Quote:
Originally Posted by OccultHawk
Oh I definitely finished it. I liked it just not 100% balls to the wall. I probably needed to concentrate on it more than I did to get as much as you did out of it.
|
It's funny actually. The first time I read it in middle school I was someone who today would be totally at risk of becoming a gamergate MAGA fascist. I totally dug it as a schematic for building a better society and I was all about giving the vote only to veterans cause it sounded cool. Then after high school when I dropped that **** and having mostly the movie in my mind I decided that I'd misread the book and was a fool to mistake what the book was actually trying to say.
Then I reread the book recently and realized I'd read it kinda right the first time. It was expressing more nuanced ideas than I was capable of understanding back in the day but ultimately was still praising the experience of military service even if it wasn't explicitly praising fascism. And honestly I still haven't quite wrapped my head around exactly what it's saying cause I suspect that Heinlein is a weird ****ing guy who has anti-authoritarian ideas but still values his experience in the military and is possibly too wild in the head to parse it all himself.
I will say that it's potentially as dangerous a book as Atlas Shrugged though. If I ever have a kid I won't be comfortable with them reading it without talking to them about their ideas about it.