A review by tpietila
Big Boys Don't Cry by Tom Kratman

1.0

A rip off of the Bolo series by Keith Laumer. A have read only a few of those, but there were much more interesting than this story. An intelligent tank has been badly damaged. It is being dismantled for scrap and that opens new connections to the brain of the tank and it remembers past missions and experiences which have been restricted from the active memory. They consist mainly from more or less bloody battles and very detailed descriptions of the turrets of tanks and so on. The writer sure seems to love his guns! On the other hand, his knowledge of physics is really badly lacking. In one place, he describes antimatter mines which are able to harm the tanks described in the story through the thinner armor plating at the bottom. As 50 grams of antimatter corresponds an explosive power worth of 150 Hiroshima bombs it will undoubtedly slightly harm the armor. Or vaporizes everything within a few dozen meters. The writing is fairly clumsy, worse than Laumer’s, but vastly better than Wright’s. What we learn from this story: pacifists should be hanged at the nearest lamppost. And feminists are badly disturbed people who push worlds to civil war just because they want to be as good as men.