The Road to Damascus (Bolos) [Mass Market Paperback]

John Ringo (Author), Linda Evans (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bolos | Publication Date: June 28, 2005

When a ruthless political regime seizes power on a world struggling to recover from alien invasion, a former war hero finds herself leading a desperate band of freedom fighters. Kafari Khrustinova, who fought Deng infantry from farmhouses and barns, finds herself struggling to free her homeworld from an unholy political alliance, headed by the charismatic and ambitious Vittori Santorini, which has seduced her young daughter with its propaganda and subverted the planet's Bolo, using the war machine to crush all political opposition. To free her homeworld, Kafari must somehow cripple or kill the Bolo she once called friend. Unit SOL-0045, "Sonny," is a Mark XX Bolo, self-aware and intelligent. When Sonny's human commander is forced off-world, Sonny tries to navigate his way through ambiguous moral and legal issues, sinking into deep confusion and electronic misery. He eventually faces a dark night of the soul, with no guarantee that he will understand-let alone make-the right decision. And caught in the middle of this volatile battlefield is Yalena Khrustinova, Kafari's young daughter. Will she open her eyes in time to save herself-and millions of innocents-or will Santorini's relentless brainwashing campaign continue to blind her while the tyrant engineers the ultimate destruction of a helpless and enslaved population?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers interested in ethics as well as tactics will welcome this splendid new entry in the late Keith Laumer's Bolo series from military SF masters Ringo (When the Devil Dances) and Evans (Far Edge of Darkness). When the planet Jefferson faces an interplanetary Volkswanderung every bit as nasty as when the Huns drove the Goths into Roman territory, commander Simon Khrustinov and his Unit SOL-0045, a "Surplus on Loan" Bolo, "but still the finest Bolo any man could claim as partner and friend," defeat the alien menace. (Bear in mind that a Bolo is a self-aware tank roughly the size of the Pentagon that packs more firepower than most combatant powers of WWII.) However, this turns out to be just the start of the trouble. Much of Jefferson's infrastructure has been devastated, and the reconstruction entails unpopular taxes and conscription. When the government falls into the hands of radical utopians, the planet's new rulers eventually attempt to use the Bolo to destroy their class enemies in a blaze of ethnic cleansing. The subsequent conflicts within the sensitive Bolo's core programming cause the machine to question the reason for its existence. Laumer may rest easily knowing that his creation is in good hands. Ringo and Evans have written a strong cautionary tale that entertains as well as instructs, even if at times those lessons can be less than subtle.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Ringo provides a textbook example of how a novel in the military SF subgenre should be written. ... For those who have read everything David Drake has written or who may have wished that Tom Clancy, Larry Bond or Harold Coyle would write SF, Ringo provides what's needed . ... Crackerjack storytelling." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 768 pages
• Publisher: Baen (June 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743499166
• ISBN-13: 978-0743499163
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE BOLOS ARE BACK!, June 7, 2004

By 

Phillip B. Spotts "cintibookworm" (Cincinnati, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Road to Damascus (Bolo) (Hardcover)

For those of too young to have grown up on Keith Laumer's stories of self-aware fighting machines you now get a chance to taste what you missed. But these aren't KL's Bolos. No sir, gone are the independent tank sized fighting machines, the Bolo of the Ringo/Evans era are massive, 13,000 ton brutes that are large enough that only one is needed to protect a planet from enemy invasion

ROAD TO DAMASCUS is a story about one such machine. Obsolete and scheduled to be scrapped, a new war with aliens requires "Sonny" and his human commander be sent to Jefferson to protect them from the Deng, which he does with the usual Ringoisk style where you would swear that you were in the middle of the battle instead of just reading about it.

However the Bolo and the various wars it comes to fight are secondary to the real plot of the book, the subjugation of a once prosperous planet by a group of truly evil people. It was like reading Hitler's Mein Kampf all over again. The POPPA, a hideous blend of Nazi's and communists, use class warfare, brainwashing, gun control, goon squads, death camps and one really big semi-sentient machine to maintain their iron fisted rule. It is a story as much about politics as it is about war.

So what is a thinking machine suppose to do when the revolution comes? That's the big question and what makes this story different from any other Bolo story I've ever had the pleasure to read.

Lots of blood, guts, mystery, intrigue, and even a little romance thrown in. While RTD isn't your average Bolo war story it is a fascinating new look at human/machine interaction, revolution and dictatorship.

I liked and wholeheartedly RECOMMEND it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Military science fiction meets the Socialist State, March 30, 2004

By 

Crimsonsplat (Houston, tx United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Road to Damascus (Bolo) (Hardcover)

The Road To Damascus, by co-authors John Ringo and Linda Evans. Set in the future, a nasty three-way war comes to the planet Jefferson. But the destruction and death of that war are nothing compared to the danger of the reconstruction afterwards, at the hands of people who want "only the best" for their citizens...and will stop at nothing to create it.

Caught in the middle of this is a giant, AI-run machine of war known as a Bolo. Obsolete and abandoned, it is used as an instrument of an oppresion it does not understand, as it carries out increasingly bloody actions in support of what was once a free and prosperous society, and now is little more than a brutal socialist welfare state.

Bolos were created by Keith Laumer, and have been the subject of several novels and short stories. They are to mere tanks what tanks might be to the Pharoh's chariots. "Historically" they evolved from the highly automated battle tanks of the 21st century; in fact some contemporary tankers who read Bolo stories call the M1 Abrams MBT the "Mark I Bolo" due to it's high degree of computerization. Intelligent machines of war, they are the ultimate war machines, designed to defend humanity from its enemies.

But what if those enemies are human? That is the question faced by Unit of the Line SOL-0045, also known as "Sonny." Ringo and Evans are top notch authors, and they spare few punches looking at the fundamental self-defeating politics of the left, while simultaneously portraying the tortured psyche of a machine caught between duty and honor. Likewise caught betwen friendship, family, and duty are two people fighting against Sonny -- Sonny's former commander and his wife, who are at the same time, desperately tyring to save their daughter from the clutches of the State. I recommend this book, whether you like military yarns, political intrigue, or love stories, it's got something for everyone.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too Many Plot Holes, June 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Road to Damascus (Bolo) (Hardcover)

Let's leave aside the question of whether making a Bolo _that_ big makes any sense (as I recall, Laumer's original Bolos were much less unwieldly..). That done, there still remain the open questions of the villians' motivations and the lack of supervision from Brigade HQ.

Given that Earth history is still known and studied, we are at first given to believe that POPPA's founders have some sort of commercial motive for their power grab, knowing full-well what the ultimate results will be. A half-hearted smuggling subplot attempts to explain some of this, but the book later has a change of heart and suggests that the top of the cabal are True Believers.

Also, given that the Bolo has a built-in FTL tranceiver, which apparently costs him nothing in resources to operate, it strains credulity that he doesn't give more situation reports to HQ and receive better guidance. This situation becomes completely untenable when Vishnu's Brigade rep decides to commit herself to action against POPPA. All it should have taken is one report from her to HQ for HQ to send a cease-and-desist down to the Bolo..

All that said, if you put aside your disbelief at the setup, there are some nice scenes here, including a surprisingly moving Bolo epiphany.