Honor of the Regiment
Review
Honor of the Regiment is the tenth book in the Bolo series. It’s an anthology of Bolo stories written by ten different authors.
There’s a lot of variety in this anthology. Some stories—like Ploughshare and As Our Strength Lessens—are packed with action and focus on Bolos as fighting machines. Others—like Camelot, The Legacy of Leonidas, and The Ghost of Resartus—look more at how Bolos fit into their societies. The authors have clearly taken the right lesson from Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade and Rogue Bolo: Bolos work best as characters, not just background. That shift makes Honor of the Regiment a big improvement over the older books.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the anthologies—The Unconquerable, The Triumphant, Last Stand, Old Guard, and Cold Steel—to see what new authors do with the idea.
Lost Legion
A story about a forgotten U.S. Army unit fighting guerrillas somewhere in South America as the world collapses, just before the nuclear war from The Night of the Trolls in Bolo and The Stars Must Wait. The unit is sent a Bolo Mk. III instead of the desperately needed supplies, but it soon proves its worth. The characters are a little flat, and the story dodges any deeper exploration of American adventurism and colonialism by making the guerrillas comically evil. Still, there’s great action and a Bolo AI that heroically pulls the tank out of danger and saves the day after its pilot is killed.
Camelot
A few veterans retire to the planet Camelot, a world that forgoes modern technology. Their peaceful lifestyle is shattered when pirates land, kill, loot, and demand tribute before returning in a few months. So the people of Camelot buy a Bolo.
There’s an interesting question: Is a Bolo, and the technological progress it represents, more destructive to their way of life than the pirates? I think the answer is clearly “no,” but the story could have explored that tension more. Instead, it sidesteps it at the end by having the Bolo knighted and join the locals in their roleplaying.
The Legacy of Leonidas
The Legacy of Leonidas is an expanded and rewritten version of Field Test from Bolo; the author even references the original story by name. In this version, a regiment of Bolos is sent to the non-Concordiat planet New Sierra to help them fend off an invasion by Christian religious fanatics.1
But the army coordinator doesn’t trust the Mk. XX Bolos, believing honor and grit win wars, not firepower. Unit JSN (Jason) is the only Bolo operational when the fanatics push through the mountains toward New Denver. It’s deployed as a last-ditch effort against explicit orders. The Bolo rallies the troops after they’re betrayed by their colonel, charges the enemy, and holds the pass until reinforcements arrive. Its selflessness and honor—and quoting Nelson’sorders at Trafalgar—finally convince the coordinator of his mistake.
Ploughshare
Space Germans unearth a Mk. XVI Bolo DAK (Das Afrika Korps) and plan to use it to invade Space Alsace-Lorraine and drive out the Space French. But the Bolo figures out that the war—and a famine 300 years earlier—were caused by hostile aliens trying to take over the planet. Using its superior intelligence, the Bolo manipulates both sides into preparing for the alien invasion.
This is a take on the same idea as Rogue Bolo, where the Bolo identifies a hidden threat and prepares for it. In this case, the Bolo orchestrates the threat of itself to unite the human factions, which reminds me of how Ozymandias sets up a fake-alien threat to prevent nuclear war in Watchmen. The united human response to the alien invasion also feels a lot like Independence Day. It’s thematically similar to A Relic of War and Final Mission, where a Bolo is woken up and has to defend humans from an unanticipated alien attack.
Ghosts
A Mk. LX Bolo’s soul remembers moments from its past lives while fighting a shapeshifter. Not much happens, and the story leans into mysticism more than any other in the anthology. Bolos have souls; they remember past lives—like being a Panzer in WWII—that they couldn’t possibly have lived. It also introduces the idea that Bolo personalities are forcibly wiped after combat, which contradicts just about every other story in the series.
The Ghost of Resartus
This story is set on a frontier planet under constant attack by snake-like Xiala aliens. The Bolos disguise themselves as farm equipment to bait the enemy into revealing themselves. There are a lot of interesting ideas here: the mutual duty between humans and Bolos, Bolos going insane, and how every Bolo has a base image of the first sentient Bolo—Resartus—embedded to keep them from going rogue. But the story is too short to really develop any of it.
Operation Desert Fox
This short story has a lot of fun scenes. The Bolo and its commander play war games, scout the planet, and run around saving people like an overgrown, Dinochrome Lassie. The enemy is a nameless corporation that decides to take over the planet with mechs, which feels very late-80s/early-90s cyberpunk.
But this is the third story in the anthology—after Ploughshare and Ghosts—to reference Nazis, which is a disconcerting trend. The main character is a Black man obsessed with Rommel because Rommel’s soldiers once saved his ancestor. The story leans into the Rommel Myth, going out of its way to excuse its admiration by arguing Rommel wasn’t really that bad. The weird tone and subject matter drag the story down.
In the end, like ’sOdd Attachment, the whole thing is a setup for a joke.
As Our Strength Lessens
In As Our Strength Lessens, a Bolo is tasked with destroying a research facility that mirrors any attack sent against it. This is the most action- and tech-heavy story in the anthology, which makes sense coming from the author of Hammer’s Slammers.
The facility reminds me of Excession—both are incomprehensible, spherical anomalies that resist every assault. brings in lots of cool tech: rotating shields for infinite repeaters, ground-transmission comms, and a deep dive on how a Hellbore works. But there’s also a lot of humanity, especially in the drunken conversation between the tank and Major Peter Bowen, and of course, the Bolo’s selfless sacrifice.
The fanatics are based on Mormons. Their state is named Deseret. Their leader is named “Hyman Smith-Wentworth,” after Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith, and the Wentworth Letter. ↩