War On Ishtar

Poul Anderson, Fire Time (St Albans, Herts, 1977).

Poul Anderson describes warfare convincingly while also showing us that "War is Hell." (This phrase is not Anderson's but is appropriate.)

Anderson displays a sound grasp of military terminology:

"...bartizans alternated with bastions. Each of the latter held a catapult throwing several darts at once, or a mangonel with incendiary ammunition." (p. 209)

Of the highlighted words, two were unfamiliar and I needed to check the precise meaning of the third.

"Valenneners worked catapults and trebuchets to cast heavy missiles..." (p. 211)

Trebuchets, like catapults, cast missiles so how do they differ?

The sounds of battle:

arrows whistle;
stones make a sound like "...whoo-oo-thump..." (ibid.);
there are howls, screeches, horn blasts and drum-thunder.

Other sensations:

grit stings eyes and crunches between teeth.

We are there, almost.

The battling Ishtarians are quadrupeds (see image) but earlier, on pp. 197-198, Anderson had described T-life (and see here), so alien that I find it difficult to summarize the description:

spherical torso;
five limbs;
the top limb culminating in five petals that are chemosensors and tongues for five jaws;
a sound-receiving tendril under each petal;
five symmetrical fingers on each arm;
one self-darkening eye under each arm and a third co-ordinating eye under the top limb;
protuberances of variable shape, color and odor to indicate the three sexes -

- but I may have misunderstood some of these details. We need more bizarrely shaped aliens in sf. Picture a Pierrson's Puppeteer, then imagine that Puppeteers write sf in which the galaxy is full of beings that look like them. As JRR Tolkien said to CS Lewis about Father Christmas and a talking lion in the same story, "It won't do..."