In 1959, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers won the Hugo award as the year's best science fiction novel. Critics and reviewers have been apologizing for that fact ever since. Even admirers of Heinlein as a logician and story-teller condemn Starship Troopers as a "militaristic polemic" glorifying a violent, proto-fascist ethic, creating a polarized society in which heroic war veterans rule over "draftdodgers, effeminate snobs, pacifists, and other animals of low standing.&...