Last Saturday night I had to wait for someone into the early hours of the morning. Flipping though the TV channels I landed on the movie Starship Troopers. I have always avoided this because of its poor reputation and it lived up to it. Both script and acting were appalling. But then it was the film of arguably the worst book I’ve ever read (which makes you wonder why it was made). Even so, watching it encouraged me to relive a youthful enthusiasm for Robert Heinlein.

I loved Heinlein in my teens, and I’m re-reading one of his books to find out why. Broadly Heinlein went through three phases. The early books (like Starship Troopers) were militaristic / survivalist, politically somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan, and poorly written. In the mid-phase, typified by his novel of the establishment of a lunar state, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he just about hit it right in the mix of genuinely thought-provoking ideas and rollicking plot. Then, when hugely successful, we got the over-long, maudlin, self-indulgent rambles like Time Enough for Love.

The book I chose to re-read was the book on the cusp between phase 2 and 3 – Stranger in a Strange Land. Written in 1961, it had the luck to anticipate the wave of 1960s thinking, and its free love / embrace the whole / grok life message made it huge (despite the usual dose of Heinlein’s unstintingly right wing views on personal independence). But it’s also fascinating looking back on what it does and doesn’t do.

I can see why it appealed to the teenage boy – there’s adventure, some intriguing ideas and, yes, plenty of beautiful women (mostly set alongside brainy but not necessarily sporty men). But now three things come across.

First, inevitably, it has dated. Although not set in a specific period we have the second manned mission to Mars, flying taxis with automatic pilots and grass carpets, but also there’s a dated attitude to smoking and a (3D) security camera system that uses film, to store the images.

Second there is some surprising depth in the thinking about the very different attitude to life a human raised by Martians might have. (Particularly set in contrast with the deliciously 1950s attitude to relations between men and women, with lots of coy wordplay including a girl being called ‘pretty foots’ (sic) and comments like ‘You big lunk,’ not being out of place.)

Finally, I had forgotten how much Heinlein’s middle aged male protagonists had then-inconceivable portfolios careers. The older character in this book, Jubal Harshaw, is a medical doctor, a lawyer and churns out Z-grade fiction of a sort the probably sold in Heinlein’s youth but that was already so far out of acceptable in 1961 that it must have been a parody.

As someone who has something of a portfolio career myself, I can’t help but wonder how much I was influenced subconsciously by Heinlein. If so, his writing probably changed my life more than anyone in the 60s who bought into the trippy hippy, free love feel.

So, hurrah for Starship Troopers.