Blasting bugs is more complicated than you think

I lost my heart to a Starship Trooper ... Photograph: Columbia Tristar/Kobal

There's a law on science fiction blogs stating that there is probability of one that the words Robert Heinlein and Starship Troopers will be followed by the word 'fascist'. Certainly, I've been unable to resist the compulsion - even if I'm not as sure as some that the 1960 Hugo winner is an apologia for military dictatorship and institutional racism.

The controversy has been raging (and I mean raging) ever since the book was first published almost 50 years ago, helped along by its prominent position on US marine recommended reading lists and Paul Verhoeven's gloriously over the top 1997 adaptation. Even if large swathes of middle America are supposed to have taken this film at face value and viewed it as a special effects-heavy exercise in battle-porn, its satirical intent couldn't be clearer. As Verhoeven says on his (highly recommended) DVD commentary track, the point is that the men in long black coats are "bad, bad, bad". But, splendid as the film may be, it shouldn't be taken as a true reflection of the book. Heinlein's position is far more complex, even if no less bonkers for that.

The author claimed that he wrote Starship Troopers in just a few weeks, galvanised into action by a newspaper advert published by the left-leaning Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy, demanding an end to nuclear weapons testing in the United States. This inspiration is clear: the book is a paean to blowing shit up, shot through with anti-Marxist rhetoric and featuring an insect enemy whose hive mind and military tactic of sacrificing individuals for the good of the many could be seen as the apotheosis of communism.

But there's more to Starship Troopers than a simple rebuff to those Cold War peaceniks, and its continuing ability to provoke debate rests as much with Heinlein's strange and vividly described utopian ideas as his gung-ho militarism. The novel is set in a society 5,000 years in the future, where only those who have completed a fixed term of military service are allowed to vote and where teachers tell their pupils (in direct opposition to Wilfred Owen) that: "the noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and war's desolation."

The result is a world that is stable, crime-free and technologically advanced. It's a discomforting and provocative challenge to anyone who doesn't believe that might is a moral absolute. Even so, it's probably over-simplistic to brand this society as plain fascist. Heinlein is an equal opportunities militarist, for instance, taking care to populate his army with representatives of most races and both sexes. It's also suggested in the book that the legal, personal and property rights of non-citizens are fully protected (even if it isn't explained how these safeguards work).

It's also perhaps over-simplistic to say that Heinlein himself 100 per cent approved of the fundamentals of this future utopia. The text isn't without ambiguity (although some of the contradictions might easily be credited to the speed at which it was written) and there's an independent first-person narrator who shouldn't just be seen as a mouthpiece of the author, even if he might not have much in the way of character.

This one-dimensional storyteller is Juan Rico, a member of a marine-style Mobile Infantry who tells of his passage through training and his subsequent career blasting the bejesus out of mankind's insectoid enemy in flashback.

Plenty of this material is fascinating. There are dramatic accounts of a boot camp so tough it makes the one in Full Metal Jacket seem like a Woodcraft Folk holiday and there are a few brief but exhilarating battle sequences. In these too, Heinlein's inventiveness comes into its own, particularly in his depiction of an exoskeleton armour that allows his soldiers to 'jump' vast distances and is occasionally rumoured to have inspired a real-life US military research programme.

Plenty more is seriously odd. The various strata of the military, its ranking systems and customs are described with fetishistic detail and in a manner weird enough alone to get 'fascist' sensors pinging. Worse still, great chunks of the book are given over to terrifically dull lectures about the need to limit the franchise to veterans and joys of combat. These come courtesy of a handful of other characters equally as one-dimensional as the narrator, who seem to exist only to spout philosophy.

In spite of these longueurs, Starship Troopers is compelling reading. And it's not just the difficult nature Heinlein's politics that makes it so. There's a force to much of the writing and a clarity of vision that elevate this book far above other equally rightwing tracts that have long since been forgotten. It remains challenging even 50 years after publication because it also remains alive and compelling. For most liberals it may present the fascination of the abomination - but it's fascination, nonetheless.

Next time: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr