Lines of Departure - Marko Kloos

A while back I read and very much enjoyed Marko Kloos's debut novel TERMS OF ENLISTMENT. It's a top-notch military science fiction novel narrated by young soldier Andrew Grayson, which ends with a cliffhanger of sorts as humanity makes contact with an alien race for the first time and realizes that to those aliens, humanity is nothing more than a bunch of ants to be stepped on.

As the sequel, LINES OF DEPARTURE, opens, five years have passed since the ending of the first novel, and Andrew has become a seasoned veteran of the war against the aliens, who have come to be called the Lankies. (I'm not quite sure why.) The Earth forces have lost basically every battle, and the Lankies have gobbled up human colony after human colony. Not only that, the two main Terran factions are still fighting amongst themselves, as they were before the aliens showed up, and the situation on Earth itself is steadily deteriorating, as Andrew discovers when he makes a poignant trip home to visit his mother.

Eventually he finds himself stationed on a backwater planet and involved in a dangerous mutiny, but all that goes out the window when a giant Lankie ship arrives and Andrew finds himself in the middle of a desperate plan to finally win one, just one, battle against the aliens...

Like the first book in the series, LINES OF DEPARTURE has a high degree of authenticity when it comes to the military activity, and the action scenes, which include both ground combat and space battles, are very well-handled. In addition, Andrew is a fine, sympathetic protagonist, tough, intelligent, and very human.

I thought this book got off to a little slower start and wasn't quite as compelling overall as TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, but it's still an absolutely top-notch science fiction novel. And although it certainly has a satisfying climax, it ends on something of a cliffhanger as well. The third book in the trilogy, ANGLES OF ATTACK, is already available, and I'll be picking it up and reading it soon.

Terms of Enlistment - Marko Kloos

I'd read good things about TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, the debut novel by Marko Kloos and the first novel in a new science fiction adventure trilogy called Frontlines. I decided to give it a try and am glad that I did, because I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(Minor spoilers ahead, but not as much as you'd get from reading Amazon reviews of this book.)

The narrator/protagonist Andrew Grayson is a so-called "welfare rat" who escapes his life in the dangerous urban slum that Boston has become by joining the armed forces of the North American Commonwealth. Set about a hundred years from now, the NAC is taking tentative steps out into space, having discovered an FTL drive and started a few colonies on distant planets. Andrew hopes to get to go to one of those colonies, but instead when he finishes basic training, he's assigned to help keep the peace on Earth, a job that proves to be not peaceful at all. After a violent incident that turns into a PR disaster for the military, Andrew is transferred to a spaceship that's headed for one of the colony worlds, but unknown to anybody there are even worse things waiting out there.

TERMS OF ENLISTMENT takes some familiar SF elements—the near-future dystopia, the basic training novel, the first contact/alien invasion yarn—and blends them together. But while the elements are familiar, Kloos handles them very well and has the storyteller's knack that really made me want to keep reading. It takes a while for the aliens to show up, but when they do, they're not the same-old, same-old aliens, and I really liked Kloos's fresh take on them. TERMS OF ENLISTMENT is just good solid military SF, and I had a great time reading it. The second book in the trilogy is already out (and already on my Kindle), and the third one is supposed to be released later this spring. I'm looking forward to reading them.