I read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as a young teen, and I read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War a few years later. The second was clearly a post-Vietnam (1974) response to the first (published in 1959).
Ted Gioia argues that this conventional wisdom pigeonholes Haldeman’s novel:
One might call this the “whig approach” to literary criticism — something akin
to what Herbert Butterfield once called the “Whig interpretation of history.” It reduces all the complexities and richness of past fiction to some simple coordinate based on the conventional wisdom as of this morning. So Sappho is only understood in terms of today’s view of gender roles; Hemingway is dissed because he falls short on the same scale; Twain moves from being anti-racist and into the racist camp because he didn’t know the acceptable “framing” words of the 21st century. Who cares anymore how these writers related to the value systems of their times? We judge them based on the prevailing mood of the most recent MLA. Of course, it hardly occurs to us that we ourselves may be found wanting according future MLA truisms yet to be invented.Under this sledgehammer approach, novels are either written by progressive authors or reactionary authors, and once you know which bucket in which to toss any given writer, you are no longer obliged to read them. And the Whig view of sci-fi makes Haldeman into the hero and Heinlein into the villain. End of story.