What do You think about Armor (1984)?
4.5 stars, audio versionORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature."...everything you were hiding from was in there with you. That's the trouble with armor. It won't protect you from what you are."Felix is a loner, a broken man with a mysterious past. When he's dropped with thousands of fellow soldiers on a toxic planet nicknamed "Banshee," he's the only survivor of the battle with the 8-foot tall "Ants" that live there. That's partly because of the special armor he wears -- his black nuclear-powered scout suit -- and partly because of the emotional armor he wears -- what he calls "The Engine" -- his lack of fear and compassion in dangerous situations. Because he doesn't really care if he dies, he is able to make quick detached decisions, and it's this armor, ironically, that keeps him alive.After the battle, the computer assumes Felix is dead, and this glitch means that he's never assigned to R&R. Instead, he keeps getting dropped into the hordes of Ants on Banshee, and he continues to survive while everyone else dies. Prone to be solitary anyway, the fact that nobody around him lasts long means that Felix becomes more experienced than his leaders (though few people realize this), that he doesn't form any human bonds, and that his situation progressively gets more lonely, desperate, and tragic.Felix is so emotionless and inaccessible, his environment is so bleak, and his situation is so grim, that I nearly quit reading Armor. It was just painful and hopeless. Then suddenly we leave Felix, jump several years into the future, and join up with Jack Crow, a notorious criminal who has escaped from prison and partnered with a space pirate. The two of them plan to infiltrate a research lab on a frontier planet. Jack is fascinated by a black scout suit he finds and he carries it to the research lab as a gift to Hollis, the scientist who runs the lab. Also intrigued, Hollis manages to hook into it so that they can relive Felix's experiences in the Antwar.And they are horrified -- devastated by Felix's physical pain and mental suffering. But most of all, they're awed at his strength and his ability to go on in the face of such complete devastation and hopelessness, especially when they find out how Felix got his "armor" -- how he became this emotionless killing machine. Felix refuses to die and it affects them profoundly.It affected me profoundly, too. After nearly quitting Armor because of its lack of emotion, I was surprised to eventually find myself stressed out and sobbing. You won't believe it at the beginning, but Armor becomes intensely emotional, especially for what's considered a "military SF" novel. This is not merely "military SF" -- it's a novel about suffering, compassion, love, and the human survival instinct. It just takes a while to get there, which makes it even more gratifying when it finally shows itself.I listened to Blackstone Audio's version of Armor, narrated by Tom Weiner. His deep voice was perfect for a story with a bunch of rough men in it, but he did a great job with the female characters, too. I unhesitatingly recommend the audio version.Armor isn't the perfect novel -- it's hard to believe in the Antwar because we never understand why humans want to be on this toxic planet, it's hard to believe in a computer glitch that can't be fixed, and there's some psychobabble that doesn't hold up to 21st century psychology (Armor was published in 1984), yet this is a powerful, character-focused, deeply emotional novel about human suffering and the will to survive.The ending of Armor is both devastatingly glorious and agonizingly inconclusive. John Steakley was writing a sequel when he died in November 2010. An excerpt of the sequel, which I believe was not finished, can be found at this fan website. But I don't need a sequel -- I like the way Armor ended."Are you there Felix? Are you there?"
—Kat Hooper
If Armor comprised pages 7-89 and 261-374 (in my edition, i.e., Felix’s story), John Steakley would have had the “gripping, forceful and compelling…tour de force” the cover blurb promises. Something that really could compare to Starships Troopers or The Forever War. Instead he had to go and break the narrative with Jack Crow’s story. It’s a WTF moment as you’re roughly torn from the claustrophobic, terrifying, soul-crushing milieu of Banshee to…the cafeteria of an alien prison. And Steakley never recovers the narrative momentum. It’s a colossal error in story-telling judgment.As in Vampires, Steakley can write effective scenes of psychological torture that puts you there, even if you don’t want to be. But he’s not that compelling or original elsewhere. He still can’t write a believable female character – Lya is another impossibly good Madonna, and Karen is the damaged whore. In a different novel and a better writer’s hands, Jack and Karen’s relationship might have been interesting but here it’s trite and melodramatic. (Though I did like Steakley’s coda: (view spoiler)[“Karen is not pregnant and won’t be. Yes, we’re still together. But we are not, repeat: not happy. But I guess we’ll keep at it anyhow.” (p. 426)) (hide spoiler)]
—Terence
Many have compared this book, often unfavorably, to Starship Troopers. Some going as far as to call it a rip off of Starship Troopers. I take a different perspective...In an interview Steakley has actually said that he was inspired by Starship Troopers when he wrote Armor, and took many ideas for his book from Heinlein's. Not in an effort to steal, but as a compliment - Borrowing a scenario he loved and using it to explore a different idea.Starship Troopers is an exploration of citizenship, duty, and patriotism in human terms.Armor is an exploration of war and will - The human drive, and the resiliency of the human animal under the most extreme of circumstances. This exploration is primarily through the experiences of Felix, and the reactions of his observers, Jack Crow and company.Felix is a soldier. A very good soldier. Too good. He cannot, will not, be defeated. Every battle, every fight, every amount of seemingly insurmountable difficulty he encounters, he champions. Suffering, being injured, but never being destroyed, and continually throwing himself and being thrown back into the fray. Against an endless, unstoppable, enemy, a race of giant sentient ants, who never stops coming. For all his victories, Felix' reality remains the same: The Antwar. A conflict, unexplained even to its fighters, on a desolate hellhole world: The planet Banshee, a barren desert, with subzero temperatures and screaming winds.Felix' experience is shown through the recording devices inside his powered combat armor, which has come to be in the possession of a group of scientists, and Armor's secondary protagonist Jack Crow. As Crow and others become more and more sucked into Felix' world of despair and terror, made only more terrifying by his unstoppable will to never quit, their own problems only grow. Their own quiet place in space is becoming unstable, local forces and an enemy of Jack Crow's past coming together for a final conflict that forces them out of Felix' memories, and into a war of their own.This book succeeds not for the writing - Which is either brilliant literary eccentricity, or just not that well crafted depending on your perspective - or even for the plot. It succeeds and a story of the human will. The machine, the monster, that lies within every man, and how he can choose to champion it, or let it destroy him. And of what a man of character and will is capable of doing with that monster - That "Engine". This is one of the few books I visit over and over again. I have favorite parts and passages, which provide comfort, strength and reinforcement in times of need. I also cannot keep a copy of this book on my shelves, as I am constantly giving them to people who need to read it.
—Nagrom
