Week 8 Posts A/B

Vocab
Consternation (310) - alarm: fear resulting from the awareness of danger

Cacophony (311) - harsh, discordant sound : dissonance

Figurative Language
1) "[...] a purple pear-shaped blot in the sky above the fields northwest of town. Avery squinted behind his gold-tinted glasses as white-hot plasma erupted from the warship's prow. A waterfall of ionized gasses splashed down in a boiling veil. Then the ship inched forward, leaving a blackening plume of smoke" (285). In this section there was a lot of imagery and this is an example of it. You can clearly imagine what this huge warship would look like and all the havoc it would reek.

2) "It's gate was just a break in a low ironwork fence framed by two lampposts in an antique style-simulated gaslights whose frosted glass chimneys hid ultraefficent sodium-vapor bulbs" (286). This is another example of imagery because it paints a picture of what the camp looks like with the iron fence and the lights.

3) "[...] activating the energy cores mounted above the machines' generators. With a crackle of sparks and belching purple exhaust, the vehicle's seat rose from the hanger floor, perfectly balanced against the weight of their bladed wheels" (315). Yet again we have more imagery with the floating seat of this vehicle. Also the picture of the plasma and the exhaust help with the image.

Quote
"Four vehicles now sat where the bays had stood. Each was a collection of slightly different parts, but they shared the same general design: two bladed wheels sandwiched together inside a reinforced chassis; behind each set of wheels was a single anti-gravity generator; and behind the generator a seat with high handles that Maccabeus assumed were the vehicles' steering mechanisms" (315). I choose this quote because I thought it was interesting and it has a unique significance. First off these vehicles which are later called choppers were originally built for plowing and farming but they were adapted for use in battles. So the jump from farm equipment to battle equipment is kind of weird at least in my mind. But this is significant because they are one of the best technologies the Brutes have which leads to victories later on.

Theme
The theme for this section is that even if you can't win a conflict for example doesn't mean your going to lose. You can take a bad situation and adapt it so a bad outcome won't occur or of it's inevitable, well then you can still make it so it won't be as bad of an outcome.

Post B
For this post I thought I would comment on a interesting quote. The quote is, "The Jiralhanae had determined the orbital was part of a lifting system the aliens used to move cargo to and from the surface. On Maccabeus' orders, the Unggoy had established outposts at its seven cable junctions-gaps in its hull for the golden wires that stretched up from the planet's surface, through the orbital, and on to another silver arc much farther above" (302). The reason I picked this quote is because when you look at this quote in a vacuum without the plot, characters etc... it makes you think what we as a civilization will be like in 500 or so years concerning technology. Apart from this space station in the book humanity has colonized other planets so we have ships that can travel in slip space. Then there is also cryo sleep so you don't age while traveling to other planets and then there are beings like AI and the obvious advanced weaponry and things to do with the military. So it's kind of interesting to think were we'll be from outer space travel to finding aliens all the way to flash-cloning organs and having these much more advanced AI than we do now. So that's why I picked this quote, it made me stop reading and think about the future.