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[Frumple]

That's what time travel and regency cruft's for, silly. There's an indefinite number of princes that can claim legal right to rule, and thirsty folks want to see all of 'em get rode.

[Lord Shonus]

Starship Government Clerks would have been a much duller book.

I'unno, maybe not. Depends on where they were clerking, why, regarding what, and so on.

It's not like administrative/etc. fiction can't be exciting; that's the basic conceit behind a lot of legal thrillers at a minimum, and those ain't exactly a placid slice of the literary pie, heh.

Starship Troopers is one of Heinlein's "juveniles", aimed primarily at what we would now call a YA audience. An audience that would be very unlikely to enjoy the adventures of Johnny Rico: Space Tax Auditor. Aimed at adult audience? Such a concept would work, and there's elements of it in the later Beyond This Horizon. But when he wrote the book and for the audience he was aiming at it would be a hard sell.

I'm often quite annoyed that most crime dramas almost exclusively cover the one-and-only crime of Murder. I mean, there are interesting stories to be told where nobody dies, but NO.

There's plenty of Law And Order: SVU episodes where nobody dies, but that's not much better.

The big issue is that if you're doing episodic TV or a single movie, you need a really punchy crime that gets the attention of the audience quickly. A dead body turning up or a screaming woman fills that need in a way that "hey, the financials of this company don't add up!" don't. Even though a multilayered story of embezzlement and fraud can be a gripping and interesting tale in and of itself. Which is why stuff like that is not uncommon in books aimed at adult audiences.

[EuchreJack]

I'm reasonably sure an Armed Robbery could be equally engaging, but it's probably more expensive to shoot for visual media...

[heydude6]

I mean, I think The Big Short was a pretty successful movie about financial crime.

[MaxTheFox]

Honestly, about military sci-fi in general, I applaud those authors who can make it not feel stilted, regardless of anything else. Like, by the nature of a military the character interactions are a lot more restricted. I wrote one book with that premise-- and a premise made to get the characters more free reign than an usual military mission would have-- and I still felt drained by the end of it. Or maybe I just burnt out. Dunno, civilians are more fun to write about for me.

[EuchreJack]

Honestly, about military sci-fi in general, I applaud those authors who can make it not feel stilted, regardless of anything else. Like, by the nature of a military the character interactions are a lot more restricted. I wrote one book with that premise-- and a premise made to get the characters more free reign than an usual military mission would have-- and I still felt drained by the end of it. Or maybe I just burnt out. Dunno, civilians are more fun to write about for me.

The word "Uniform" denotes a standardization of equipment and training, so that soldiers of similar types will have similar capabilities. The Romans pioneered it. They won versus other groups not because their soldiers had the best equipment, but because they were all armed and trained the same.
Barbarians with their uneven equipment and uneven training tended to get isolated and killed when fighting the Romans.

That does not mean that the Humans (or whatever, it's sci fi) are the same. Soldiers are quite a diverse lot, with far too much time standing around and doing nothing. They're generally slightly more tolerant than the Average Citizen because they've been places, seen things, and been forced to work with people from different backgrounds than themselves.

So, to create "interesting" military sci fi, you just create interesting characters and put them in the same uniform. Like all other career-based sitcoms and dramas.  Then again, I like military fiction a lot, so my taste might not be... normal.

Think of a Draft: Literally Anyone could be in the Military.

[MaxTheFox]

Yeah, I ended up with focusing on characters themselves and I think I did it OK enough for an amateur like myself :')