*Lamb was captured by the Vichy French, so War in a Stringbag is also a good book to read if you have some personal animus against the French or Arabs and would relish being exposed to a surfeit of examples of Frenchmen and Arabs behaving in a cruel and disgusting manner.
This is the one that first saw light of day in Worlds of Tomorrow. It would go on to appear in numerous Laumer collections and a couple of anthologies, both of them produced with Martin H. Greenberg's involvement: The Mammoth Book of New World Science Fiction (presented by Isaac Asimov) and Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow (edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg.) I read the magazine version of "Night of the Trolls" in a scan at the internet archive.
Our narrator, Jackson, wakes up and climbs out of the suspended-animation tank to find the lab deserted--he hasn't been in suspended animation for three days, as planned, but for decades! The Pennsylvania military base where the research facility is located is a wreck, full of rats and even a dead body; outside Jackson finds that the ICBM silos are open, the missiles launched--there must have been some kind of war or revolution! Bad news! Then worse news--there is a Bolo fighting robot, a thing like a pagoda on treads as big as a freighter and covered with gun ports, patrolling the facility grounds, and the Jackson doesn't have his ID with him!
Luckily this Bolo has not been maintained in a while and is not currently living its best robot life--Jackson is able to escape it. He explores what turns to be the kind of post-apocalyptic world that we SF readers are always encountering.* The narrator went under suspended animation back in 1979 as part of the testing of the systems of Earth's first star ship; Jackson learns that that was like 70 or 80 years ago when he meets a friendly old man who can't even remember a pre-apocalyptic world! The old geezer helps him out with food and so forth, and tells him that the area is now controlled by a Baron. The Baron lives in a palace that was a hotel back in the 1970s, and this aristocrat has not only an army with 20th-century AFVs but a Bolo of his own that sits in front of the hotel.
One of the noteworthy things about "Night of the Trolls" is how often Laumer uses silly metaphors that put me in the mind of hard-boiled detective stories. "He folded like a two-dollar umbrella." "...got to my feet and staggered off up the grade that seemed as steep now as penthouse rent." I guess this suits how Jackson acts. At the start of the story I thought he was some kind of scientist, but in fact Jackson is an astronaut, presumably a tough military veteran or test pilot. He sneaks into the Baron's palace by hiding in the shadows, bluffs his way past guards through fast talk, and disguises himself by beating up people and stealing their clothes. Jackson makes his way to the Baron, who it turns out is a fellow 20th-century astronaut, one of Jackson's colleagues who came out of suspended animation twenty years earlier and built himself up into the feudal suzerain he is today.
The Baron is ambitious (maybe he saw a sign at a shopping mall), and wants to rule the entire East coast, but there are rival barons with armies in neighboring states, so he wants to make use of the Bolos and the equipment stored in the star ship at the research center. But to access that equipment he needs Jackson's help reprogramming his own Bolo, which ain't workin' right, as well as the Bolo defending the star ship. When it comes out that some of the other astronauts at the facility have emerged from stasis and been killed by the Baron, Jackson's eagerness to take the role of the Baron's right hand man wanes.
Jackson is compelled to get the Baron's Bolo under control, and then the Baron rides off in it to attack the Bolo defending the star ship. Jackson escapes, somehow gets to the Bolo at the research facility before the Baron's attack force does, takes command of it and in a Bolo vs Bolo duel defeats the Baron via trickery and superior technical knowledge. Our sense of wonder ending is that Jackson sends the star ship off into space (there are still astronauts aboard in suspended animation who will be automatically roused when they get to Alpha Centauri) and Jackson, now leader of Pennsylvania, determines to rebuild a decent civilization on Earth.
I think it noteworthy that both this story and the first Bolo story, "Combat Unit," are about characters who wake up after a long period and find themselves in a changed world, and both are about Bolos that are not working at their full capacity.
"Night of the Trolls" has a good plot, and all the Bolo stuff is good, and much of the relationship drama stuff (Jackson's memories of family and colleagues from the 20th century and the revelation that that old man is Jackson's son) is good. But the story is a little too long. The biggest problem is Jackson's infiltration of the Baron's palace, where he beats up a guy and takes his clothes, then beats up another guy and takes his clothes, then beats up a third guy whose clothes he doesn't need--he just beats that third guy up because that guy is a jerk. I guess we are supposed to enjoy all this beating because some of the victims are effete or obese aristocrats and we should like seeing their pretensions burst by a muscular man's man, but, really, one beating would have been sufficient. There are also too many instances of the narrator getting past guards and other people by yelling at them in a parody of what people who hate aristocrats think aristocrats talk like. I guess Laumer thinks this kind of dialogue is funny in and of itself and so laid it on thick instead of just providing one or two instances to demonstrate the narrator's ability and to achieve's the plot's requirement that Jackson meet the Baron. (I have a feeling that a recurring theme in Laumer's work is the manly man who shows up his social superiors--a lot of writers work out their class resentments in their writing.)
I'm willing to give this one a thumbs up, even though the middle section at the palace drags and the jokes undermine the serious components of the story somewhat.
*Here are handy links to five MPorcius Fiction Log blog posts that each discuss a post-apocalyptic short story that I feel is somehow noteworthy or memorable but not particularly famous:
"Magic City" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)
"Day of Judgment" by Edmond Hamilton (1946)
"Song from a Forgotten Hill" by Glen Cook (1971)
"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison (1971)
"The Kelly's Eye" by Robert Hoskins (1975)
"Last Command" first appeared in Analog, and seems to have been well received by the SF community, evidence by the fact that it appears in many anthologies, including those put together by Analog editor John W. Campbell (Analog 7), Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (Best SF: 1967), Damon Knight (A Pocketful of Stars) and Gordon Dickson (Combat SF.) It also appears in My Favorite Science Fiction Story--"Last Command" is Anne McCaffrey's favorite SF story, and in the intro to the story she talks about how she would like to make a half-hour TV show of it.
I read the 1999 printing of the story in My Favorite Science Fiction Story, which is available at the internet archive.
This is another story about a Bolo in poor shape waking up after being "asleep" for a long time. Are they all like this?
Pete Reynolds is an engineer on the planet New Devon, the head of a construction crew blasting apart a rocky area near a highway, clearing ground for a spaceport. His blasting arouses a Bolo that was buried under 200 meters of rock a long time ago--the local government didn't bother to check the records and so didn't tell Reynolds this site was where a lot of military ordnance was buried after the last war. Oh, those government bureaucrats!
The story features italicized passages in the first person, presenting the point of view of the war robot, and third-person sections in which we observe Reynolds trying to figure out what is going on as the earth shakes and cracks when the Bolo begins digging its way out and then everybody scrambles to resolve the crisis. The local mayor and a journalist get in the way as Reynolds tries to evacuate the area and the submerged Bolo, travelling like a huge mole (it towers forty-five feet high and its treads are ten feet wide) wrecks a highway overpass. The Bolo thinks the war that ended seventy years ago is still on and, when it surfaces, assumes that the city a few kilometers away is an enemy fortress!
The Bolo's weapons have no ammo and it can only crawl along at like two mph, but its armor is intact and the conventional weapons of the planetary defense force cannot knock it out. Luckily, the ninety-year-old dude who commanded the Bolo way back when is still alive, and if he can get up close to the machine maybe it will recognize him, maybe he can stop it. Of course, the Bolo is dangerously radioactive from being hit by enemy weapons seven decades ago, so the old man is on a suicide mission, but he is willing to give up his life for the community.
Everything in this story is obvious--the way that fighting men and engineers are portrayed sympathetically and politicians and other government wankers are denounced, for example. (N. B.: I said "obvious," not wrong.) And the story is really just a variation on the same themes we saw in "Combat Unit." However, the story is well told, with every element being interesting or exciting, even if they are not surprising, and Laumer doesn't make the mistakes in "Last Command" that he made in "Night of the Trolls"--here there are no weak jokes to distract you and no padding to tire you. This is a good one.
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| I read the paperback version of The Yngling back in 2016 and found it to be a "pedestrian" tale of a psychic swordsman in a post-apocalyptic feudal society |
After first appearing in Analog, in addition to a bunch of Laumer collections, "A Relic of War" has been reprinted in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's Robot Warriors and David Drake's Dogs of War. I once owned a copy of the Laumer collection The Big Show, which includes "A Relic of War," but I can't find it anywhere, so I read the version in the internet archive scan of Dogs of War. Drake penned a brief afterword for this edition that provides a little insight into Laumer's service in WWII and into what Drake likes about the Bolo stories.
"A Relic of War" is about an old Bolo unit that is not working at full capacity. It served in an interstellar war a century ago, and now sits in the town square of a small settlement that is surrounded by jungle; where the settlement now sits was the site of a ferocious battle one hundred years earlier, and the jungle is full of the wreckage of Terran and alien AFVs, artillery pieces and military aircraft. The Bolo is still "alive," and has sat still for a century, chatting to settlers about its war service and just shooting the breeze.
A government tech comes by to deactivate Bobby, as the locals call the twenty-five foot wide war machine. When the tech turns on the transmitter that will shut Bobby down, its signal is picked up by an alien war robot that has been lying dormant since its force lost the battle long ago. This robot attacks, and Bobby outfights it, saving the settlement. The townspeople have a little celebration and present Bobby a medal and then the tech (after making sure there are no more active enemy units around) finally shuts down Bobby.
This story is good, maybe a little slight. In a smaller way it explores the same sorts of themes as "Last Command" and "Combat Unit:" the sacrifices made by those who defend the community, and how that community shows its gratitude. The idea of an old veteran being called back to duty must really have resonated with Laumer, because he employs this idea again and again. Maybe he felt he--and/or other veterans--didn't get the recognition they deserved for their service?
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These stories are good (though "Night of the Trolls" has some problems) but since they seem to all have quite similar plot elements and themes, I think I'll hold off on reading any more Bolo stories for a while.
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