Fascist, Smascist
There's a little mini-stir in the blogosphere about a New York Times Book Review writer calling Robert Heinlein a fascist. Instapundit noted that a review of John Scalzi's new book (I must get around to reading Old Man's War) and the author compared it to Starship Troopers. Here's the original quote:

Heinlein’s military sci-fi, particularly the book that practically invented the genre, “Starship Troopers,” has not aged well, to put it mildly. First published in 1959, when America’s misadventure in Korea was over and its intervention in Vietnam was hardly a twinkle in John F. Kennedy’s eye, “Starship Troopers” tells of the education of a naïve young man who enlists in a futuristic infantry unit. Raised by his father to believe that the practice of war is obsolete, the immature soldier — and, by extension, the reader — is instructed through a series of deep space combat missions that war is not only unavoidable, it is vital and even noble. While peace, Heinlein writes, is merely “a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties,” war is what wins man his so-called unalienable rights and secures his liberty. The practice of war is as natural as voting; both are fundamental applications of force, “naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.”

From here the book starts to get a little scary. Frame it as a cautionary tale if it helps you sleep better, but to a contemporary reader it is almost impossible to interpret the novel as anything other than an endorsement of fascism, from an era when the f-word wasn’t just a pejorative suffix to be attached to any philosophy you disagreed with. Taken literally — and there is no indication that Heinlein meant otherwise....

Richard Miniter writes about it a pajamas media. Also a good read is this link to Spider Robinson's defense of Heinlein.

Frankly, I don't think the comments were all that bad. Especially when you note the writer's self-effacing comments at the end:

If [Scalzi] uses [his] work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete, then Scalzi truly will have earned his place alongside Heinlein in the canon of military science fiction — and not a moment too soon.

- posted by Base10 @ 12:24 PM