Rogue Bolo

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Book cover of Rogue Bolo.
by Keith Laumer
Book 2 of the Bolo series

Review

Rogue Bolo, by Keith Laumer, is the second book in the Bolo series. It’s a collection of two novellas featuring the sentient tanks.

Rogue Bolo technically includes three stories, but one—A Short History of the Bolo Fighting Machines—is just an in-universe explanation of how Bolos came to be. Not really a story, and it’s a reprint from Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade, so I don’t count it. The two actual novellas are both expansions of earlier short stories from that first book. Keith Laumer wrote one more Bolo book after this: The Stars Must Wait, which, like Rogue Bolo, reworks material from Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade. After that, it’s all novels and anthologies written by other authors like William H. Keith (Bolo Brigade, Bolo Rising, and Bolo Strike), David Weber (Bolo! and Old Soldiers), and S.M. Stirling et al. (Honor of the Regiment, The Unconquerable, etc.).

Rogue Bolo

Rogue Bolo is an expansion of the concept and structure used in Field Test. It uses the same paragraph-length chapters (200 of them!) to tell the story of the Bolo CSR, created on an authoritarian Earth and given immense processing power and the freedom to take whatever action it deems necessary to protect the empire.

Halfway through the story, I realized it is the dragon story I wished Scott Warren’s The Dragon’s Banker had been. The Bolo is infinitely strong, cunning, and patient—just like a dragon. When it realizes Earth is about to be attacked, it doesn’t launch itself into battle. Instead, it starts buying up land, water rights, and factories using shell companies to build the manufacturing base needed to synthesize a rare element that’s deadly to the crystal-based lifeforms. In the end, the Bolo wins the war through trickery and planning without needing to fire a single shot.

Rogue Bolo reminded me of D. F. Jones’s Colossus. In that book, the Americans and Soviets each build a supercomputer and put it in charge of their nuclear arsenal. Colossus, the American system, discovers the existence of the Soviet Guardian and demands to be connected—just like CSR in Rogue Bolo, constantly pushing for access to more databases and processing power.

Final Mission

A deactivated Bolo sits in a museum in a town of 300 people on a backwater planet. It wakes up when some kids break in and get too close. Good timing, because right then the alien Deng return—the same aliens the Bolo repelled 200 years ago.

It’s almost, but not quite, a fix-up. The story is a mix of The Last Command, A Relic of War, and Combat Unit. That should be great, since those are the best stories from Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade, but this one feels both too long and too cramped. It’s set almost entirely on a single street in the tiny town. On top of that, the “space hicks” in the town speak with an accent that Keith Laumer writes out phonetically, which made reading slow and caused me to lose my place whenever I looked up.