Starship Troopers: The Shaping of the Space Warrior in Cold War Astroculture, 1950–80

Abstract

This chapter argues that the imagination of warfare in space – and, specifically, of the space suit – serves as a reflection on the extraterrestrial status of media. To analyze how military thought and communication techniques merged in the space suit, it focuses on Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) as a text that reveals the political, technological and cultural mechanisms involved. After close examination, the space warrior proves to be the last possible icon of humanism in a posthuman age, a communicative conscience that is both attracted and repelled by the alien enemy. The chapter shows how a detour through the Japanese reception of Heinlein’s novel globally anchors and visualizes the space suit as a late twentieth-century astrocultural icon.