Armor (novel)
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Armor is a military science fiction novel by John Steakley. It has some superficial similarities with Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (such as the military use of exoskeletons and insect-like alien enemies.) but concentrates more on the psychological effects of violence on human beings rather than on the political aspects of the military, which were the focus of Heinlein's novel.
It was first published in December 1984.
Storyline
Armor is the story of humanity's war against a certain race that uses insects against its enemies, who these creatures are or why the war started is not discussed. The story focuses on one man, Felix, the Archon Guardian of Golden_, who is a scout in his platoon.
He gets dropped into battle from the spaceship and falls in the middle of a horde of these man sized ant like creatures. He fights his way out quickly and works to get away from the battle. He realizes he is the only survivor. He continues fighting until he is later retrieved by search and rescue teams as the only survivor.
He rests aboard the ship, and then once he is healed he receives his orders to deploy. Battle after battle he is the only survivor, and with no rest periods in between he is sent back into the fight. He is sent more often than he should be sent, and the people that he tells how many battles he has been through are do not believe him because the casualty rate on this hostile planet is near 100 percent.
The reason why he keeps getting sent into battle is because his unit was listed as killed in action. Whenever the computer has to decide which units to deploy it also orders all of the killed units into action, although this is not taken into account with troop complement numbers. His unit is listed as dead, but he is not, and no correction of these two facts is made into the computer, so time and time again he is ordered back into the fight.
Main Character Personality
The main character of this story is someone that is afraid of fighting, that does not want to continue to fight. He is however the ultimate killing machine, super precise and accurate with all of his actions. The reason for this is he seems to have a partially split personality. His personality is his human side, while the other side that takes over during combat, the "engine" as it is known keeps pushing his body through combat and leads to his survival each time.
The beginning of the story is told through the eyes of Felix. Later, Jack Crow, a notorious criminal brings a Power Armor suit to a brilliant researcher. The researcher accesses the memories of Felix through his suit and then they first hand experience the fear and the awesome survival of Felix the Scout.
