The book that would be film, Starship Troopers, speaks with the kind of true grit that, had the genre been properly developed at the time of its publication, John Wayne would have starred in. The story follows -- on the bounce -- the career of Juan Rico, a violently average guy of a few decades in the future. The earth has become unified under one government, where only people who served in the military can vote as "citizens" and everybody else is just standing around.

The book follows Rico through his indoctrination and remaking as a military man, during which time the human race meets "the bugs" and goes to war with the even-more violent new species. In a way it's unfair to try to judge this book by any rules other than those of its own genre, the war story. And a war story is exactly what this is -- futuristic and technological status notwithstanding, it's a tale of men and combat along the lines of the propagandistic World War II movies of yesteryear. As a war story, this is par excellence, speaking in the updated terms of technology and time that may come to pass in the next century.

It is. however, a slow read for the first half or so. Rico's deadpan delivery (the narrative is in the first person) makes basic training play like Stripes without humor -- why bother? The reader almost finds himself saying, "come on, blow something up already!" It all congeals coherently towards the second half, when Rico's fates and the Bug War escalates into more interesting proportions. By the book's almost maudlin conclusion, one can imagine the score, all brass and heroism, being played behind the scene. It'll be interesting to see how Hollywood takes on this very traditional war tale in today's very untraditional, almost B-Movie atmosphere.