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Actually it was not based on the Nazis if Poul Anderson is to be believed:

I never joined in the idiot cries of "fascist!" It was plain that the society of Starship Troopers is, on balance, more free than ours today. I did wonder how stable its order of things would be, and expressed my doubts in public print as well as in the occasional letters we exchanged. Heinlein took no offense. After a little argument back and forth, we both fell into reminiscences of Switzerland, where he got the notion in the first place. [Anderson 1992:319]

http://www.kentaurus.com/troopers.htm

just another perspective... http://www.kentaurus.com/troopers.htm

I'm partial to this page on SST: Heinlein vs Verhoeven. Good discussion of the book, and a nice debunking of some of the BS and misunderstandings about the book.

This should give you one persons take on Robert Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers" It is a great book that would be an alternative future to the snazzy Star Trek version that became popular shortly later. I love the early cold war feel to it, gritty, real...

For the book itself, though, he offers a great deal of praise, spending a lot of time debunking various "myths" that have sprung up around the book since it was published. If you're judging Starship Troopers (the book) by your impressions of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (the movie), you're doing yourself a great disservice.

were the whole point of "Starship Troopers"!

Verhooven missed that, entirely, so he threw in a bunch of sadism (DI sticking a knife through a recruit's hand for _no_reason_), fascism (service == citizenship commercials) and sex (Dina Meyer) that were absent in the book, I guess to keep the teenagers interested?

Heinlein's Federal Service did NOT advertize. Instead they made gruesome examples of disabled vetrans to _discourage_ rash youth from enlistment. One percent of the enlistees completed basic training, most left voluntarily. All were free to resign at any time (other than during an actual engagement). Doesn't sound like any fascist society I've ever heard of.

Then Verhooven left out the powered armor. Idiot. Would you like to see more?

I gave the book to the SO's seventeen-year-old, the opening chapter grabbed him firmly by the imagination and he read it in about a day. (Only thing I ever saw him actually read, besides the D&D, MechWarrior, and CyberPunk manuals). I never quizzed hin on the H&MP so I don't know if he understood that. But I did learn how to get these young kids' attention: Mechs!

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It's not as if there _aren't_ fine RAH stories with plenty of sex and violence, and into which Mr. Verhooven could easily have patched a hottie like Dina and additional sex if he had wanted. How about "Glory Road"? Cripes, it has nude beaches! Or "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"? Indeed, even something as intellectual as "Beyond This Horizon" has sex, socialism, human genetic engineering (to outrage the fascism theorists), a couple of gunfights (one of which could be amplified, just a tiny bit, into a _major_ shootout on the scale of "Invasion USA" if desired), and men who wore nail polish. Shit, how about "Friday"? Additional gratuitous sex could be added at random to many Heinlein stories, with no damage. Instead he picked about the least appropriate one to pump sex into, and used it to replace the central theme, which he obviously failed to understand (if he was _trying_ for a sarcastic parody, he failed miserably IMHO, and would have been much better off to just go with a straight adaptaion of the book)!
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"A hack-and-slash-hero-gets-the-bitch-flick"? Exactly. With "RAH's Starship Troopers" for a title, I expected better. I also expected powered armor.

Somebody up there remarked that he liked the book, and the movie, and the coincidence that they shared the same title and major characters' names. There, however, the resemblence ends.

I, OTOH, thought the movie was rather lame, and would have paid very little attention to it if it were not for that title. I'm outraged that someone did _that_ to ST.

Perhaps IHBT but I'll bite.

There's actually nothing fascist about Starship Troopers - the movie leans that way, but the book does not. Heinlein wrote it because he was pissed at the way our Nuclear and Military policy was being handled. Nobody in the book is forced to serve the government, as you would be in fascism - the government doesn't own the economy, as a fascist one would. It's true that the franchise isn't automatically granted, but that just makes it elitist, not fascist. The franchise isn't automatically granted in the US either - you have to reach a certain age - and in some states in the past you had to prove you could read, or pay a tax, or some such. Some of those individual policies may have been unjust, but that doesn't mean the government was fascist.

Also, the military is not allowed free rein in the book - members of the military/civil service do not participate in the government until AFTER their service - and even then the majority of citizens were not actually in the military, but in the civil service.

Don't take my word for it, this review is not favorable towards the book, but denies that it is fascist:

http://home.golden.net/~csp/cd/reviews/starship.ht m

Or try this page for another view:

http://www.kentaurus.com/troopers.htm

If you think Starship Troopers was meant as satire, perhaps you enjoyed the satire of such other political apologies as The Federalist Papers, the Communist Manifesto, or Mein Kampf. The fact that Mein Kampf, let's say, could be easily lampooned or refuted doesn't mean that it was meant as as satire. Or perhaps you remember the movie, which is satirical (of Heinlein). Contrary to the opinion of many, our (the US) military is not populated by idiots.

What Verhoeven and his cronies did with the movie was turn the Federation into an actual fascist state. As the linked webpage states, Verhoeven's statement that...

"The philosophy of Heinlein is certainly in the movie. Whether I adhere to that society myself is something else, but it is the philosophy of the world he described, and we took that from his book."

...is total bullshit. Purposely or not, Verhoeven et al got Heinlein's philosophy all fucked up. So the movie ends being a pretty good action flick, with a kinda anti-war message from its over-the-top portrayal of a fascist state, if you really try to analyze it. Of course, there's really no point in doing that, because Heinlein's novel discusses a lot more stuff a lot better, and Verhoeven didn't pick up any of it in the 5-minute read he gave it before directing the movie.

However, I have trouble daying that our current method of granting the vote (to anyone over 18 who is a "citizen" by some standard) is any better. I have always beeen firmly against age discrimination in any form.

In any case you have not given any clue as to what your particular objection with the book is, other than to dismiss it as foaming right-wing gibberish. This does not for a coherent conversation make. Instead of responding to something specific, I'm making scattershot answers to what I think you might be objecting to in the book.

see this reference for more discussion. Here's a quote from Heinlein himself explaining the status of the miltary in Starhsip Troopers:

No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead -- and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older." [Heinlein 1980:398]