Book Revew: The Road to Damascus.

A Bolo is a fictional type of artificially intelligent superheavy tank. They were first imagined by Keith Laumer, and have since been featured in science fiction novels and short story anthologies by him and others. -- Wikipedia.

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. -- Baen Books blurb for The Road to Damascus by John Ringo and Linda Evans.

One of the books that Matt sent home from Afghanistan a few weeks ago was Ringo and Evans' The Road To Damascus. I have enjoyed over the years the late Keith Laumer's Bolo stories and several have picked up the threads of his creation but none, I think, better than this. The Publisher's Weekly review describes a setting not too far off the mark from our own world and time:

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.

Less than subtle, perhaps, but nonetheless true -- sometimes painfully so. It was difficult to read the chapters about the Khrustinovas' losing battles to save their young daughter from the brain-washing clutches of government collectivist schools. Yet how many parents today lose their children's souls and futures by the same process?

The amazing thing to me is how prescient this work is -- obviously a work constructed as a "useful dire warning" for our own place and time -- for it was published in 2004, pre-Obama. Here is Sonny explaining the facts of life with a planetary government run by P.O.P.P.A., the Populist Order for Promoting Public Accord:

"POPPA is composed of two tiers. The lower tier produces many outspoken members who make their demands known to the upper tier. The lower tier is derived from the inner-city population that serves a the base of the party. The lower tier's members are generally educated in public school systems and if they aspire to advanced training they are educated in facilities provided by the state. This wing constitutes the majority of POPPA's membership, but contributes little or nothing to party theory or platform. It votes the party line and is rewarded with cash payments, subsidized housing, subsidized education, and occasionally preferential employment in government positions such as you hold, my mechanic. The lower tier produces only a handful of clearly token individuals allowed to serve in high offices.

"The upper tier, which includes most of the party's management, virtually all the appointed and elected government officials, and all of the party's decision-makers, is drawn exclusively from suburban areas whose wealth is a fundamental criterion for admittance as a resident. These POPPA party members are generally educated at private schools and attend private colleges colleges . . . They are not affected by food-rationing schemes, income caps, or taxation laws, as the legislation draftede and passed by members of their social group inevitably contains loopholes that effectively shelter their income and render them immune from unpleasant statutes that restrict the lives of lower-tier party members and all non-party citizens.

"POPPA's leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even a most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong anti-populists who actively despise their voting base. . . This . . . is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children on other worlds have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government which they control.

"Their current actions are repressive and heavy-handed. Last year's abolishment of the presidential election commission is a case in point. It was passed in clear violation of this world's constitution, but has not been stricken down as unconstitutional. Until that legislation passed, POPPA was required to placate those elements of the party uncomfortable with an extremist agenda. That restraint no longer exists, paving the way for POPPA's leadership to be as extremist as they wish. Given events of the last two days, I predict a harsh response that will clarify POPPA's deeper agenda for everyone to see." -- pp. 515-517.

Sound like any domestic collectivist party that you know?

The regime focuses its hatred on the Grangers, small-hold farmers in the planet's interior who were among the first settlers and who "bitterly cling to their guns and religion," as a present-day Vittori Santorini once described it. In the end, the regime turns to poison gas to exterminate them. I'll not spoil the race to the ending for any potential readers, but Ringo and Evans have crafted a harsher reflection of our own collectivist-beset world. Give us a little time, the reader is left thinking, and we'll get there.