Tsaiberspace

One of the cool things about my current workplace is the “lending library”: employees just drop off and pick up books. And since this is a high-tech company populated by geeks like me, the reading selection is heavily skewed towards my interests: science-fiction, fantasy, and Tom Clancy (in addition to the correctly-assumed collection of technical books).

Last weekend I read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I intended it to last me my plane flight out and back; it was disappointing only because after the first chapter I got sucked into what I thought would be an epic space opera, only to finish the book before the plane landed at my destination, leaving me with no book for the flight back home. It has some neat ideas about interstellar warfare, in particular, time dilation, which figures prominently in Ender’s Game.

Yesterday I picked up Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, also a quick read (I finished it last night). After chasing down Heinlein, the book, and the movie (Wikipedia is great for this kind of thing), I’ve decided I like both the book and the movie, each on their own merits. The movie is standard Paul Verhoeven fare, emphasizing the romance and action (with an essentially Aryan cast) at the expense of Heinlein’s philosophy (and ethnically-diverse cast). Heinlein’s book, despite being written in 1959, has ideas in it that are still very cool even now (in particular, the mobile exoskeleton).

What struck me most was the similarity between the books (well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I haven’t read anything in a very long time). They both, in the first person, follow the main character’s path through:

• Basic military training (emphasizing the difficulties of operating a powered exoskeleton) and graduation.
• Some episodic R&R and temporary “return” to (and rejection of) civilian life.
• An indefinite term of military service in a species-vs.-species war to extinction.
• A twist at the end. Their respective twists aren’t even really Old Boy- or Sixth Sense-caliber, but they are “twisty” enough to warrant “no spoiler” protection.