People compare old man's war to starship troopers all the time, but we should really look at old man's war, forever war and starship troopers as a trilogy in their own right showing the evolution of attitudes in America towards warfare through different generations. Old man's war is a quintessentially Gulf war attitude towards war, and starship troopers absolutely exudes what you would expect from a man who fought in world war II, although to the best of my knowledge Robert Heinlein never was in battle and got a medical discharge he certainly had the attitude of a naval officer. In a similar way the forever war is indelibly linked to the Vietnam war which had an enormous impact on the men of its generation. You see something very similar With stories about robots, in a very real way you could make a trilogy from a lot of different stories. For example the Isaac Asimov I robot experience, followed by Terminator and that experience with ai, and then Anne , which is a very modern look at the sorts of vulnerabilities we would expect from robots and AIS. In the 60s we thought we could create the perfect man. In the '80s we were terrified of what cars we would create, and now in the 2000s we experience existential horror about the kinds of slavery we might be inflicting on another thinking being. - - - good call to action figure would be to ask people to submit their own trilogies, and better yet duologies that haven't been updated to the modern perspective but have potential to do the work to suggest one or two to get people's brains working on the subject, that will make it more value to sfwa - - - Source: [Methodology-question: What is the role (if any) of contemporary fiction in historical scholarship? : AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nm301y/methodologyquestion_what_is_the_role_if_any_of/gzo3q2z/?context=3) See also: [[Joe Haldeman]]