He Knows What He Fights For

Oliver Cromwell (scroll down) appears in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest.

A kzin says of a particular human being:

"'Locklear is a warrior who knows what he fights for.'"

-Dean Ing, "Briar Patch" IN Larry Niven, Ed., Man-Kzin Wars II (London, 1991), p. 6.

This sentence echoes a Cromwell quote which I will copy at the end of the post because experience tells me that copying quotes earlier in a post sometimes messes with the font size.

Sometimes an sf writer wants to give his characters the benefits of interplanetary travel without putting them to the trouble of traversing millions of miles of vacuum, e.g.:

ERB imagined a planetary system where a breathable atmosphere stretched between several planets in a common orbit so that an interplanetary crossing was possible by aircraft;

a Ringworld ocean has islands that are inhabited, one-to-one scale maps of Earth, Mars, Kzin etc;

Locklear and his kzinti allies are on the planet Zoo where several compounds reproduce conditions on other planets, including Kzin and, he hopes to confirm, Earth.

We anticipate Locklear's exploration of another compound. He knows what he fights for: the company of human females.

• I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.
  • Letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643) - copied from here.