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Bolo Strike | Rating | |
| B | |||
| William H. Keith, Jr. | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Bolos | Last Stand, Old Guard, Bolo Brigade, Bolo Rising, Bolo Strike | ||
A Bolo Mark XXXIII is 32,000 metric tons of computerized death. One of these suckers can defend a planet from an invading force - or be a critical element of an invasion themselves. And when there are multiple Bolos dropping on a planet, those alien batards are going down.
Unless it's a trap.
While the last two Bolo novels took some time - sometimes too much time - to reach the Bolo-versus-alien battles that are the heart of these stories, almost the entirety of Bolo Strike consists of fighting. There are spots of less instense fighting and spots of more, but the book is essentially almost four hundred pages of battle. While this lets the story hit the ground running and never allows readers to get bored, it does get kind of wearying when it never, ever lets up.
The other problem with starting right out of the gate at top speed is that the story doesn't escalate. It can't - it's already going as fast and energetically as the author can manage. The conflict here is just about as intense at the beginning as it is at the end. Which not only adds to the difficulty in reading it, but it means there is no real climax, only a final confrontation.
This is a great book for those who love military science fiction and can't get enough of the down-and-dirty tactics of tank warfare. It's also nice that the military here is reasonably competent. They make mistakes, some of them big ones, but they're not fighting stupid, or ordering the Bols to do so. And Keith does his usual fine job of making interesting aliens with a viewpoint that keeps them from being merely humanity in different skin. It's a fine book, to be sure, but the constant fighting eventually is just too much. The story seriously needs some periods where the characters were not in mortal danger or planning for battle.
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