-- Bolo --

Keith Laumer's
Ultimate Fighting Machine!

Dedicated to the continuation of the
Bolo legacy left to us by Mr. Laumer.

Maintained by Dan Hollifield

Senior Editor/Publisher: Aphelion Webzine

From the WWW I tinfoil-coated tank, to WWW II's Tigers, Panzers, and Shermans, to the the early 21^st century's M1A1, to the first General Motors Bolo Division's Mk. 1 Model-B Bolo, to the utter-most future of the Dinochrome Brigade-- The fans of Keith Laumer's most enduring creation trace their obsession's meta-history. From Laumer's short stories and novels came a digital knight in flint-steel armor to protect the human race and it's allies from all alien invaders.

Laumer's enduring legacy has lasted far beyond his own lifetime, and continues to this day under the guidance of several new writers to the saga of the Bolo.

So far this is a very new page- updates will be un-timed and irregular. I hope to have several additions online in the near future, but others will have to be long-term projects.

Thanks for your time- Dan.

My Bolo Stories

My own Bolo creation, Unit AHVC-2703, MK XXXIII, Model-X, Codename: Havoc, is featured in the folowing stories:

"Stranded!" The full text version. Althought this story remains unfinished, it does have a decent chapter ending. This wasn't supposed to be a Bolo story, but the character grew as the story went on. This is Havoc's re-awakening story now.
"AHVC-2703 Reboot" Which is just a self-scrolling version of "Stranded!" using Havoc's POV. Has a MIDI file attached, though. Nice to sit through once, but too often and it'll grate on the nerves. It scrolls slowly to allow easy reading.
"Grudge Match"
The Golf Game story. A short-short. This story is considerably later in Havoc's timeline. At this point, Unit AHVC-2703 has become an employee of the Collector and counts the android Maxwell among his closest friends.

Havoc also appears in my novel "Threat of Valleor" as a minor character in a chapter that has yet to appear online. I do like this character. A tank, two square miles in area, with megaton-per-second firepower, who has chosen to study to become a wizard. The logical continuation of "Stranded" would be to show Havoc's progress in his studies. Of course, the fact that he's also having to integrate a five-way split personality and depot maintenance a thousand miles away from those studies should serve to make the story more interesting.

I'm also a member of Bolonet, Bolo Central Command as Unit DLH-314. Here's a humorous look at the parking situation at my place as a Bolo Unit Commander. I think I need a bigger garage. I'll have to talk that over with my OMB, though.

Bolonet is devoted to all aspects of Bolo fandom, with interviews, publishing updates, book critiques and reviews, creative writing, artistry, fan-fic on the website... Discussion abounds on several different topics at once on the mailing list. The members of Bolonet adopt an identity as a Bolo Combat Unit for fun. Each Unit checks in as often as combat conditions allow. Over the SWIFT network, BCC Units at their distant posts can maintain sporadic contact with one another, and Central Command. This helps keep unit morale up.

There is a shrinking number of Bolo websites online nowadays. BCC hopes to inspire new life for Bolo fandom, new websites, new works, new fans.

Future location of a Bolo bibliography of Keith Laumer's books. At least, the ones I have- 51, I just counted. But some of those are short story collections with a lot of repeated stories. Laumer's editors seemed to be keen to take a new novellette and publish it in a collection with 2 or 3 older ones. I estimate 40 books that I'll have to index, in all.

This is my list from memory:

The Compleat Bolo -- Subsumes previous two Bolo short story collections.: Night of the Trolls; Courier; Field Test; The Last Command; A Relic of War; Combat Unit; Rogue Bolo, Book I; Rogue Bolo, Book II

The Stars Must Wait -- Re-write of "Night of the Trolls" short into a novel.

A Plague of Deamons

Several Retief books...

Future location of an essay on Bolos, alternate timelines, and Keith Kaumer. Most of the work researching this one will be done in the "bolo-ography" mentioned above. Sideways-in-time stories were at least a third of Laumer's sci-fi work. Some of these have bolos in them, though most don't. It turns out that Laumer was one of the Fathers of the alternate universe tale, for instance. The essay will attempt to justify my belief that Laumer wrote at least 3 timelines that held Bolos. I base this mostly on the different background cultures he used in those bolo-cameo stories. Something called the Ultimax Group shows up in at least 5 of his non-bolo novels, and somehow *they* have access to some types of Bolos. Another point is the re-write of his "Night of the Trolls" short story into the "The Stars Must Wait" novel.

Future location of links to other Bolo websites.

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