Sami Sundell reviewed Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman
Review of "Big Boys Don't Cry" on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Big Boys Don't Cry tells the story of Maggie, a Ratha - an AI battle machine - as she reminisces her past missions. She forms emotional bonds with her crew, but as the crew dies, injures and finally retires, human contact gets more and more inhuman and Maggie finds herself manned by dumb drones. She ends up being a magnificent harbinger of doom for all her enemies as she moves from battlefield to battlefield to further mankind's greedy quest for power.
The world of the novella is very black and white. Maggie is the only one with a conscience, whereas all the humans are greedy, petty, sadistic, corrupt beings. Since it's a relatively short story and it's built of multiple episodes, there's no room for subtlety: people are reduced to caricatures, battle depictions get more and more violent and pretty obviously try to appeal to basic emotions.
At least for …
Big Boys Don't Cry tells the story of Maggie, a Ratha - an AI battle machine - as she reminisces her past missions. She forms emotional bonds with her crew, but as the crew dies, injures and finally retires, human contact gets more and more inhuman and Maggie finds herself manned by dumb drones. She ends up being a magnificent harbinger of doom for all her enemies as she moves from battlefield to battlefield to further mankind's greedy quest for power.
The world of the novella is very black and white. Maggie is the only one with a conscience, whereas all the humans are greedy, petty, sadistic, corrupt beings. Since it's a relatively short story and it's built of multiple episodes, there's no room for subtlety: people are reduced to caricatures, battle depictions get more and more violent and pretty obviously try to appeal to basic emotions.
At least for me, that just doesn't work. The story is too one-sided, people are too obviously "bad", and at the same time some crucial features of the story are left unexplained.
The proto-Maggie slowly gaining consciousness is all kinds of cumbersome. Searching for words - sometimes while using idioms a newly born battle machine from future has no reason to recognize - just isn't a very good way of verbalising awakening of consciousness. At least not the way it's done here.
Why did the Rathas have sense of pain? Even if the brains "needed" to be susceptible to torture, intense pain sensation doesn't seem a useful feature - particularly since at least most people don't seem to be aware it exists.