review of
Brian N. Ball's The Regiments of Night
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 23, 2020



Yet-another author I was previously unfamiliar w/ — this despite his having been born 88 yrs ago. He's still alive, I wish him well. Why I don't go to SciFi Converntions is beyond me, I enjoyed this. Much to my relief as a reviewer, I didn't take many notes so this review might very well be incoherent, but Khalia will understand.

"To some extent Khalia could understand it. The Revived constituted a minority group that all could sympathize with, but whose appearance aroused only deep, half-submerged feelings of horror. They were the zombies of myth, the dead brought back from the grave into which unhappy chance had thrown them.

""They should be decently buried," Mrs. Zulkifar had once grated to the Brigadier. "I shouldn't be expected to travel—eat—breathe the same air—as a dead man!"

"On that occasion Khalia had answered the woman: "Leave Mr. Moonman alone,"" - p 18

I told you Khalia would understand.. but do YOU, dear reader?

"Khalia hid her instinctive horror. What had happened to the colony in the Sirian System was not the fault of the people themselves. Caught in a freak temporal effect, they had hung for two centuries in an unhappy half-life, neither living nor dead. The few that had the resilience to survive that bizarre and traumatic experience had been saved by a chance visit when a Galactic Center ship had called in. Mr. Moonman was one of the survivors." - p 24

I was one of the others. I eat freak temporal effects for breakfast. It's all about surviving.

"Dross glanced at Wardle. "I know you held field rank, sir, but you commanded armies. We need a man who can adapt instantly to any bizarre set of circumstances. An expert, Brigadier, in the art of survival!"" - p 55

Sounds more like a partier to me. NOW, as we learned in Lesson 47b-SubParCon 14BX, SF writers often build on each other's lineages & they use their Waldos to do it. Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics have gotten serious play as a result.

""Surely not! No!" Mrs. Zulkifar shouted. "I know quite well that you're wrong, Doctor! Isn't it true that all robots are subject to the Laws of Robotics? Don't they carry a program stressing the sanctity of human life?"

"Dross shook his head. "You have to believe this, Madam," he said. "Laws of Robotics! You might as well talk about the love-life of the robot! And the sanctity of human life? No! Mr. Knaggs and I found the prototype of a Confederation robot a few weeks ago. Do you know what was numbered amongst its duties?" He glared at the self-possessed, immaculately-dressed woman. "It was a perimeter guard. It was designed to sniff out all living things that tried to enter the surface base. Everything, humans included. And then kill."" - p 60

Now cf that to this excerpt from my recent review of Harry Harrison's Planet of No Return:

""["]The whole interior is so cramped that it must have been designed for robot control. See that metal tube? That's the ammunition feed for the recoilless canon. It goes right across the interior, right through the space where a human gunner or driver would sit. But there is more than enough space to site the control units for robot operation."

"""I don't understand. How can this be possible?" Lea said. "I thought that robots were incapable of injuring people? There are the robotic laws . . ."

"""Perhaps on Earth, but they were never applied out at the fringes of the old Earth Empire. You are forgetting that robots are machines, nothing more. They are not human so we shouldn't be anthropomorphic about them. They do whatever they are programmed to do—and do it without emotional reactions of any kind.["]" - p 176

"You probably won't find "recoilless canon" in any music dictionary so I'll provide a definition:

"a piece in which the same melody is begun in different parts successively, so that the imitations overlap. without having the propellant theme shrink back physically or emotionally

"Otherwise, note the reference to Isaac Asimov's famous story entitled I, Robot in wch the "3 Laws of Robotics" were introduced:

"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

"A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

"A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

"An article in Scientific American discusses the feasability of these laws: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/asimovs-laws-wont-stop-robots-from-ha... . Artist Rich Pell made a great piece where he reminded DARPA of them too." - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3367739965

Remember sex? That's so old-fashioned, positively outmoded, anachronistic. In this enlightened PANDEMIC PANIC COVID-19(84) era we know it's much more liberal & progressive to turn one's neighbor in for Thought Crimes than it is to fuck. That's how you can tell this next quote is from a different era.

"They stood together in silence for a while. The girl was very close to him. Danecki sensed, both in himself and the girl, the sexual awareness which comes in moments of mortal peril. She had the scent of a woman who desperately needs to make love.

"Me? thought Danecki. Approaching a middle age I'll not reach because of a hard-eyed young killer or a thousand-year-old war! Not with me." - p 94

Then Emma dies. After the build-up she's gotten as a pompous nuisance, no reader is going to miss her.

""She—what was it your engineer said?—tried to fill two spaces at once? Moving precisely at—? Displacing matter?"

""Poor Emma! A handsome woman, but stupid! Shallow, vain, and stupid! Poor woman!"" - p 124

Batibasaga, a feminist, revolted aginst the above generalization about woman.

"Batibasaga stepped into the shaft.

"The Army marched.

"It was like a wall of lava—unstoppable, pulsating with red-black nuclear forces, a living wave of dense, ponderous, crushing machinery."

""I've failed," said Danecki helplessly." - p 153

Khalia & Danecki, the horn-dogs who tried to show by example that the feminists & the masculinists needn't fight, see their efforts frittered away in impending doom. But will specious logic win the day?

""I know," said Dross. "I know because I am a thousand years old."

"In unison, the three robots said: "No man lives to be a thousand years old."

""The last human to contact you did so a thousand years ago," said Dross calmly. "I am a human. Therefore I am a thousand years old."" - p 172

& that's about how I feel today. I enjoyed this bk, esp the parts about the you-know-what. I will read more by the author — espcially if I can ever get thru the several thousand other bks that're ahead in line. ( )

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in here; hidden armies of thousand year old robots, legal vendettas, living dead, repopulation of season planets, galactic tourism and more. But it would have been better to pick one or two and give the story more focus. There’s some good character development of the central cast, but unsurprisingly the plot meanders towards an anticlimactic ending that unwinds one of the braver story telling choices. ( )