Keith Laumer (1925-1993) holds an unusual place in the history of Science Fiction. During his life he never received the laurels that he deserved, never winning either the Hugo or Nebula. Despite this his work was popular with readers. A diplomat, he was uniquely positioned to write the Retief series with a verisimilitude that most of us could never hope to find. His military SF is also well-informed, having served in the Air Force. In the 21st century his Bolo series has found new fans as the tales of the robotic tanks have been reprinted by Baen Books and expanded upon by authors like William Keith and Eric Flint. What I wanted to do here does not include these pastiches, but looks at the original Bolo tales and in the order they were written, with the hope of gleaming some idea of the evolution the idea has taken. All Laumer’s original work appeared in The Compleat Bolo (1990). This is a nice collection because it is Laumer’s alone. Taken, along with the novel A Plague of Demons (1964) it forms the core of the Bolo canon.
“Combat Unit” (F&SF, November 1960) was the first Bolo tale, and in it we can see Laumer has begun at the end, creating much of what is to come later, meaning the Dinochrome Brigade, self-aware super-tanks, their history, methods and abilities. The story begins when a damaged tank awakens, works it way back to full consciousness. Laumer gives this process as a series of choppy improvements that allows the reader to experience the awakening as the Mark XXXIII series tank does. This arty technique, as much as the intelligence of the tank that sits waiting for rescue, while it listens to classical music, studies stars and contemplates the meaning of life and death, explains why this story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s not an action story so much as the tale of a survivor and the success of his positive mind-set.
“Courier” (aka “The Frozen Planet”) (IF, September 1961) ties the Bolo series to Laumer’s most famous creation, Retief, the galactic agent. The Bolo has only a brief cameo when Retief makes his way to the frozen planet of Jorgenson’s World. He must warn the mind-reading Scandinavian descendants of an incoming invasion by the Soetti. Retief and his companion Chip are threatened by a “… a Bolo Resartus, Model M. Built mebbe two hundred years ago in Concordiat times” which they disable by hacking its controls. Bolo production ended at the time of “Combat Unit”, with the Mark XXXIII being the last of the super-tanks. Ultimately, the Soetti are turned aside and the Bolo’s appearance is noteworthy but not of any real importance.
“Night of the Trolls” (Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963) is Laumer’s major opus of Bolos, with the timeline returning closer to the beginning. Laumer never really ever shows us the early days of the Bolos, but prefers the days after their glory. After a holocaust, Jackson, a scientist and Bolo technician, wakes up from hyb-sleep to find his world replaced by death and barbarism. He quickly learns that a “Baron” has taken charge, with armed soldiers combing the ruins for wealth and survivors to enslave or kill. This man turns out to be Jackson’s old colleague Mallon, now eighty years older. Two Bolos are in the mix, with each guarding a different location, a Mark I protects the underground complex where Jackson wakes and the Mark III protects a spaceship, Prometheus, filled with sleeping voyagers. Playing a dangerous game with the power-hungry Mallon, Jackson disarms the Mark III Bolo but lays a trap of his own. Jackson escapes to the Mark I and lures Mallon and the Mark III into an empty missile silo. Despite the Mark I being older, more inferior tech, and having no missile to fire, Jackson wins out. A tank trap is a tank trap, even in the near future. Both the Mark I and III are not self-aware but able to be programmed to do certain tasks such as perimeter duty.
Laumer shows his best talents in this story, making the action exciting but also plucking at our heart strings with the character of the old man who saves Jackson twice, and firing our sense of revenge with the insidious Mallon. By setting one model of Bolo against another we learn much about their respective abilities and weaknesses. Laumer would expand this story (padded really) into the novel The Stars Must Wait (1990) but changes the ending to a less satisfying conclusion.
Plague of Demons (aka “The Hounds of Hell”, IF, November-December 1964) is not wholly a novella about Bolos but ends with tanks similar to them. John Bravais discovers the presence of shape-shifting aliens and is kidnapped by them to fight in an intergalactic war. When he dies, he finds his brain has been transplanted into a cybernetic tank, much as the Yugoothian Migos in H. P. Lovecraft place brains in jars in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931). The alien Demons are in for a surprise when the slave gets unchained and brings his full munitions against them. The tanks, and the way the author describes the mind of a working tank is right out of the Bolo tales, but since the tanks belong to aliens, they aren’t technically Bolos.
“The Last Command” (Analog, January 1967) has Laumer using both modes of narration, with a buried Bolo Denny telling of its experiences first hand, while we see the humans who are building a new spacesport third hand. The tank is trying to accomplish its final command to attack the enemy. An unhappy veteran named Lt. James Sanders leaves his dreary life to assist the engineers who have failed to stop the tank from approaching a populated area. Sanders knows that the massive radiation from the tank will be fatal but doesn’t care, getting one last chance to ride a Bolo before dying. The abandonment of the tanks because of the cost of repair is a nice analogy for the cultural disinterest for veterans.
“A Relic of War” (Analog, October 1969) has another old tank, this time called Bobby, by the townsfolk who look at it as a mascot. When Concordiat agent Crewe shows up to destroy the Bolo the townsfolk revolt, claiming Bobby as salvage and off limits. Crewe’s presence activates one of the ancient enemies buried in the same battlefield that Bobby had fought in. The Bolo saves the town but receives only death as a reward. Crewe comes to Bobby after the battle, the Bolo accepting death bravely as a soldier should.
“A Short History of the Bolo Fighting Machines” (1976) was an introduction Laumer prepared for the first collection of Bolo stories from Berkley, simply called Bolo. It nicely lays out the history of the tank from modern history and then extrapolates the different improvements that see the automated Mark III become the sentient Mark XX and onward. Strangely it is placed at the end of The Complete Bolo when it would have served better that the beginning.
In 1971, Keith Laumer suffered a stroke from which he came back. His writing afterwards does not seem quite as sharp or fresh to some critics. This may be the case with “Field Test” (Analog, March 1976) that uses a stylistic departure for Laumer. He tells the story of Denny (DNE) from “The Last Command” in a series of memos, letters and conversations, building up the story of Cold City and how it has to evacuate when the Peoples’ Republic attacks. The new, untested Bolo, the first to receive AI chips, confronts the approaching enemy, is bombarded with nukes and the military observers know it will retreat to save its own existence. This doesn’t happen. Denny advances, breaking the PR line and throwing them back. Before Denny dies from the radiation, the project manager is able to find out why the machine did not pull back. The final line of the story is one that we will hear again in the title of pastiche books, “For the honor of the regiment.”
The stylistic choice that Laumer makes in “Field Test” and Rogue Bolo may have been in response to the New Wave of the 1960s attitude that suggested that Science Fiction, especially adventure SF, was passé. Laumer uses a technique that John Brunner used in The Sheep Look Up (1972), which in turn was borrowed from John Dos Passos. Or it may have been the work of a man who had suffered a stroke. The effect of jumping from character to character does allow us to see the many facets of an invasion and its repulsion but it also lacks the full emotional punch that earlier stories had. Laumer expanded the story into the novel, Rogue Bolo (1986), written ten years since the last Bolo story. At novel-length, the same jumping narrative technique becomes tiresome quickly.
“Final Mission” (1986) is appropriately the final Bolo tale. Though it offers nothing new, it is a well-written tale of a small boy nick-named Dub, who becomes the commander of a Bolo known as JNA – or Johnny. The backwater planet of Spivey’s —- is under invasion again by the spodders, spider-like aliens called the Deng. Dub and his older friend Mick sneak into a ramshackle shed called the war museum, and accidentically activate the Bolo. The ansible-like intergalactic radio called a SWIFT powers up the machine (again by accident) so that the boys, their teacher and an old derelict, who turns out to be General Henry, a forgotten hero who fell out of power when he refused to burn out the reactors in the Bolo regiments after a war. As to pattern, the Bolo saves everyone despite the humans best efforts to fill their own pockets. Unlike previous tales, Johnny gets a happy ending, receiving honors, time with Dup and a chance to work on his translation of Gilgamesh, an intelligent soldier waiting for his next combat. Laumer has taken us back to where that first Bolo tale ends.
Critics may have felt Laumer was passed his prime after his stroke but this story shows him in all his glory. We gasp when the old bum turns out to be a master military strategist; we cry when the boy who loves the Bolo loses his friend; we cheer when the evil spiders are defeated by a lone war machine. This is Laumer doing what he does best: making a tale of war a human, emotional narrative with a message about bravery and loyalty and honor. It may not be everybody’s cup-of-tea but if you like that in your military SF, no one does it better than Keith Laumer in his Bolo tales.
The Bolo stories almost entirely take place after the great tanks have become relics. Unlike the Hammer Slammers series of David Drake, an obvious disciple of the Bolos, Laumer wasn’t interested in telling the early stories of the Bolos. He chose to make them reminders of an age long gone. This nostalgic approach is hard to explain, as he could have written many current tales of tank warfare but chose not to. This may have been because he saw them from a distance of twenty years, having been a young man during World War II. By 1960, when he wrote the first Bolo story, he may have felt that the age of nuclear bomb had drawn the curtain on the tank’s greatest days. Certainly tanks were still around and more sophisticated than ever, but ultimately small potatoes compare to ICBMs carrying nukes. His fondness for the armored vehicles is obvious at the same time that he saw them as relics of another time, when tanks broke the lines in World War I and drove the battlefields of World War II.