Terms of Enlistment (Frontlines #1) by Marko Kloos

My rating: 4.7 out of 5

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements, where you're restricted to two thousand calories of badly flavored soy every day.

You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service.

With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that the good food and decent health care come at a steep price…and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or the gangs that rule the slums.

***** *** *******

This book and the series has been floating around in my peripheral vision for some time now. I'm generally not the biggest fan of military sci-fi but I do enjoy the sub-genre enough to keep my eyes peeled for what's hot. After hearing a huge amount of good things about the series as well as watching a short film from Netflix's animated series Love, Death & Robots based on one of Kloos' short stories (Lucky Thirteen - which is from the same timeline as this book) I was compelled to investigate further.

Set in what is a rather grim future, the story is told in a enjoyable first-person and present-tense narrative which flows well. The perspective is that of the main character Andrew Grayson, who grows up in a dirty thirty floor tenement block which is part of a low-class public hosing estate in Boston, one of untold other similar estates across the world. Understandably, he yearns to escape his miserable existence and signs up for the military. The world is at war. Two opposing power blocs, the North American Commonwealth and a Chinese-Russian alliance are fighting it out across the globe as well as in space. There are dozens of colonised planets within about a forty light year sphere to fight over. Grayson longs to get of Earth, as far away from his old home as possible. He gains entry into the Army, and this is when things start get really interesting for him.

Simply put, this is a superb book. It's well written and has loads of the stuff that we all love about science fiction such as interesting characters, cool technology and lots of noisy action. Kloos strikes a really good balance between character development and story momentum, and the length of the book is such that it's easily devoured in a reasonable time. If you like lots of explosions and automatic weapons fire you will love this. Just as much as the superb action sequences, I enjoyed getting to know Andrew Grayson as well as his friends and colleagues, he's a normal guy with normal emotions and sensibilities who I could easily relate to. I am really looking forward to seeing him again in the other books.

Kloos has done a really good job with this book and I can easily see why his work is rating so high among his readers. This was the first book for a while that I've found this hard to put down, the story keeps moving so fluidly and with such pace that I was so easily drawn right into the story. Perfect.

4/5 for concept

5/5 for delivery

5/5 for entertainment

= 4.7 out of 5

Buy the ebook HERE (Amazon US)

Buy the paper book HERE (Book Depository)