The writing in "Starship Troopers" has received varied responses, with the scenes of military training and combat receiving praise. In a 2009 retrospective, Jo Walton wrote that "Starship Troopers" was "military SF done extremely well". She went on to argue that "Heinlein was absolutely at his peak when he wrote this in 1959. He had so much technical stylistic mastery of the craft of writing science fiction that he could the story 'backwards and in high heels' and get away with it." Others referred to it as very readable, and found the military scenes compelling. Heinlein's descriptions of training and boot camp in the novel, based on his own experiences in the military, have been described as being rendered with remarkable skill. A 1960 review in the "New York Herald Tribune" praised the "brilliantly written" passages describing infantry combat, and also called attention to the discussion of weapons and armor, which, according to other reviewers, demonstrated Heinlein's "undiminished talent for invention". Scholar George Slusser described the book in 1986 as the "ultimately convincing space-war epic", praising in particular the "precisely imagined" weapons and tactics, while a 1979 science fiction encyclopedia referred to it as the "slickest" of Heinlein's juvenile books.