Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade
Review
Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade, by , is the first book in the Bolo series. It is a collection of seven novellas and short stories, all featuring Bolos.
I read the Bolo anthologies—Honor of the Regiment, The Unconquerable, The Triumphant, etc.—about twenty-five years ago, then tracked down every other Bolo book I could find at the used bookstore. Eventually I picked up Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade. Now, rereading it, the stories feel familiar in the same way that A Fire Upon The Deep or Childhood’s End did: the details are fuzzy, but the arc is clear.
With two more decades of sci-fi in my head, this book doesn’t land as great. Some of the stories—like The Last Command and Combat Unit—start to hint at the format that makes the later anthologies work: getting directly inside the Bolo’s minds and seeing what and how it’s thinking. But others—especially The Night of the Trolls and Courier—treat the Bolos as set dressing, and those stories are far the worse for it.
The three strongest stories—The Last Command, A Relic of War, and Combat Unit—all take place well after the war. This lets them explore the theme of duty in more depth. It’s easy to be honorable when the enemy is charging across the battlefield. It’s harder when you’ve been forgotten by the people you saved. This allows to explore other themes as well: loss, death, and what it means to be alive.
A Short History of the Bolo Fighting Machines
An in-universe explanation of how Bolos came to be. Not really a story.
The Night of the Trolls
A novella version of ’s later novel The Stars Must Wait. The main character annoys me with how he talks and punches his way through the story. The plot—a man wakes up from stasis and discovers he’s survived a nuclear apocalypse—is predictable. The Bolos are the eponymous “trolls”, and they’re just an obstacle to overcome, not a character like in the more successful stories.
Courier
A Retief story that just happens to have a Bolo at the end. Retief punches his way onto a planet, discovers the locals can read minds, punches a Bolo (sort of), and skis off into the sunset with a dame. I can’t really stand Retief, whose lack of subtlety is apparently balanced by his upper body strength and annoyingly correct confidence. Feels like a Star Trek: The Original Series episode, but with Retief as a less intellectual (I know!) Kirk.
Field Test
The first sentient Bolo—the Mark XX—is thrown into combat untested in a last-ditch effort to save a city. It “fails” by performing a suboptimal suicidal charge which nonetheless wins the day. This act is driven by its sense of duty and honor. A throwaway line notes that the Bolo’s mind is still constrained by its programming, a theme that is explored more in Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory. The story is told as a series of paragraph-length chapters, each a snippet of in-universe media—from letters to speeches to short conversations. This structure is reminiscent of Stand on Zanzibar, and is a test run for Rogue Bolo, where one of the novellas uses the same paragraph-length chapter format.
The Last Command
A Bolo wakes up after being decommissioned and buried, assumes it’s under attack, and nearly destroys a city—only to be stopped by its long-retired commander. The ending is emotional: the dying Bolo asks how far to the maintenance bay, and the commander, dying of radiation poisoning from the still radioactive Bolo, replies, “It’s a long way, Lenny… But I’m coming with you…” That connection between man and machine is a recurring theme in the later books.
A Relic of War
An abandoned Bolo is found by the government, who mean to shut it down—only to accidentally awaken the creatures the Bolo originally fought. In the end, the Bolo allows itself to be shut down to protect the town from itself, which reminded me a little of shutting down HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Combat Unit
A damaged Bolo wakes up in a repair bay and suspects it’s been captured and is under attack. The twist, set up by placing this story after Field Test and The Last Command—both of which feature Bolos incorrectly assuming they’re under attack—is that this time, it really is. A fun way of showing how dangerous Bolos are even when stripped of all “weapons.” My favorite part was when the Bolo hacks the site’s power plant and causes a nuclear meltdown. The story is a bit like when Bob escapes the research center in We Are Legion (We Are Bob).