evidence is a tool--Hitler and Stalin claimed the other was evil and they were both right--but I've seen people being complete jerks and claiming people are objecting to their behavior because they want minorities to shut up, not because they're jerks. Just because someone is a supporter of an ostensibly good cause doesn't mean that anybody opposed to that person is opposed to the cause itself--I'm a Christian, but I don't interpret attacks on individual Christians or organizations that misbehave as attacks on Christianity or Jesus.

Furthermore, accusing people with disagreeable views of being mentally ill is the first step down a very dangerous road. The kind of road that ends with the Soviet psychiatric gulag. Although I remember seeing some idiot on FreeRepublic claiming the Clintons and Obama were clinical narcissists, it seems to be more common on the (secular) left because they believe people are inherently good--so therefore when the reality of human evil becomes too obvious, they decide evil people aren't really people. See this article on sociopathy on Richard Dawkins' old website, for example. Or this one about the Virginia Tech shooter. In real life, I've got one friend who said "sociopath" is the scientific term for evil, another who said it's okay to love fictional psychopaths (including Loki from the Marvel films, who based on his attachment to his mother Frigga is not a clinical psychopath however much a murderous jerk he is) but one should avoid them in real life, and a third (a vocal member of the skeptic movement) who said that one of my Wastelands-verse characters is a psychopath even though, speaking as his creator, he's not.

(For the record, I toned his actions down a bit from that version of the story. If you're a writer and your reader misinterprets your character, odds are it's your fault for not defining him or her clearly enough.)

The "evil people are sociopaths" meme is something I first noticed a lot of on the site DemocraticUnderground, where people liked to claim various prominent Republicans were psychopaths and sociopaths (presumably the corporate variety chronicled in Snakes in Suits as opposed to the stereotypical mad ax-murderer). An entire pseudo-science called "ponerology" has been invented to justify this type of thing. Here's an example of ponerology being applied politically, to the point of conspiracy theory if you take the bit at the end about "PSYCHOPATHS RULE THE WORLD" into account. Here's another example of ponerology-as-ideology.

You say these people are isolated individuals (most of whom are limited to certain quarters of the Internet) who have no real power, right? Well, for starters every one who can vote has a small amount of power and once you get enough voters, then you're talking the potential for something truly dangerous. Once notions of un-persons and that certain political views are a sign of being an un-person get traction--and it wasn't long ago that a shadow of this passed over the political landscape--watch out. And before you say, "It can't happen here," well look at what's being discussed in Britain. Or what actually has happened in New York. Or the prominence of eugenics in the United States not all that long ago. The prevalence of the "bad people are sociopaths, not regular people who have made poor or immoral decisions" meme could represent a wider cultural trend, especially as Christianity, with its notions of universal human sin and that anyone can repent of their wickedness even late in their lives, declines in influence in the United States.

And politically, what happens when older left-wing leaders die and these people replace them in positions of leadership?

I imagine someone will accuse me of indulging in the slippery slope fallacy, and I concede that A doesn't necessarily lead to B and so on. However, if I were some obscurantist, I would have denied the existence of personality disorders as a whole, despite objective evidence for them. I could mimic the young-earth crowd and try to use religion to trump science (see Romans 2:15, which implies everyone has a conscience, something psychopaths/sociopaths don't have) and claim that the notion of personality disorders will inevitably lead to psychiatric abuses, the mistreatment of the children of criminals due to their supposedly defective heredity, etc. (fallacy of appeal to consequences), much like how the young-earthers claim belief in evolution leads to racism. My main concern is not popular prejudice (although I certainly object to that), but the political implications.

Ideas have consequences. If an idea is able to spread unchallenged and people believe it--and those people can vote--it is quite likely that laws will be made to reflect that. The notion that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated, for example, led to those laws in New York, even though it may not be true.

Movie Review: "Starship Troopers: Invasion" (2012)

The other day, I drove up to North Fulton's last Blockbuster Video store and rented the new animated film Starship Troopers: Invasion.  Going to return it soon, but figured I'd review it first...

The Plot

The (surviving) major characters of the live-action film--Johnny Rico (now a general), Carmen Ibanez (a ship captain in her own right), and Carl Jenkins (an intelligence and ESP bigwig)--are brought back together when Carl requisitions Carmen's ship for a classified purpose he claims will win them the war.  When the Federation loses contact with the ship, Carmen and some Mobile Infantry have to get it back.

The Good

*It was a straight-up entertaining animated bug-blasting festival and was pretty fun to watch. Not necessarily all that thoughtful (see my comment on the politics), but it was still entertaining.  When I was a lot younger, I watched the animated series Starship Troopers: Roughnecks and this was a good reminder of that.

*It's an animated movie intended for adults. In the United States, animation is generally considered stuff for kids, with many attempts at using it for more mature audiences failing miserably (the awesome Titan A.E.) comes to mind.  However, outside of the U.S., animation can be used to tell more adult-oriented stories.  The movie was actually made in Japan, which is very well-known for that sort of thing.  In this case, there's much more violence (with blood), more realistic military cursing, nudity, and sex.

*It stayed out of politics entirely. The book depicted a society where one had to serve in the military (or some other dangerous sort of public service, although this is less clear) in order to vote, with the idea that if one had to sacrifice for something, one would appreciate it more and use it more wisely.  Paul Verhoeven, who was in charge of the first film, did not agree and depicted the Terran Federation as being some kind of fascist-ish regime that regulated how many children one could have, televised executions, may have tried to pass off a natural asteroid impact as an alien attack for its own purposes, and then bungled the military "response."  I don't agree with limiting the franchise in this manner ("no taxation without representation" should be reason enough), but that isn't fascistic.

Verhoeven could have made his point about fascism, war, propaganda, etc. by making an original movie and not trashing one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th Century by depicting his ideas as faux Nazism.  Thank God (I mean that) they're remaking it, and they get the bloody point.

*The movie is largely centered on Carmen, who was secondary to Johnny in the original film and is only referenced in the direct-to-video live-action sequels.  Johnny is there and he plays a pivotal role later on, but it's mostly her show.  I really wasn't expecting that.  Sci-fi action movies are generally a boys' club, but this is rather different.

*The sniper girl Trig is apparently a human from a non-Earth human colony, since she lost her family and hometown to a Bug assault. The first film depicts an asteroid strike on Buenoes Aires but otherwise it doesn't seem the Bugs have actually attacked Earth. Although in the book the Terran Federation included multiple planets, the film barely touches on human colonization of other worlds (a Mormon attempt to colonize a Bug world goes predictably badly) and although the animated TV series depicts other worlds, I don't recall any human settlements.

*Powered armor.  That was one thing they left out of the first movie (so they could depict people wearing SWAT gear getting massacred to make an antiwar point I suppose), but finally managed to bring in for the third.  In this one, like in the animated series, most of the soldiers wear roughly human-sized power suits, with the book-style uber-powered armor of the third film appearing in the climax.  On the DVD commentary, one of the people involved said by making it animated, they could depict stuff like the powered armor that would be too expensive to do live-action.

*The movie in general has some really good visuals like mangled bodies floating in zero-gravity, ship-to-ship combat, etc.  See my last comment about how you can do some stuff with animation you can't do live-action.

The Bad

*The completely gratuitous Carmen shower scene was ridiculous.  They start at her feet, pan up to her behind and come around for her breasts, all while this soft sexy music is playing.  Then she starts banging on the wall of the shower and cursing Carl for stealing her ship.  The latter is a character moment--it shows how fixated she is on the ship she commanded and getting it back--but in context, the whole scene is just aggravatingly dumb.


*Carl wasn't that much of a jerk in the first movie.  The only remotely jerky action I can recall is him telepathically prompting his ferret to bug his mother, which isn't especially jerky. In fact, even though he did dress like some escaped Nazi, it's strongly implied he used his telepathy to help Johnny rescue Carmen when her shuttle crashed in Bug territory, which is actually rather nice. One could argue that power corrupts, but Carmen flat-out tells him "you always were an asshole."  Granted, it's been years since I saw the original, but I don't remember any friction between the two of them back when they were in high school.

*During a briefing, Johnny asks Carmen out on a date, which she responds to by walking out of the briefing room.  Depicting Johnny pining after Carmen ten to twenty years after she Dear John'd him is kind of pathetic, plus since he's a general now and giving her orders, that would be really inappropriate.  It does play an important role later in the film and in context I suspect it was intended to be funny, but still.

*One of the characters has extra-sensory powers but didn't have them in the strength needed for the ESP program so he ended up a grunt.  One of the female characters gets all hot and bothered and says that this must be why he always knows when she's in the shower.

(They retain the coed showers present in the first film.)

The character's (weak) telepathy is a Chekhov's gun that should have been fired.  Given how the Bugs seem to run on the same frequencies as human telepaths (we see this to a degree in the first movie and it's a big plot point here), I would have loved to have seen this actually used somewhere. Perhaps in some key fight scene he manages to set the Bugs against each other?


*When Johnny orders the soldiers to investigate Carmen's missing ship, the soldiers agree to do it only if they let an officer who was jailed by Carl (for reasons I won't get into due to spoilers) lead them. Johnny agrees, but said this will not be prejudicial to his court-martial. The attempt to impose conditions, especially the way they did it, comes off as borderline insubordination.  It would have been better if one of the soldiers had asked more respectfully, citing said officer's record, and Johnny considered it and agreed.  THEN he can make the "this will be in no way prejudicial to his trial" comment.

*Since Casper Van Dien, who played Johnny in the original, executive-produced the film, it wouldn't have been that difficult to have him do Johnny's voice-acting.  Consider it something in the same vein as Peter Cullen always being the voice of Optimus Prime. I didn't mind the main characters being voiced by different actors than the ones who played them in the film (with the exception of Carl, who came off as really prissy at the beginning), but still.

*It was difficult to tell some of the lesser characters apart.

The Verdict

A fun romp that could have been a bit better, but I liked it better than the first movie.  7.5 out of 10.

Iron Sky: A Movie Funded By Subscription

I was hanging out with my friend David after I visited the fossil show a few weeks ago and we found this gem online:



The alternate history stuff isn't all that plausible--if the Nazis had the resources needed to colonize the moon, chances are they wouldn't have lost the war on Earth--but despite this, it simply looks awesome.  And it's got a really cool soundtrack, especially the music playing when you see the swarm of Nazi flying saucers approaching Earth.

Another aspect of it that's interesting is that they're relying on donations to fund part of the production of the film.

http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/

That's pretty clever.  It seems they got most of their resources through traditional filmmaking channels, but "crowd-financing" could be useful for someone interested in producing a film that the banks don't think is going to be profitable (and thus won't underwite) or the "Hollywood set" would not be interested in producing (say an adaptation of Starship Troopers that doesn't deform Heinlein's belief system into something resembling Nazism and actually includes powered armor).

It would need to be something with a pretty big existing fan-base to have a good chance of working--funding "Starship Troopers as it should be" might be doable this way because there are masses of ST/Heinlein fans who were disappointed by the actual film, but something like Hiero's Journey, which is relatively unknown, would need to rely on the fundraising talents of the producer and not an existing fan-base that can fork over the cash.

I'd send the producers of the movie some cash to help finance the project, but they're only accepting a limited amount of funding outside of the European Union and apparently there are various rules to invest in it.  However, this blog has gotten a fair number of hits from Europe, so I might have some readers who would have an easier time chipping in some cash.