It's one day into a new week, and I have something I've been meaning to get to long enough that I already did a Youtube video about it (kind of...). I'm talking about the archetype of the sci fi giant tank, and one of the earlier examples of an SF multimedia franchise, the Bolo series. And let's start at the beginning, with the first of these that I got.
Bolo was a series of stories written by Keith Laumer, featuring the titular giant tanks. This in itself was an intriguing departure from earlier pulps, where larger-than-life heroes and quirky scientists were the usual basis for a running series. Laumer instead offered a future history (itself a reasonably well-established convention) shaped by the evolution of battleship-sized tanks piloted by artificial intelligence. The original story was "Combat Unit", a 1960 story told from the perspective of a captured AI mech being studied by mysterious aliens. After an incidental appearance in the 1961 story "Courier", an installment of Laumer's popular Retief series, the Bolos got their proper introduction in the 1963 novella "Night of the Trolls", where an astronaut awakes in an unusually functional post-apocalyptic world ruled by a warlord with his own giant tank. From there, the series evolved or devolved into tragedy with "The Last Command" in 1966, in which a Bolo decommissioned and buried as radioactive waste breaks loose into a peacetime world it cannot understand. The downbeat tone continued with "The Last Command", in which an authority figure must convince a frontier town to decommission their Bolo pet/ mascot, and "Field Test", where an experimental tank discovers heroism to its creators' alarm. In 1976, the stories were collected as Bolo. And outside of a few odd entries later in Laumer's career, that was the end of the line.
But, of course, that was not all. In the 1980s, the Bolo stories were used loosely as the basis for the classic strategy game Ogre, and for two video games. Then in 1993, just after Laumer's death, Baen Books released the first of an anthology series expanding the series and increasingly directly undermining its original point, Bolos Book One: The Honor of the Regiment. I bought the book soon after picking up the Laumer collection. I was immediately impressed. Then I went full junky as soon as I got hold of Book 2: The Unconquerable.
In full hindsight, the two books together are a snapshot of 1990s "original" anthologies as well as '80s/ '90s combat SF. Between the two, the emerging format was a strikingly unintrospective recapitulation of the "colonial" incarnation of military science fiction: A human settlement is attacked without warning or provocation by an overwhelming number of aliens (which in almost all cases never appear again), and the only defense is (usually) one Bolo. In fact, the stories that really follow this format (conspicuously "Ghosts of Resartus" in Book One and "Shared Experience" in Book 2, both by Christopher Stasheff) are more of a plurality in a reasonably diverse lineup of adversaries and scenarios. S.M. Stirling's shows a primitive AI tank with a stranded military force in "near future" Latin America across both volumes, while S.N. Lewitt shows a Bolo defending naive settlers from raiders and slavers in "Camelot" and "Sir Kendrick's Lady". The human-on-human theme continues with the otherwise routine "Legacy of Leonidas" and the much better "Operation Desert Fox" in Book One, where Bolos face a theocratic regime and a corporate-funded force of mechs. Book 1 ends with a bang with "As Our Strength Lessens" by David Drake, where the Bolos face a very mysterious alien civilization whose A.E. Van Vogt far-future tech can absorb and then replicate any attack.
As alluded, it's a few stories in Book 2 that truly cement the series. For extra color, this volume is the one in my personal collection that has literally fallen apart, and I'm still reading it because it is absolutely out of print. The completely bonkers fun read is "You're It" by one Shirley Meier, where a damaged Bolo and the last technician able to repair it are hunted by a hostile empire's knockoff AI tank on a pseudo-Mesozoic planet. An entry that seems to be divisive is "The Murphosensor Bomb" by Karen Wehrstein, an Asimov-style puzzle story where a scientist must find a computer virus that is immobilizing the Bolos. Things stay solid with "Legacy" by Todd Johnson (who wrote the longest and probably worst story in Book One), where pacifist far-future archeologists must repair an ancient Bolo to defend them. Then the end is again the best with "Endings" by William R Fortschen, which finally takes the non-human perspective in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war that has already destroyed both sides. All very heady stuff to read late at night in 8th grade...
Inevitably, a good thing was followed by more, and back then, I skipped straight to number 4. Book 3 was printed in 1995 in sequence with the first two, and to me it was the odd one out. There's only four stories by two authors. The first one "The Farmer's Wife" puts the Bolo second to a crippled human colony ship, while the last "Miles To Go" tries to ramp up tragedy with what I find to be a completely contrived scenario. I finally bought this one just in the last few years, and still haven't reread the whole thing. Book 4 was released in 1997, and the brief delay marks a vast jump in quality. It's some of the best entries in the series, especially "The Traitor" and "Hold Until Relieved", but it's already feeling like more of what we have seen before. (And we had enough Arthurian references with the actual "Camelot" story...)
So, that completes a rundown of a pretty good sci fi franchise. To me, it's what happens when a group of people just decide to have fun. It may not be "classic", but I can attest that I am still coming back to it. I will also freely admit that it had a whole lot to do with the evolution of how I write. I've said my peace, and I'm calling it a day. That's all for now, more to come!
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