Holly Jones
Holly Jones describes herself in the first person narrative of “The Menace from Earth.” The metaphorical image will prove to be vital to the story’s theme and essential to the trajectory of its plot.
“My name is Holly Jones and I'm fifteen. I'm very intelligent but it doesn't show, because I look like an underdone angel.”
Death
The protagonist of the story “Life-Line” has created an invention that has thrown the insurance industry into a tizzy. His device can tell how long anyone has left to live, right down to the precise date of expiration. As any salesman would, Pinero shills his new product through the power of metaphor:
“I can give you advance billing of the Angel of Death. I can tell you when the Black Camel will kneel at your door. In five minutes' time, with my apparatus, I can tell any of you how many grains of sand are still left in your hourglass.”
Mainstreaming
After a period of inactivity during World War II, Heinlein began a concerted attempt to move his career beyond the pulp magazines devoted exclusively to science fiction and into the mainstream. His greatest success was with the wildly popular Saturday Evening Post. In the story “Space Jockey” one can sense Heinlein subtly trying convincing this much wider readership that they had no reason to fear the genre by engaging the power of simile to make a comparison with literature they knew to connect with literature they may have had reservations toward:
“Like captains and pilots on Mark Twain's Mississippi—and for the same reasons—a spaceship captain bosses his ship, his crew, his cargo, and his passengers, but the pilot is the final, legal, and unquestioned boss of how the ship is handled from blast-off to the end of the trip.”
He's a She
“Delilah and the Space Rigger” is about the first female space station construction worker. The asexuality of the name Brooks McNye got the unseen applicant the job with the result being that everyone naturally expected a man when Brooks arrived. And then the helmet McNye is wearing is removed and the construction superintendent, Tiny Larsen, gets his first look at his newest worker:
“I thought Tiny would explode. He didn't need to see the hair ribbon; with the helmet up it was clear that the new "man" was as female as Venus de Milo.”
But What IS a Man?
In the story “Jerry was a Man” a genetically enhanced chimp who now has the intellect of a human being stimulates a new kind of “monkey trial” in which the question at hand is not cosmological—whether man evolved from apes—but ontological: what is a man, anyway? Counselor for the defense grounds his argument in metaphor:
“A man is a collection of hopes and fears, of human longings, of aspirations greater than himself—more than the clay from which he came; less the Creator which lifted him up from the clay.”
