What Happened?
Turns out the war does not last forever. It just feels like it. A nifty bit of creative imagery is used to introduce some long-awaited answers to the murkiness of just what the whole long ordeal was really about. Don’t worry, what follows goes into much greater detail:
“The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was ‘Me?’”
Character Description
Imagery is a highly effective way to convey the fundamentals of a character. What might well take a page or more of conversation to put across can be unveiled in a just a short paragraph of details that build a vivid portrait. Such is what makes a certain Sergeant Cortez already memorable just a page after the first mention of his name:
“Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine…On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen.”
Born to Care, Trained to Kill
The job of any military is simple: take a person who is at least halfway decent, strip them of their humanity and train them to be killbots. If a soldier feels anything other than “better him than me” it's a sign the process is flawed. That, at least, is one the lessons of the novel in its response to the glorification of war in Starship Troopers.
“Because it was murder, unadorned butchery…We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species…I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that ‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact…but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?”
First Contact
What is a story about mankind’s first contact with an alien species without a description of the species? And what is an effective description of a species without some powerful imagery to highlight all the repulsive differences between them and us? Not this, that’s what:
“His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassels instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sit- ting low down where his adam’s apple should have been.”
