Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode we'll continue our exploration of Appendix W and a list of science fiction influences on the world of Warhammer 40,000 with a look at one of the most seminal and influential books in military science fiction history, Starship Troopers.  

Alright, let's just get into it. Let's take a look at the first appearance of a Space Marine in literature as it shows up at Robert Heinlein's 1959 book. This is from page 12 and 13: 

“I was already loading my rocket launcher while I was checking on Ace and telling him for the second time to straighten up. Jelly's voiced reach me right on the top of that, on the All Hands Circuit: `Platoon by Leapfrog: Forward’, my boss, Sergeant Johnson, echoed `by leapfrog odd numbers: Advance’. That left me with nothing to worry about for 20 seconds, so I jumped up on the building nearest me, raised the launcher to my shoulder, found the target, and pulled the first trigger to let the rocket have a look at its target.

Pulled the second trigger and kissed it on its way, jumped back to the ground. Second section, even numbers. I called out, waited for the count in my mind in order to advance, and did so myself, hopping over the next row of buildings and while I was in the air, fanning the first row by the riverfront with a hand flamer.

They seemed to be wood construction. It looked like the time to start a good fire. With luck, some of those warehouses would house oil products or even explosives. As I hit the Y rack on my shoulders, launched two small HE bombs a couple of hundred yards each way to my right and left flanks, but I never saw what they did as just then my first rocket hit that unmistakable, if you've ever seen the brilliance of an atomic explosion. It was just a peewee, of course, less than two kilotons nominal yield.” 

So early on in the book, we're thrown right into the action along with Johnny Rico, a member of the Mobile Infantry. But these are Space Marines and all but name. They're wearing heavily armored suits and a launch from a spaceship that's in orbit high above the planet that they're attacking, and they send in just a single platoon to wreck an entire city in the space of half an hour or so. So within this short description, you know, the space of less than a page, we get a sense of what they're capable of, that they're jump pack infantry that are highly mobile. They keep in contact with communications and they have advanced range finders and sighting systems.  They have multiple weapons systems like a rocket launcher and a hand flamer and high explosive bombs launching from their backpack. And this gives us a sense that they're hyper-capable soldiers that due to the technological superiority or just in the process of overwhelming an enemy. On the next page, he runs into some of the aliens that he's fighting:

“Opened my eyes and stared straight at a local citizen just coming out of an opening in the building ahead of me. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he started to raise something, a weapon, I suppose, as Jelly called out ‘odd numbers, advance’. I didn't have time to fool with him. I was a good 500 yards short of where I should have been by then, I still had the hand flamer in my left hand.

I toasted him and jumped over the building he had been coming out of as they started to count. A hand flamer is primarily for incendiary work, but it is a good defensive anti-personnel weapon. In tight quarters, you don't have to aim it much. (Ricoh then takes another jump). I found myself down on a roof, but not a nice flat one where I might have tarried three seconds to launch another PeeWee A-bomb rocket.  

This roof was a jungle of pipes and stanchions and assorted iron mongery. A factory maybe, or some sort of chemical works. No place to land. Worse still, half a dozen natives were up there. These geezers are humanoid, eight to nine feet tall, much skinnier than we are, and with a higher body temperature. They don't wear any clothes and stand out on a set of snoopers, like a neon sign.  They look still funnier in daylight with your bare eyes, but I would rather fight them than the arachnids. Those bugs make me queasy.”

Within the space of another page, we get more of the world building of the story, more of the capabilities of the armor and the soldiers, and we're introduced to two alien races, the skinnys that he's currently fighting and mention of the arachnids that we’ll meet much later on in the book.

Now, these arachnids are notable for being the ones featured in the movie, but they're described differently here, and maybe that gives us a quick opportunity to talk about the difference between the movie and the book. So the movie came out in 1997 directed by Paul Verhoeven. It was loosely adapted based on the novel, but there's a lot of differences, and this has been brought up multiple times.

The screenwriter, Ed Neumeier, who had previously collaborated with Verhoeven on Robocop, which just as an aside, is one of my all-time personal faves, had started a draft script called “Bug Hunt” in the nineties when while he was shopping that around, it was noted it had some similarities with Heinlein’s novel. Once the rights were secured and the adaptation began, well, then the executive notes and also Verhoeven's directorial vision kind of took over. Verhoeven infamously only read a couple chapters in the book before he thought it was boring, and then just decided to use it as a springboard for his critique about totalitarianism and fascism.  So a lot of what we see in the film is Pure Verhoeven and from the guy who brought us Robocop and the Schwarzenegger flick Total Recall. We can see that lineage and that wry sense of humor, but I digress. The focus here in Appendix W is on those elements of fiction that led to the development of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe, which came out in 1987 and Verhoeven's film wasn't launched till 97, as we said, so I think we really need to address the film at a much later date because it did influence subsequent development of Warhammer 40,000. 

But really right now our focus is on the novel and that version of Starship Troopers was released in the fall of 1959. Published by GP Putnam and Sons with a lot of reprints. I'm reading the Ace Edition from May 1987. It's a slim little 208-page paperback, which usually fits into a pocket, and it's considered the last of Heinlein’s juvenile novels, which were a series of science fiction novels written for young adults, back before young adult was a marketing category, and by young adults in the 1950s, they specifically meant teenage boys.

The general themes are about growing up and having to deal with adult things like decisions and responsibilities and conflict, all told through the lens of a science fiction story. And as I and others have mentioned elsewhere, science fiction is usually a reflection on the present and using the metaphors of science fiction in order to examine the situation that we have within our real world by, you know, disambiguating it a little bit.

Now for Heinlein, there was definitely an element of propaganda in those stories because he used them to communicate his own views about what he thought being a participant in a just and civil society should be, and Heinlein is in by no means being singled out in this regard. All authors will communicate their ideology through their works; some more explicitly than others.  And while we're not gonna go all Zizekian here and say the novel’s function is “pure ideology”, they definitely fit within an ideological apparatus, as does pretty much all military science fiction. But in the meantime, please forgive my Zizek impression. I'll work on that, as I'm pretty sure he's gonna come up again in the future.  Now, in terms of Appendix W, we really need to spend some time going into the rise and development of military science fiction, as so many of the influential titles are drawn from that genre, and it's not without its problems, but for now, let's get back to the book.  

Now this is the part that's most fun for me. And looking at this, we're probably gonna have to turn this into a recurring segment and look at it. Every time we look at an influence on Warhammer 40,000, I like looking at the technology that was presented in the fiction and then seeing how it manifested within, in this case, the game. Often we like looking at things that show up in, say, a science fiction film, and then see how they get implemented in real life, or with our cyberpunk series, we like looking at the material that was presented in cyberpunk and see how that turned into the inspiration for development for our current technological systems that we have in say 2022.  But in the context of Appendix W, we really wanna look at the technology as presented in the book and see how it was turned into something in the game. I'd say “gamified”, but I really don't like the term here. We just wanna see how it's incorporated as an element. So returning to that last excerpt, let's take a look at some of the technology that's presented in the novel.

First off, we have the armor, the Marauder Armor. It's a fully enclosed suit with some environmental protection. It has advanced comms, including what sounds like a heads-up display. It has multiple vision systems, including the snoopers, which sounds a lot like low light vision, along with say, an IR or UV vision as well, and of course, the suit, which as I said, self-contained, like the infantry deploys from low. orbit. They're in a drop pod, which breaks open in the atmosphere, and then they parachute the rest of the way down. So it's jump pack infantry, or what we'd call jump pack infantry. It can make assisted leaps that cover vast amounts of distance and get to the top of buildings.  It isn't actually a flight suit the way we now think about it, but I'm gonna touch on that here because if the suit sounds familiar, I mean, outside of the flight, it's almost the same kind of thing we saw represented in the very first Iron Man film back in 2008. It's more advanced than Tony's original version from the cave, obviously, but it's very close to the one that's presented as like his first or second gen version - minus Jarvis and the flight boots - it's pretty close, but again, this is 1959. Ironman didn't appear in Marvel comics until Tales of Suspense number 39 from March in 1963. Did Stan draw inspiration from Heinlein's work? It's hard to say. They were both writing in the Cold War era and they were dealing with similar themes and issues, but I think their approaches were a little bit different. Stan Lee was talking much more about the industrialist and the armor on the outside, but being weak on the inside, whereas Heinlein was much more talking about the military as a whole. But it's interesting to see how the parallels develop over time. 

But turning back to the Marauder Armor, we can see how that directly showed up in Warhammer 40,000, the types of systems that were listed in the detailed version of Power Armor that was given in the early writing on Warhammer 40,000 in both the books and in the White Dwarf Magazine. The jump packs were mentioned in the original game, and Drop Infantry was the thing from very early on. I mean, they're basically high-tech paratroopers taken to the edge of space rather than from a glider over Normandy, but that idea of dropping out of the skies on your enemy still holds a great deal of fascination.

Shifting from the armor to the weapon systems, we see a bunch that are explicitly named that end up showing up in Warhammer 40,000 as well. I point to the hand flamer, which as an idea is kind of unique, a flame thrower that doesn't require the backpack that was present in all the military versions at that time and shows up here verbatim within Warhammer 40K. Additionally, the rocket launcher, the shoulder mounted version with multiple different warheads that can be selected and then used as required by the battlefield conditions. This is the one, basically, exactly as it was presented in the rulebook, and it was also the one that, it came rather famously with the original RTB01 Space Marine set, the one that was the first plastic kit the Games Workshop released.  The closeup grenade harness showed up on the very first Terminator Marines, which came out shortly after the rulebook, and were part of the very first edition of the game. 

Then dialing back from the small human sized and personal tech, we have that idea of the star fleet, the star ships that the troopers are dropping from here. Let's take a look at that.

The first ship that the drop out of is named that Roger Young, and it's presented as a Navy ship. And it follows a similar naming convention to the US Navy, which isn't surprising because Heinlein famously did spend time in the US Navy. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and Heinlein served on a number of naval vessels for the US Navy in the 1930s, including the USS Lexington, which was an aircraft carrier as well as the USS Roper, which was a destroyer.  We're not gonna get into the full extent of his military service, but obviously it influenced the fiction that he wrote in subsequent years.  Now within 40K, the idea of an Imperial Navy had existed since the beginning as well. I mean, it's redolent throughout science fiction. The idea of spaceships being basically an extension of the Navy goes far beyond Heinlein, but you know, as a Navy guy and a prolific author, he is responsible for a fair degree of it. It also just makes sense. If you're gonna describe something futuristic, often you have to approach it analogically. And in this case, the three-dimensional combat that takes place in the void of space is often represented by the 2D and then later 3D Combat that takes place on above and below are oceans.

Now, spaceship Combat was something that was by and large far beyond the scope and scale of the squad-based tactical combat was represented within the Game of Warhammer 40,000 at least for Rogue Trader. A few years later Games Workshop did publish a game called Battlefleet Gothic, which represented those spaceship actions, and within that game, we can see some of the elements of Starship Troopers show up again. But Battlefleet Gothic is kind of beyond the scope of our podcast right now, so maybe we should set aside a special episode for Battlefleet Gothic at some point in the future. But within both the book and the game, the Navy represents something more than just the technological elements.  It also represents the social and organizational elements as well. I think we need to get to those. 

The Navy in the book is represented as part of the massive organizational and bureaucratic structure of the planet Earth, as is true with navies pretty much everywhere around the globe as the resources, logistics, and organization required to keep a navy afloat and functioning on the seas is a massive expenditure for any nation or state that seeks to do so. And this is true in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe as well, where the Navy is responsible for protecting trillions of people spread across millions of planets throughout the galaxy. And the organizational structure seems to be an attempt to codify the very word, Byzantine. There's not enough time in this podcast to outline the various orders, chambers, divisions, legions, et cetera that exist within the Ecclesiarchy of the Imperium of Man in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Suffice to say it's complex, and we'll just pique your interest for perhaps a future deep dive on that. 

Returning to the social and cultural elements, there's one that really stands out and that is militarism. One of the off repeated and criticized taglines and memes from the movie is that “service guarantees citizenship” that the franchise has somehow earned through military service, and this is present in the book as well. It's one of the reasons that Johnny Rico enlists after being convinced by his moral philosophy teacher Dubois. In the text, he decides that in order to further participate in politics, he needs to earn that franchise, and so he enlists. Now, the argument as presented by Dubois in the book are pretty much a straw man presenting a vision where, you know, `tough, manly men are demanded to deal with hard times’, a rhetoric that we're starting to see reappear and float around in various social media channels.  It's a viewpoint that doesn't stand up to much critical analysis, but as presented in the text, it's convincing enough for Johnny Rico and hence, you know, the inciting incident for the plot. 

All in all, the military and militarism is presented as a good thing in the context of the novel, that it's really not questioned. There are some detractors, notably Johnny Rico's father, but these are largely just foils for the main argument. They all fall by the wayside once the inciting incident of Buenos Aires being destroyed by an alien entity takes place within the book. That doesn't actually come until a little bit later, though about a hundred pages into the text.  The first 20 pages is the action scenes that we originally covered, and then the next 80 is really devoted to Rico's training and the time he spent in bootcamp. In terms of structure, it's much more similar to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, even though obviously that came out about 30 years later.

Speaking of bootcamp, one of the thrills I got in the book as a younger reader was that it took place at Camp Arthur Curry named for the Canadian General who led the Canadian corps during the First World War. When I was growing up in Calgary, Curry Barracks was a feature on the west end of town. And to have that local bit of recognition, it really kind of piqued my curiosity.  Within the book, Johnny Rico just refers to it as being within the Northern plains, which would suggest something of a unified North America, or at least a world government, and also there'd be a long ways away for someone from Buenos Aires and probably not necessarily that warm and hospitable. 

But the other thing, the 80 pages on bootcamp really did was drive home the militarism and the ideology behind the book.  We see scenes of corporal punishment with soldiers getting the lash for infractions. We see the rather high rate of attrition as recruits are unable to secure their franchise or even make it through basic training. The washout rate is in excess of 90%. And all in all, we get a sense of how well trained these recruits end up being. 

But the challenge - in not just this text but with a lot of military science fiction - is that it puts the military first. There's a rather fantastic article by Chris Hables Gray from Science Fiction Studies in 1994 titled “There Will Be War: Future War Fantasies in the Militaristic science fiction of the eighties”, and in it he discusses some of Heinlein's early career in the Navy, and he wasn't alone as a science fiction writer. There's a number of other details he includes, but I'll quote here from Chris: 

“But in most respects, the specific details of the cooperation between the sci-fi writers in the military in Philadelphia are not as important as the general outlines. Clearly, by the 1940s, the discourse universes of military R&D experts and technically literate and/or oriented sci-fi writers have become one. Its use of sci-fi writers as military analysts may have been the first case, but it was not the last.” end quote. 

So we have here in the forties and fifties, from the period from World War II to the Korean War, that intersection of the futurists, the sci-fi writers and the military analysts trying to predict what a future war may be like.  Gray goes on to state writing in the nineties from World War II to today, military technologists have remained fascinated with sci-fi, while many sci-fi writers have remained enamored with war. So we have this overlap where science fiction can inform the technologists working on the new hardware, but also the futurists that are trying to predict how things might happen in various scenarios that they may have to prepare for as well.

Gray goes on to describe a conference that took place in 1985 at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, where a number of sci-fi writers were meeting with military personnel and futurists about just those scenarios. Sci-fi authors included James Gunn (not the director), Joe Haldeman, and Susan Schwartz, and in post-conference interviews, they noted what the authors provided was something of a humanizing influence, provided non-militaristic ways of dealing with conflict.

In terms of Starship Troopers, it long had an influence on the military and how it conceived of what a future war scenario might be like with armored soldiers, and that showed up in various projects that were instituted down the years, like the Land Warrior Project. This may be because Starship Troopers rather infamously was on the West Point Reading list for nearly 40 years. This is what the cadets were, you know, given a list of things to read and it was the only science fiction novel to be on there. So the influence runs deep on the officer corps. 

What about the influence on the topic at hand, Warhammer 40,000? Well, I hope I've laid out enough evidence that you find somewhat convincing.  The direct parallels are there. Starship Troopers had a massive influence on the development of military sci-fi, and we'll see that a number of those titles from the genre also had an influence on Warhammer 40,000, so it comes in there a couple different ways. And it's not just the direct technology and the construction of the troopers themselves as jump troopers with advanced armor and portable weapons, though that directly shows up in the game, but also the idea of a massive space firing Imperial Navy that can conduct operations in orbit around a planet.

Aside from the influence on Games Workshop’s games, there were a number of other games that were developed that used the license, including a board game produced by Avalon Hill and a miniatures tabletop battle game produced by Mongoose Publishing in 2005 and designed by Andy Chambers, who was one of the original studio members within Games Workshop, who worked on Warhammer 40,000. That game included elements from both the film and the novels, including the original antagonists, the skinnies, the ones that Johnny Rico encounters in the descriptions from at the beginning of this podcast. 

The skinnies are described as being tall, thin, alien, humanoids, which is kind of interesting because the grays were not actually introduced until 1965 in popular culture. Their appearance at Roswell in 1947, being a Retcon, and again, showing up similarly here in 1958.

That's just a little fun fact, though. A little extra for sticking all the way to the end of this episode of the ImplausiPod. Thanks for being with us. I'm Dr. Implausible. You can contact us at all the regular social medias, including Dr. Implausible at Implausi dot blog. We hope you'll join us again next time.