Liu Cixin vs. Robert Heinlein

[Ekenet]

Yellow Perils of Robert Heinlein (openedition.org)

The bugs in Starship Troopers are an allegory for East Asians, and the Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem are an allegory for Americans. Robert Heinlein: Kill all the Asians because they're communists, Liu Cixin: Avoid the Americans in the dark forest of the galaxy because they're capitalists and they'll act insane and make everyone insane.

Meanwhile, the Japanese don't identify as bugs: Japan was isolationist, but they were original individualistic people, not a hierarchical one. (the16types.info)

[Adam Strange]

I read Heinlein's Starship Troopers when I was twelve years old and really only liked the first* and parts of the last chapters. At twelve, I thought that the middle was long and boring.
I re-read it when I was seventeen and thought that it was the greatest science-fiction book I'd ever read, because of the philosophy expressed in that middle part.

The book really did seem like a re-telling of the Korean war from the perspective of the Americans, but I didn't come away from the book thinking that Heinlein advocated genocide. That was reserved for Ender's Game. Rather, Heinlein himself said that he wrote the book as an exploration of the reasons that men fight wars. He seemed to be saying that only one species would dominate the galaxy, and he wanted it to be Human, but he didn't say that humans should kill all the aliens.

Indeed, in Heinlein's universe, aliens were often portrayed as being morally better than humans.

I've read a little of Liu Cixin's works, and I find them to be simplistic and boring, although that might be due to bad translators.


*
"That left me with nothing to worry about for the next twenty 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 and ordered "Advance!""
-Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers.

So, a shoulder-launched atomic missile that can see and identify its target and can fly independently to it, described in 1959.

So much of science fiction is the dreams our stuff is made of.