Terms of Enlistment kept popping up in my reading recommendations and I kept pushing it off for a couple months. I’m not a big fan of military science fiction where the emphasis is on weapons and gee-whiz technology, but the genre has a few happy exceptions that feature people. (Think Star Wars, which for all its special effects did not spend time obsessing about stuff, it was about people. And we loved those movies.)
I finally borrowed Terms of Enlistment from the library and was hooked by the first page. Our protagonist, Andrew Grayson, is a welfare rat, living in government housing, 30 floor concrete buildings all crowded together in a Public Residence Cluster. Welfare recipients get flavored soy meals in Basic Nutritional Allowance adding to 2000 calories per day. Apparently Andrew has no chance of getting a job despite a public college education. His only way out of the welfare hole is to enlist and stay for at least 5 years.
Other authors have used this theme – join up to get out of the ghetto – notably Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle in Higher Education. It’s plausible and easy to see how we could get to this point in a few decades.
Author Marko Kloos uses Andrew’s first assignments, evacuate embassy staff and quelling a riot in Detroit, to show the social background before Andrew moves to the navy and the real action that defines this series begins. Andrew’s first extra-solar trip to a new colony turns into a fight for the crew’s (and eventually humanity’s) lives as they are attacked by giant aliens. This clearly sets the stage for subsequent novels as the Earth forces move to counter the aliens and defend our planet.
No Extraordinary Heroics
One aspect that stands out for me is that Andrew is an ordinary guy. Smart, brave, resourceful, lucky, but he does not do incredible deeds of derring-do. Recall the early Honor Harrington novels where she heroically saves her ship or extricates half a million prisoners of war. Those books are fun – once – but they don’t feel real. It is difficult to identify with someone larger than life and frankly the story line gets tiresome. I look for realistic characters with flaws and strengths, and Kloos delivers this with Andrew and his friends.
Summary
There are now five novels in the Frontlines series of which Terms of Enlistment is the first. Kloos does a good job setting up the conflict between humans and the far more capable aliens and the book reads like a stand alone novel, not like an extended set up. That’s commendable in series fiction these days!
Overall this is a fine piece of science fiction, with people and interesting settings, set in a plausible future. I’m not sure how plausible war with 85 feet tall aliens will be in the subsequent novels, but this first novel is a winner.
4 Stars
Leave a Reply