Opening Line
The novel’s opening line commences the book’s use of metaphor. A comparison is made using simile which typically is clearer than a straight-out metaphor. In this case, however, the clarity is somewhat muddled by the first use of a slang term that applies directly to the story. Still, the second half of the comparison is enough to give an idea of what is meant:
“Twenty minutes after the war ends, I’m watching stumpers pour up out of a frozen hole in the ground like ants from hell and praying that I keep my natural legs for another day.”
Setting
Metaphor and simile is used effectively to intensify the heightened emotion state of certain scenes. The ostensibly everyday setting becomes infused with a sense of menace through the use of figurative language in the description of place:
“Inside my castle all is quiet except for my plasma torch, which sounds like paper tearing. The vague shapes of the factory robots lurk in the darkness, mobile arms frozen in various poses like scrapyard sculptures.”
And He’s Not Even a Decepticon
Character description is also reliant upon effective utilization of metaphor. A young Cherokee with ambitions to become a gangster seems to be getting off to a nice start. He is efficiently summed up by the narrator with the literary equivalent of a dismissive French wave:
“Lark is a wonderful liar. His lies come as natural as the babbling of a creek.”
The Android Effect
Robots in an of themselves rarely present any sort of immediate existential threat. The paranoia starts to creep in once the robots begin to look like us. That is why R2-D2 is cute, but traveling across the galaxy stuck with C-3PO is far more terrifying than an hour alone with Jar Jar Binks:
“People should know that, at first, the enemy looked like everyday stuff: cars, buildings, phones. Then later, when they started designing themselves, Rob looked familiar but distorted, like people and animals from some other universe, built by some other god.”
The Wisdom of the Liar
Lark may be a pathological liar, but there is nothing that says a liar can’t also be a homespun philosopher. The kid cracks wise with metaphor, but it comes out as the kind of thing you might seen emblazoned on a bumper sticker plastered across the gate of a pickup truck:
“A mechanic is just an engineer in blue jeans.”
