The strategy was simple, and, I guess, logical… if we could afford the losses. Let the Bugs come up.Meet them and kill them on the surface. Let them keep on coming up. Don’t bomb their holes, don’t gas their holes — let them out. After a while — a day, two days, a week if we really did have overwhelming force, they would stop coming up. Planning Staff estimated (don’t ask me how!) that the Bugs would expend 70 per cent to 90 per cent of their warriors before they stopped trying to drive us off the surface.
The book by Robert Heinlein was written in 1959, but it still has a futuristic flavour. It tells the story of the war with the Bugs, an arachnid-like alien species, sometime in the future of humankind.
It uses a first-person narrative to follow the tale of a soldier, gradually increasing in ranking, as the war progresses. Much of the book is taking place during his military training, which gives the opportunity to discuss many political ideas.
The book basically started the military scifi genre. It has numerous ideas very advanced for their time: racial diversity, starship drives, power suits.
The first movie (1997) is quite different than the book, more action-packed and less intellectually engaging.
Overall, the novel offers an immersive lecture and an interesting storyline, where the author uses the background of war and the progress of a space marine to propose some political ideas.
Mike Bostan - personal blog on book reviews and energy studies 