How does that fit into your wiki definition?

If I recall, Starship Trooper's closest pass to fascism was that the government only allowed a certain class of people to vote - military veterans who left the service and never joined the officer corps. Prior enlisted guys. The military never directly ruled - you only got to vote when you got out. Ordinary civilians never ruled either -they hadn't demonstrated their loyalty to the country via service.

Whether or not you think such a situation would quickly decay into fascism is another story. I, personally, can't envision the circumstances in which such a government could form in the first place - allowing the prior-Es to vote but not the officers, while possibly a wise stabilizing factor, just seems like too much an inversion of the way humans typically process class status.

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hhEb, I started this but I don't like the direction its going and I'm not sure where I'm being unclear. That seemed to be a huge example of placing the state above the individual. Not bolded to be a jerk or anything.

I'm still willing to be peaceful here if everybody else is.

Mr. Alexander, funny that, huh? Anedotes about smoke and fire come to mind.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Just a clarification. Maybe a disagreement. It's been four or five years since I last read it, I think, but wasn't that an individual action against the state? And there was some discussion about it in the book, right? IIRC

Heinlein addressed that in "Expanded Universe",he specifically noted in ST that "veterans" were veterans of civil service,with about 10% being military veterans.He said that his critics couldn't read simple declarative sentences.

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"An armed man is a citizen
An unarmed man is a subject"

Robert A. Heinlein

I haven't read that one yet, and really haven't picked up Starship troopers since freshman year of college. My bad.

Still, it's hard to see such a government forming. The people who form governments have usually just finished violently overthrowing another one, and what results from it usually has a lot to do with what motivates the over-throwers. If it's a military org doing it for the sake of a military objective or just to plain take over, the top officers will be in charge. If it's a mob run by a charismatic demogogue, you'll get a theocracy. If it's a bunch of land-holding aristocrats, you'll get a fuedal society. If it's a group of well armed merchants who are fed up with arbitrary rule and taxation, you might get a democracy, if everything goes exactly right and you have a lot of men in leadership who are uncommonly disinterested in power.

But a revolution putting low tier civil servants in charge without their nominal commanders over them? That would be something to see.

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Hence, the science fiction: what if we could get this thing, what would we do with it. Didn't Heinlein have one protagonist go into the future and build a CAD system so he could design his time machine? or something like that?

Something like that. That would be "Drafting Dan" from The Door Into Summer, which was a semi mechanical system from the description.



Spoiler time:



The character didn't invent a time machine (that was someone else) but he did recognize Drafting Dan as an idea he'd had before going into cold sleep. He did manage to use a "secret project" time machine to go back in time, and built Drafting Dan (which he used for other projects).

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

That would be The Door into Summer.

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This list must not have come up in such a context, though, because it doesn't include anything about getting food and water or starting fires or making & basic tools. (In fact, the context in which it came up would seem to have been a military one, based on how much of the list is preoccupied with military matters and culture, and having a functional military system within which to prove one's worth by these skills implies that the rest of society is still working well enough to support that military system... which would mean this is a list of stuff you should be able to do if your society is still working, not if it isn't.)

changing diapers SIR

My head just exploded trying to read that.

Yes, it is. I shouldn't have capitalized "into."

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Okay, sort of like making a three point turn let me change direction again.

I'm not set in stone on this. I read all his work before I was 16. That was a hell of a long time ago.

Educate me. Its what you guys like to do. Yeah I broached this, but I'm not trying to defend an ATM.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

At this point I'm reminded of people who pick up the Bible and see in it only the parts about handling snakes or boiling the calf in the mother's milk. Why must everyone endlessly rehash one story in a large oeuvre of work, most of which is more fun to read? I mean, isn't Lorenzo Smythe more interesting than Johnny Rico? Might it be productive to look at Kipling's influence on Heinlein? (RAH was more a jingoist, not by any stretch fascist; at core he was a storyteller in the right time and place).

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The book does not explicitely say that the raped and murdered girl was one of those charged with teasing the troops. Actually, Manny implies the contrary by saying "it may have started as a simple slot machine[1] transaction" -- the teasers did not have sex with the troops, that was the whole point. Manny & Co. just milked the incident for all it was worth.

But if it were one of the "tease girls", then it would have been a perfect example of "putting revolution above the individual". Which is typical of almost all revolutions.

[1] Looney slang for "prostitute"

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

A lot of the stuff in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress really happened.

Somewhere, somewhen.

There is even a Mossadeq reference.

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I get the distinct impression that Citizen of the Galaxy was allegorical for someone's real experience too. The references to the middle eastern slave trade, and the west's general cluelessness and indifference to it were plain enough.

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Most of Heinlein's works had "deeper" insights that "could" be applied to modern life. His "juvenile" works (like Citizen of the Galaxy) certainly had meanings that went over the heads of its "target" audience, but went straight to an "intended" audience!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson