 John Brunner compared them to calling Koreans "gooks".Slusser argued that the term "Bugs" was an "abusive and biologically inaccurate" word that justified the violence against alien beings, a tendency which, according to Slusser, the book shared with other commercially successful science fiction.Some of Heinlein's other works have also been described as racist, though Franklin argues that this was not unique to Heinlein, and that he was less racist than the U.S. government of the time.