The image was inspired by the Joe Haldeman novel "The Forever War", a kind of hard SF Vietnam-style saga of a relativistic space war. One of the technologies used is a device called a 'stasis field', which imposes a limit on the speed of objects and particles. This was presumably a literary device to prevent the protagonists nuking each other out of existence, but it has the intriguing consequence that key battles are fought using primitive hand weapons - swords, bows, shields and quarterstaves - by soldiers in spacesuits.

The accompanying quotation is from a song which appears to describe the life of a soldier fighting a war against aliens; other lines from the song specifically refer to aliens, and I've always associated it with the Haldeman novel and this type of image.

The fighter was constructed from Bryce primitives as were the soldiers' weapons and equipment. The soldiers themselves are Poser figures imported as DXFs. Hidden light sources are used to improve the appearance of the image.