Marko has become famous in the last few years for declining a Hugo Award nomination in 2015, which then led to the addition of the nominee which won. (That’s Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem.)
Whilst the nomination was for Lines of Departure, the second book in the series, Terms of Enlistment is the first book. It’s been sat in my pile-to-be-read for a while now, so I thought it was about time I gave it a go.
In 2108 Andrew Grayson is a young teenager, surviving in a tough world of welfare council housing, gangs and barely edible rations who takes up an opportunity to leave his dying Dad and despairing Mum and join the armed forces. The first part of the book deals with his training, the camaraderie and relationships he develops whilst in boot camp.
So far, so typically Mil-SF. Told in the first person, Andrew’s tale could be a story from any of Heinlein’s juvenile novels, a parallel Starship Troopers if you like. Like the Heinlein template, it’s basically the tale of a young man who overcomes personal challenges to make good. It’s also got the usual friendly and dependable partners-in-crime, and the tough senior officer with a heart of gold, elements which regular readers of such novels may recognise.
Or at least to start with. Things don’t go quite as smoothly as would expect and move away from the traditional a little when Andrew passes muster but is placed in the Territorial Army, the grunt force given the near-impossible responsibility of trying to quell the many urban riots across the North American Commonwealth, whilst his girlfriend is sent to train to become a Marine Space Pilot, one of the elite.
After a tough engagement in Detroit (cue bad bureaucratic, pencil-pushing administrator) Andrew manages to get transferred to the Marines, where, having retrained as a neural network manager, he is assigned a position on the NACS Versailles and at this point that we meet aliens – something that will have life-changing consequences.
Terms of Enlistment is a well-written military SF novel with echoes of Haldeman, Scalzi (mentioned in the Acknowledgements) and Heinlein that keeps the pages turning. The dialogue, whilst seeming a little clichéd, is nevertheless what I would expect from a team of soldiers. There’s not a lot of radical ideas here, but it is a story done well. Sometimes you don’t need anything new to be entertained. It is what I expected.
This comment would suggest a lack of complexity to the novel, and that would be unfair. There are moral issues involved, and they may not sit well with everyone – soldiers with superior body armour and weaponry shooting less well-armed civilians is one that may concern readers, for example – but Marko does well to describe basically how a young soldier told to do a difficult job may feel. I can see why the Rabid Puppies (whose nomination caused the Hugo Award withdrawal) would find this series attractive in its old-style portrayal of boy-done-good-in difficult-circumstances, as well as that the plot portrays the degradation of Western civilisation, no doubt because of those left-wing social values. (There’s a Sino-Russian war going on as well.) It’s less morally ambiguous than Heinlein’s often-complex views and that may be attractive to some readers. For me, perhaps weirdly, it made me think of the story of Star Wars as if told from the perspective of a Stormtrooper before heading into an alternate Starship Troopers.
The ending is a typical cliff-hanger that may get the reader quickly reaching for the next book in the series to see how things turn out.
In summary, Terms of Enlistment is a thoroughly entertaining Mil-SF novel that rattles along at a clip fast enough to read it in nearly one sitting. A surprisingly promising debut, and one I’m pleased I finally got to read. I look forward to continuing reading the series with Lines of Departure.
Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos
Book 1 of Frontlines
Published by 47North; Revised edition (8 May 2013)
347 pages
ASBN: B00CIXX144
Review by Mark Yon
