While the bugs are all kinds of huge in the movie, I was surprised at how little they actually figured in the book. The entire book I kept waiting for the epic bug fights, as my previous introduction to the story had been through the second half of the movie. A third of the way through the book, Rico gets out of boot camp. The bugs aren't even mentioned until the halfway point. For all that there is commentary about the evil commie hive-mind bugs, I found that they had virtually no importance in the novel. The book never truly ends, and the bug war certainly doesn’t. Rico has had time to make it to Lieutenant, and it’s still the same war against the same enemy with heated combat.

The Federation strikes me much more as a war industry than a political force. It doesn’t matter who the enemy is, it just matters that there is an enemy, and that it is very different from humanity.