I normally only post about one thing at a time. Why am I writing about two?
Because they're both classic, genre-defining science fiction novels, and my reactions had something in common.
I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and... well, I read it. It actually didn't make much of an impression on me. I'm sure this is just another example of "Seinfeld is unfunny" hype backlash - having waited so long to check out the original, the ideas it pioneered aren't novel or interesting because they've been used so extensively elsewhere.
Which is not to say I found the story boring or uninspired. On the contrary, I was actually impressed at how fully developed the ideas and philosophies turned out to be, and it made me think that a lot of later stories copied the surveillance dystopia without paying as much mind to the details. Nineteen Eighty-Four explores how and why IngSoc and the state of perpetual war came to be, the complete philosophy and practices behind the Party, and the minutia of day-to-day life - work, relationships, leisure, psychology - under an always-watching police state.
Unfortunately the actual reading of the book was often rather dull. Long passages are devoted to exposition of history and philosophy - sometimes so blatantly as to go "Winston read a book and these are the exact words on the page". Those dry infodumps bothered me a lot more than any sense of the prose being dated.
In the end Nineteen Eighty-Four didn't have a particularly strong impact on me, so at the time I didn't write anything about it and instead just moved on to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Before starting the book I was aware that Starship Troopers heavily defined the military science fiction genre, invented the idea of powered armour, and was the inspiration for the "space marine" concept (that last is ironic given some of the novel's content). I knew there was a movie, and might have seen it but don't remember much - regardless, I've been told the movie is based on an unrelated script and later got the license, so it's quite different and satirizes a lot of the novel's themes. But the movie's not important here. Except maybe for the fact that the cast agreed to a co-ed nude shower scene only if the director directed naked, which he did.
Anyway. I read the first chapter of Starship Troopers and was excited but concerned. The first chapter deals with a hit-and-run Mobile Infantry raid and introduces the capabilities of the armour. That's cool! But the part that bothered me was how light on actual detail it was. It read like a summary rather than immersing me in the moment - it didn't make me feel like I was there experiencing the action with sensory and emotional detail, it made me feel like I was reading a report. The only other extended combat sequence reads the same: "this happened, then that happened, then we did this".
Most of the novel feels like military propaganda in the guise of training retrospectives and philosophy "debates". I put debates in quotes because they're all one-sided: the discussions are contrived to push a "mathematically provable" philosophy, not to actually explore an issue. I didn't get the sense that the book was pro-war, but it was heavily pro-military (and corporal punishment). Everything the army does is justified, every officer is only hard on his men because he cares so deeply about them, and all punishments are fair and regrettable but necessary for the good of the troops and therefore the good of society. Any faults or weaknesses that you can think of in modern militaries have been dealt with in the perfect sunshine-and-rainbows-and-guns military of the future, and the only people there are smart, kind, effective people with only the best intentions and never any malice or rivalry.
The novel talks about how only army men are allowed to vote because only army men are REAL MEN who care about more than just themselves. Not even the navy are REAL MEN, because they're not army, and the navy has no idea how hard the poor . Pilots are revered and would be real men if women didn't make better pilots. There are all kinds of little morally-superior asides, like the comment that since there's always fighting somewhere, "peace" means the times when civilians stop caring about military casualties.
Basically, I went in expecting hard military sci-fi action, and through the entire book I was wondering when the propaganda would stop and the action would start.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that my reactions to both novels had something in common. That something is a kind of neutral indifference. I didn't enjoy Nineteen Eighty-Four or Starship Troopers, but neither did I hate them. I'm glad I read them and that I have a better understanding of the history of science fiction, but I won't read these books again and wouldn't recommend them for anything but scholarly interest.
I'm not saying they're bad - obviously, if they were, they wouldn't have created entire sub-genres and tropes. They're just... not for me.
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