Radioactive Communist Zombies

Radioactive Communsist Zombies: The Novel

"A highly imaginative adventure."

"The story pulled me right in!"

They live among us. We know they are there. No government can control them; no authority can stop them. Some are evil. Some are good. All are powerful. They inhabit our myths and fairy tales. But what if they were real, the witches, wizards, and fairy godmothers? What if they were called "adepts" and were organized into guilds for mutual protection and benefit? And what if they started mucking around with the affairs of "lessers" (that is, those humans not able to match their powers)?

During the height of the Cold War, Michael Vaughan is a rogue without a guild. He survives by working for the CIA as NOC (Non-Official Cover). Shortly after the funeral of President Joe Kennedy, Jr., he is sent to Cuba to assassinate Castro. There he finds himself in a cat-and-mouse game with adepts working for Fidel.

You've read the blog, now read the novel.  Radioactive Communist Zombies, a novel of magic, intrigue, and action.

Now available for Kindle and all free Kindle apps for Mac/PC, iPad, and smart phones.   

Book Excerpts

On Facebook, for my status, I have been posting excerpts from my novel Radioactive Communist Zombies.  I've been taking one per chapter.  Since Facebook gives you a limited amount you can post for a "status" I've only been able to post small snippets.  I chose them to try to give a feel for what the book is about.  I've gotten some positive feedback.

Here are the excepts I've posted on Facebook

Chapter One: "You know why I really hated the bastard?" Gomez said loudly, sloshing his drink in the general direction of the bar's TV. The brown liquid almost spilled out, which wasn't a completely bad thing; Gomez had always been a cheap drunk. Judging by the bar he'd dragged me into, his habits hadn't changed.

Chapter Two: The girl was long-limbed and a bit on the thin side. Her skin was the color of coffee con leche and her kisses were as sweet. I know there are people who care about skin color; I've never understood that. That she was brown made no difference to me. She was striking, with lovely black eyes and she made love like a wild, beautiful animal.

Chapter Three: A car zoomed up, scattering the rubberneckers, and squealed to a stop. Three men jumped out, all Cuban but wearing suits and hats like American mobsters. All carried large guns, presumably the "automatic weapons" that were fired in the alley. The crowd evaporated in screams. Liesl pointed at the men and one blew apart like a pile of dry leaves before a hurricane, his gun clattering to the pavement.

Chapter Four:  I turned but too late: pterodactyl claws grabbed my torso, wrapped around my body like a fleshy vise, and pulled me skyward, the beating of the wings blowing down on me as the claws held me so tight I couldn't breathe. I didn't know why it just didn't eat me. I was sure it would hurt less than what its claws were doing to me and the way my head was hanging down with the blood rushing to it.

Chapter Five: I had wasted, in his opinion, my father's money and had had the pickup when he claimed he needed it. He used a switch on me for the last time that night. He was red with rage as the willow branch snapped against my backside. And he hadn't even discovered that the stash of whiskey he kept hidden from my mother, the bishop, and--he thought--from me, was missing.

Chapter Six: I smiled up at the sky and let the sun warm my face. But looking up I also noticed the high stone wall topped with triple loops of concertina wire. Spaced towers held guards holding AK-47s. I recognized the curved magazines and the extended front sights from my CIA training. I knew they were a deadly and dangerous automatic weapon provided to Castro by the Sovs.

Chapter Seven: Giancana looked at me when he calmed down. "Can you kill Castro?" "Yes," I said. "I need to know his name." "Fidel Castro!" Giancana screamed at me. "Is that his full name?" Giancana blinked and looked at me. "I don't know," he yelled. "Then I can't kill him." "You can God-damn well try," Giancana screamed. I looked at Luttazzi, who gave me a pleading look. "I'll have to be alone."

Chapter Eight: The fire must have come from an upper window. I saw the orange reflection on the shiny fender of a car and ducked into the busy street. The flames slapped into the cement and splattered the building and cars parked on the curb. I looked up and saw an adept pointing at me, fire arcing from his finger. He was aiming it toward me, the flame crossing the hood of a parked car, leaving a black trail of scorched paint.

Chapter Nine: I heard a crash and a lot of yelling: "DOWN! DOWN! DOWN!" by men used to being obeyed. Almost instinctively I doubled over putting my nose almost on my knees. Suddenly air was on my face and I could breathe. I heard a clap as atmosphere suddenly rushed in to fill a void. Gunfire rang out so close to me my ears screamed afterwards. More shots were fired and I heard something heavy fall.

Chapter Ten: About two A.M. on the seventeenth we were a few hundred yards off Zapata Peninsula, deep inside the Bay of Pigs, with Cuba on three sides of us, east, west, and north. We held position near what had been code-named "Red Beach." It was almost pitch black in the boat, but the men whose faces I could see were tight with emotion. I realized most of these men had been civilians less than a year ago.

Chapter Eleven: The plane opened fire, spraying bullets into the boat. I heard the boat's hull snap with the sound of breaking wood and was pelted by flying splinters. Men screamed as they were shot and the smell of scorched metal, shattered wood, spilt blood, and burning flesh filled the air.

Chapter Twelve: A motion to my right caught my eye. Che was raising his pistol. Three bullets ripped through my torso before I was able to bound over Maria's body, put my hand on his leg, and knock Che out of commission, which was easier than a protection spell for me. I didn't kill him--that would take too much time and too much meta-- but he was unconscious and crumpled to the floor dropping his gun near me.

Chapter Thirteen: The flames washed over me.  I felt the heat and nearly screamed with the pain but I was undamaged.  I didn't dare breathe, as I'd suck the flames inside.  The protection spell protected only my exterior.  I was vaguely aware of screams from others, but my eyes were locked on the vortex of fire shooting at me.

Epilogue: My career as a leader of the American Meta Association was long and satisfying.  And it was certainly better than working for the CIA.
Except you don't get to save the world from radioactive communist zombies.

Spell Checkers and the Election

This is getting frustrating.  I have no spell-checkers that recognize the following words:

• Barack

• Obama

• Biden

• Palin

I've finally learned there's a "c" in "Barack" but I'm having trouble with "Biden" vs. "Bidin" and "Palin" vs. "Palen."

So voting the easier-to-spell ticket it's another reason to vote McCain/Palin.

Thursday Night Story Time

Thursday night and nothing is happening, at least nothing worth blogging about.  So I'll leave you with a part of a short story:

I was amazed at the size of the motel room I could obtain for less than one hundred dollars a night.  There were two queen-sized beds, a desk with an interface, a separate room for the bathroom, and a dresser with a TV.  On the far side of the room was a window overlooking the freeway.  I was, of course, in the still relatively empty American West just off the I-5 corridor between the Seattle-Portland and Bay Area megatropolises.  In Japan a hundred dollars, about forty yen, got you a coffin for six hours.

I locked the door's dead bolt and pulled my recently acquired gun out of my gym bag.  I find guns inelegant but effective and, therefore, useful tools.  I checked that the bathroom was empty and the window locked, then closed the curtains. Only then did I relax -- a little.

I moved my bag to one of the beds from near the door where I'd dropped it.  I sat at the desk and shoved one of my credit cards in the computer.  I still held the .40 caliber semi-auto in my hand as the computer came to life.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Gibbs."

Yeah, as if I'd let a computer know my real name.

"Get me some news."  Most of my associates shunned computers out of a basic prejudice against technology.  To me, they were just like guns: efficient tools.

"Local, national, international, business, sports, entertainment --"

"No, major news stories for the past -- " How long since leaving Tokyo? " -- thirty-six hours."

It was the third news story.  A plane flying from Tokyo to Sydney disappeared over the Pacific and all aboard assumed lost.  There was some speculation it had something to do with the continued conflict between the Micronesia Meta Alliance and the Metaphysical Society of Tasmania.  Clever, that last part; Kim used the best spin-doctors.  There was no doubt in my mind who was responsible.  I had booked a seat on that flight in my usual alias.  I had sent a DG to buy the ticket and board the plane.  I relaxed more.  The EAZA thought they had succeeded in killing me.

I wanted to sleep.  I hadn't slept for three, almost four days by using zombie spells to stay awake.  They'll keep you going but you pay the price.  I could probably sleep for twenty-four hours.  I would allow myself eight.  I set the computer to make sure I was undisturbed until I wanted it to wake me. (I noticed it was Chinese-made; the Reds were trying to do to the Koreans what the Koreans did to the Japanese and the Japanese did to the Americans.)

Call me paranoid.  I put alarm spells on the door and window and put the gun on the nightstand.  I was worried about picking it up while groggy so I dropped the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and reinserted the magazine.  That way if I accidentally pulled the trigger, it wouldn't fire.  I'd have to jerk the slide back to load a round first.

I took my talisman out of my jeans pocket, held it in both my hands, muttered a few words in the ancient tongue, and the zombie spell dissipated.  I barely got the talisman back into my pocket before I fell asleep.

It could have been a few minutes or it could have been hours later when the door alarm woke me.  In my mind I saw the door fly open and two armed men rushed in.  Warriors, I thought, that's not very imaginative.  A bright light, part of the spell, slapped them in the face letting me clearly see their weapons, sawed-off shotguns, and as an added benefit prevented them from seeing me.
I reached out with my right hand and pulled up the gun as I rolled off the bed, rose on my knees and pointed the pistol at them holding it in a modified Weaver stance.  Only then did I realize I'd forgotten to put a round in the chamber.

"Freeze!" I called out.  "I have a gun and you have five seconds to get out of here before I blow you both away."

The warriors hesitated.  No adept gave warriors a second chance: they were expendable.  And no adept carried guns, usually.

The window alarm went off inside my cranium.  Damn, the warriors had been a diversion.  A roc, wingspan of at least six feet, crashed through the glass and ripped through the fabric of the curtain.  It had large eyes designed for seeing in the dark and long, obsidian-like talons.

I had one bit of powerful meta I had been saving for just such emergencies.  I had to let go of the gun with my right hand, leaving it in my left hand, and pointed at the great bird.  Fire jumped from my fingertip, across the unused bed, to the creature, slamming it into the wall and igniting its feathers.  The force of the spell knocked me into my bed and radiant heat from the arc of flame burned my hand.  I swept my finger across the room to the warriors, leaving a line of fire of the wall.  One man was beating a hasty retreat and I got him in the back.  His clothes ignited then his skin.  He screamed once before the flames entered his lungs and fatally silenced him.  The other warrior stood still, perhaps in fright, and passively went up in flames.  Both squirmed on the floor a sickeningly long time.
As it burned, the roc jumped around the room spasmodically, almost falling back out the window, and flailed its wings filling the air with flying black feathers.  It smashed into the TV and the LCD screen shattered.  One of the room's walls was on fire, the roc was ripping up the carpet with its talons, and the dying warriors were spreading the fire to the floor.

Alarms sounded and the fire sprinkler began spraying cold water like some indoor cloud burst over the room, furniture, bed, the broken TV producing sparks and smoke and immediately soaking all my clothes.  I jerked back the slide on the gun and emptied the magazine into the roc.  As each hollow-point mushroomed in its body it screeched like fingernails on a chalkboard.  Its black blood spattered the walls only to be washed down to the wet rug to lie with the ejected shell casings.  I heard the great bird's breath rattle out for the last time.

There was another full magazine in my bag.  I exchanged it for the one in the gun and stepped over the finally still bodies of what had once been human.

A grizzled man came out of his room across the hall wearing a bathrobe.  "What the hell?" he demanded.  He saw the burned men and looked around me to see the roc in the motel room.  His eyes grew wide.  "I'm sorry, Proficient.  Is there a fire?"

I looked back in my room.  There was a half-cooked roc lying in a puddle of greasy water smelling of roasted bird and wet down and the remains of the men, smelling worse than the roc, but no fire.  "It's out."

Get Published

Vanity publishing is going through a revolution.

In fact, it really shouldn't be called "vanity publishing" anymore.  You could "publish" a book for very little money.  Candice Choi of AP reports:

The [on-demand publishing] programs are easy for just about anyone to use: Authors select basic options, including the book's size, binding style and paperback or hardcover. After the manuscript is uploaded, users go to a page where they select a font and design the book's cover. Even after a book has been printed they can fix typos for later printings.

Unlike vanity publishing, in which aspiring authors pay to have their books run on traditional presses, on-demand publishing doesn't have to cost writers a cent.

Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools.

On demand publishing is made possible due to new technology called digital printing that allows publishing without the traditional huge print run of old off-set printing.  In December of last year I reported that Amazon.com had bought HP digital printers.  I said then that maybe it would come to:

For a minor fee anyone can have their book in the database to be published anywhere.  But then how do you get noticed without the critics, book tours, and marketing a publisher can provide.  You'd be one among millions of lonely voices doomed to be read by friends and family but damn few others.

And that's what on-demand publishers are doing.  And it's growing.  As Ms. Choi reports:

On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace, which was already letting filmmakers and musicians burn DVDs and CDs.

I'm still trying to get published by a major (or even a minor) publishing house.  But on-demand publishing is going to change the publishing industry in ways we probably still can't imagine.

New Years Eve Malapropisms

James L. Kilpatrick writes the occasional article on language.  His latest is a gem relating the wrong uses of homophones in writing.  For example:

He's a mountain man. He lives up there in the hills. He's one of those guys who's got to be pulling stumps out of his yard with a pickup truck and a wench.

The word they are looking for is "winch" no matter that "Surely there is much to be said for the companionship of a lusty woman, especially when one is pulling stumps."

Or this one:

Major hurricanes were on the way. The area's lovely beaches were threatened. A meteorologist explained: "Huge quantities of sand will be carried onshore, and the sand will settle into nearby lakes and marshes and form a layer of sentiment."

I'm sure he meant "sediment"

Here's one from the NEA magazine (displaying the high standards that have made our education system the best in the world):

"most spinal chord injuries once were the result of birth defects."

But most of us have spinal cords (at least those that don't deal with teacher union demands).

Or this one:

Most homophones are merely doubles, such as site/sight or pale/pail, but our wonderfully wacko language has a host of triples. Perhaps the most familiar is pour/pore/poor. It turned up in the memoir of a newlywed in the Midwest: "I stayed up half the night pouring over cookbooks." Then she dried the books and went back to bed.

Funny habits those Midwesterners have.  Just keep poring over this blog on a regular basis.

More Detail

Wow, I'm actually writing about writing.

I'm trying to rewrite the novel Radioactive Communist Zombies.  Seems publishers want long books these days.  So I'm trying to add 30,000 words (about 30% more).  I'm going to add a subplot but I'm also adding more detail.  For example, I turned this:

I had a young, attractive woman from the Miami office drive me down to Key West.

Into this:

The next morning I took a taxi to a wooded area owned by the University of Miami.  The driver had trouble finding it and I had to guide him to the boxy wooden building with the sign "ZENITH TECHNOLOGICAL ENTERPRISES."  He hadn't noticed the guards watching us from the tree line.

I told him to wait for me--enforcing it with a persuasion spell--and entered the office.  I'd worked out of this building before but now I only visited when absolutely necessary.

The CIA had manifold ways to infiltrate a hostile country such as Cuba, including submarines on the coast and even up rivers letting out small rubber rafts or swimmers, small aircraft that flew in under the radar, and jumping out of larger airplanes at high altitude and opening the parachute at little more than treetop level.  Some of those aircraft were at an airstrip near this property and the boats were behind a house in the ritzy Coral Gables neighborhood.

I wouldn't be using any of those.I entered the building's foyer where a middle-aged woman greeted me from behind a nearly desk.  She recognized me, of course, and for some reason never seemed happy to see me.  I didn't know if it was just me, or people in general.

"I need to see Shackley," I stated without bothering with niceties.

She grumbled at me but picked up the phone on her desk.  I took the chance while she was talking to Shackley to glance around the room at the "business license" from the Great State of Florida and the phony sales charts.  Beyond the reception desk was what could only be called a bustling office with typewriters beating out their staccato rhythm and men and women moving quickly carrying papers from desk to file and back again.  Business was good at Zenith Technological Enterprises, apparently.

The receptionist was saying, "That NOC is here to see you Mr. Shackley" so I looked out the window to insure my hack had stayed.  He was leaning against the car smoking a cigarette oblivious to the armed man in the shadows of the trees watching him intently.
"He'll see you in a few minutes, you can wait in there," the woman said, pointing with a desiccated finger toward the door to his office.  I turned from the window to look; there was a metal and vinyl government-issue chair next to the door.

I smiled at the woman, earning a roll of the eyes in return, and went to the chair and sat in it.  It was uncomfortable but it did afford me a view of most of the office with those ubiquitous metal desk, large typewriters that must weigh so much that the strong metal desks are required to hold them, and rows and rows of filing cabinets, each with a combination lock in the top drawer.
A blonde woman, slender and tall, was working inside one of the cabinets, obviously looking for a file.

I discreetly pointed my finger at her and she turned around, looking toward me, giving me a view of her lovely face and the rest of her svelte figure.

I smiled at her and she smiled back looking bewildered.  She didn't know why she'd turned around.  The persuasion spell I'd used was subtle.

The door to Shackley's office burst open and he growled at me, "Get in here, Jackson."
I stood slowly and walked in, closing the door behind me.

"What do you want?" Shackley asked as if annoyed at me.  He adjusted his horn-rim glasses and sat down behind his metal desk.  He was not interesting in anything that was not functional, I noticed.  His office didn't even contain a family picture or other personal memento.  His blond hair was short and slicked back with some sort of pomade, which made it appear almost brown except then the overhead fluorescents hit it just right.

I sat in another metal and vinyl chair.  "A car and driver."

He growled but I knew he'd cooperate.  He had standing orders from McCone to assist me however I requested.  He picked up the phone.  "Send Mac in here."

"No," I said.  "I want the blonde in the red dress."

Shackley looked at me.  "Who?"

"I don't know her name.  She's working in the office, blonde, red dress."

"Harper?"

"If that's her name."

"She's an analyst, not a field agent."

"Doesn't matter as long as she can drive a car."

Shackley looked at me as if trying to figure out what I wanted with her.  "For how long?"

"Five days--a week at the most."

The door opened and Mac walked in, a young guy in the uniform of the day: white shirt, narrow tie, black slacks.

"Listen, Jackson," Shackley grumbled at me. "The FBI is all over us to get all we have on Oswald's connections to Castro.  I don't have time to meet your every whim."

I just ignored him.  "Tell her to meet me at the Fontainebleau Hotel at two this afternoon.  I'll need her for five days to a week so she should bring what she needs."

"The Fontainebleau?  What the hell kind of expense account do you have, Jackson?" Mac asked.
I ignored him, too.

"Why can't you use Mac?" Shackley said almost as a whine.  He knew he was going to lose this argument--he lost every argument with me--but something inside him demanded he at least try.
"I'm going to . . . where I'm going it would look rather queer for me to arrive in the company of a man.  It would blow my cover."

Shackley looked me over, looked at Mac, and said, "Fine.  You may have Miss Harper."

"Thank you," I replied sincerely as I stood, I walked past Mac through the door.  Miss Harper was looking at me and I noticed her blue eyes.  I smiled at her again and she returned it sweetly.

Zen and the Art of Driving Fast

Nirvana.

The ears are overworked with wind noise, road noise, engine and exhaust noise.  Only the wind can be ignored.  The road noise tells you that the car is stable.  When you hear a whine is when you worry.  Engine and exhaust noise tell you the engine is healthy and when it's time to shift.  There's no time to watch the tachometer so you must rely on your ears and experience.

The eyes are sweeping.  The pavement coming at them at over 100 miles per hour is ignored.  You know this sheet of asphalt like you would know a lover's body.  The eyes are looking for visual cue to turn-in, apex, and exit of each corner.  Here it's the blue part of the stands, there it's a wooden structure called a "turn station" and there it's a telephone pole.  Being a class there are cones demarking these things but due to hills and weeds, they are not always visible.  But the eyes are also watching the other cars.  While looking through them to find the corner markers, it is watching them for sudden unexpected moves and slowdowns.  Here as nowhere else do you  dare be this close to another car at highway speeds.

The inner ear, felt in the ass, tells you the car is tacking straight and the  tires are not sliding over the asphalt. 

The right foot is planted against the firewall, the left hovering over the clutch.  Both hands are on the steering wheel, probably at "nine and three."

Your brain is processing all this information.  The baud rate is enormous and the limited bandwidth of your brain becomes selective.  The itch of your nose, the discomfort of the helmet, the cold of the wind coming in the window all fade away.  Your mind is completely and utterly concentrating on its task, on piloting a powerful car at speeds over one hundred miles per hour around a track that twists and turns seemingly at random.

Your mind has reached speed nirvana.  Gone is everything other than driving, other than moving your body to make the car move as you wish, observing, listening . . .

Driving.

Not commuting, not "operating a motor vehicle," but DRIVING.  The skills were acquired in years of back-roads speeding and days of track training.  Talent plays a role, the ability to process the information coming in fast enough to react.  To hear the screech of tires and know you need to look for a car sideways in the road.  To smell brakes and know you need to slow down and give your over-heated pads a break.  To run your eyes over the instrument gages on straight aways to make sure the beast under the hood is not suffering.

This is driving.  This is speed nirvana.  Gone are the worries of work, relationships, money, whatever.  It is you, the car, and the pavement coming at you.

Nirvana.

I Give Up

I might as well give up trying to get published (not that I've been trying much lately).  It seems even a literary great of English can't get published.

Slightly disguised works of Jane Austin were sent to 18 publishers.  Seventeen rejected them.  One spotted the trick.

Seems one David Lassman of the Jane Austin Festival (to be held in Bath, UK), sent off slightly changed manuscripts and got 18 rejection slips, only one denoting plagiarism:

"I was staggered. Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the canon and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen's work," Lassman told The Guardian newspaper.

So editors of publishing houses don't know Jane Austin when they read it?  And then they reject it with a form slip (oh, how well I know those slips).

Thank you for your recent letter and chapters from your book 'First Impressions'. It seems like a really original and interesting read," wrote Penguin . . . 

A spokeswoman for Penguin noted that its rejection letter had said only that it "seemed" original and interesting. "It would not have been read," she insisted.

Oh, they didn't even read it.  What a shock.  And yet said it "seems" original and interesting.  But they didn't read it. 

You see how they treat writers?  Even Jane Austin.

Happy Birthday RAH

Today (7/7/07) is the 100th anniversary of Robert A. Heinlein's birthday.

Mr. Heinlein had a large influence on my writing and my politics.  He made me a lot more libertarian.  I ravenously read everything I could find written by him in about a 3 year period.  Some of his books remain my favorites such as Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Heinlein's influence on 20th century literature, not just science fiction, was enormous.  So much so that an august a magazine as National Review (the actually hard copy magazine) celebrated Heinlein's birthday with a short article as the first of their Arts, Books, and Manners section (subscription required) and featured on the cover of the July 9 issue.

As John J. Miller (National Review's Washington correspondent) writes:

He was the first sci-fi author to make the bestseller lists, the winner of multiple awards, and the inspiration for a legion of protégés and imitators whose own volumes now weigh down bookstore shelves. He was not the most accomplished literary stylist in his genre, but he spun a good yarn, grappled with big ideas, and left an enduring imprint on a popular field. He was arguably the preeminent sci-fi author of the 20th century. One of the key differences between him and the two men who might also compete for this title — Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke — is that whereas they were political liberals, Heinlein was a man of the Right.

It wasn't always so.  Heinlein was an early socialist, supported Upton Sinclair's bid for California's governorship in 1934 (the socialist was running as a Democrat).  Biographical tidbit included in his posthumously published first novel For Us the Living (and the novel itself) indicates as a younger man he had some silly economic ideas.  But his social and sexual ideas seem to have remained constant as the same themes in For Us the Living play out in his last novel To Sail Beyond the Sunset.

But Heinlein is best known, and perhaps most controversial, for his anti-communism.  His two most controversial works are Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.  And interestingly, the writing of the latter was interrupted to write the former.  As Miller explains:

When Robert A. Heinlein opened his Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science-fiction author was flabbergasted. He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted “Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense” and urged Americans not to become “soft-headed.”

Then Heinlein made an important professional decision. He quit writing the manuscript he had been working on — eventually it would become one of his best-known books, Stranger in a Strange Land — and started work on a new novel. Starship Troopers was published the next year, and it quickly became perhaps the most controversial sci-fi tale of all time. Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist. “The ‘Patrick Henry’ ad shocked ’em,” he wrote many years later. “Starship Troopers outraged ’em.”

A conservative could read Starship Troopers with few qualms (being a juvenile, even the language isn't bad; in the middle of a firefight the hero exclaims "Golly!").  Stranger was a totally different book, what Miller describes as "a paean to sexual liberation and an attack on organized religion" (not much different from some themes from For Us the Living).

But Troopers is about war, the necessity of it, the honor of it, and the pain and suffering of it.  It's only slightly romanticized, even for a juvenile. 

In fact, I strongly recommend Starship Troopers, especially in this time of war.  As Miller explains:

[T]he richness of the novel lies in these more thought-provoking sections, where Heinlein inserts miniature monologues that sound like outtakes from Zell Miller’s GOP convention address. “My mother says that violence never settles anything,” comments one character. A teacher who doubles as Heinlein’s mouthpiece then pounces: “Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”

And since it seems most of the American breed have forgotten this, we may lose our freedoms and our lives when we violate sharia law in the North American Caliphate.