CHARONIAN

CHARONIAN

“They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur — white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity….”

“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”

“The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front leg. Big green bear with a withered arm.

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

 This week all monsters by more contemporary authors and today, tomorrow & thursday will all be creatures from Joe Haldeman's excellent novel The Forever War. While Haldeman has stated that the book was written based on his experiences in the Vietnam War, many saw it also as a direct response to the novel Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. Haldeman has stated that he thought Starship Troopers glorified war and critics have even called it "unremittingly grim fascism" and the author himself a "fanatical warmongering fascist".  Obviously, I'm way more interested in Haldeman's anti-war view than whatever Heinlein was up to.

Here are the covers for Starship Troopers (by Carl Lundgren) & The Forever War (by Murray Tinkelman)

The book tells the story of a war between two societies throughout the universe. But near-lightspeed travel results in wild relativistic time effects; most notably the first expedition, beginning in 1997, lasts only two years from the soldiers' point of view, but due to time dilation, they return to Earth in 2024. Or a battle will be fought on a planet where the humans claim victory but by the time they get back home, several more battles have been lost with the enemy gaining the upper hand. The entire book really brings home the idea of the futility of war. 

These creatures are animal life that happen to be in the crossfire of the first battle we witness. The "inconsequential" indigenous lifeforms caught between two warring factions. These aren't the taurans, the main antagonists, who are humanoid (two legs, two arms, a head & a torso). These are creatures the soldiers barely register.

Tomorrow there'll be another obscure & overlooked creature from The Forever War.