At The Guardian’s book blog Sam Jordison’s exploration of part Hugo winners has reached Starship Troopers. As with most non-Americans, Sam was rather non-plused by the book:
Worse still, great chunks of the book are given over to terrifically dull lectures about the need to limit the franchise to veterans and joys of combat. These come courtesy of a handful of other characters equally as one-dimensional as the narrator, who seem to exist only to spout philosophy.
But his view of the book is by no means entirely negative. Read on.
I can hardly blame Jordison, or anyone else, for feeling that lectures and expository lumps bring a story to a grinding halt. For some reason, they are almost universal in sf stories.
One factor in the acceptance of the didactic parts of Starship Troopers among American sf readers at the time it came out was that there were a lot of World War II and Korea vets among the readership, and there also were a lot of young men of draft age (conscription continued in the US until the early 1970s). The book is mainly about the experience of being transformed from a civilian to a solder. So you had part of the audience interested in reliving and validating their previous service, and others interested in having an easily-digested explanation of what happens if you go into the military.