Romance and other things

BIG BOYS DON'T CRY is a novella by LTC Tom Kratman, U.S. Army (Ret.), known for A DESERT CALLED PEACE and his Carrera series. The story follows the life cycle of a Ratha, a sentient future supertank that dutifully fights Man's battles on dozens of alien worlds. But will the massive creature still be grateful to its creators when it discovers it has a conscience? And how long will an intelligent war machine with enough firepower to flatten a city be content to remain Man's obedient slave? DRM-free.

LTC Kratman served with the 101st Airborne Division, the 193rd Infantry Brigade, the 24th Infantry Division, and the 5th Special Forces Group. He also served as a director of the U.S. Army War College.

Review:

I will say this. I scowled at No award option without reading Puppy nominated works first - I have this obsession with being as fair to the book as I possible can. NO AWARD is looking good by the minute in the novella category because they are *that terrible* as far as I am concerned.

So the idea is not as bad as I thought. See I like military scifi, I *really do*, oh horror of all horrors. Heinlein indeed was one of my childhood idols, but this? The idea of machine with conscience which was used and abused during the war and which turns on its creators, or does something they do not want her to do is something I do like. But my god the execution is terrible.

First of all, the flashbacks, dear god the flashbacks - I do not particularly care for them, but I have read books where they were done well. Here I was so confused - I am still not sure about how timeline really went (meaning not sure which event happened after which one).

Then there is that loving description of the weapons and battles - I love me some action, it is fun, but my eyes are glazing over when I read paragraph after paragraph of this:

"Calling a Ratha's main armament an "ion cannon" was something of a technical misnomer. More correctly, it was a neutral particle beam, which created and fired anions, then stripped the extra electrons from the anions in the interest of beam integrity shortly before the beam left the muzzle. Given the velocity of the beam, a considerable amount of recoil was inevitable. Firing the main armament would send a fourteen thousand ton Ratha rocking back against its anti-gravity stabilizer".

Okay then.

You know what I was thinking about when I was reading this? What is the difference between this machine grieving the loss of her boys and comparing the drones that she uses now to them and the main character in "Ancillary justice"? Frankly not much. I mean, "Ancillary justice" was much better written as far as I am concerned and wait for it, Beck (wasn't it the name? I forgot) has no genre pronouns. This is so sad that it is really amusing .

I was also thinking about Russian poet and singer Vladimir Visotskiy who wrote a lot of songs about Second World War and who did the song from the POV of the plane whose pilot is about to drive it in the Germans. If you ever find an English translation of it, listen to that instead of this shit. Really.  This machine *talks * about her emotions a plenty, does she let me to feel them? Not really, no.