Like a lot of military SF writers, Kloos loves his details. In size, biology and morality, they are utterly different, and that’s quite a trick to pull off in what are generally quite short novels. There is nothing remotely human about them. So I am happy to see that the Lankies are a genuinely alien foe. While you can get away with that in TV and film due to the limiting factor of having to use human actors, in literature it’s a lot harder to justify.

All too often they’re just people with funny accents, or wonky foreheads. In all honesty, I’m not a big fan of aliens. Towering over humans like Godzilla, terraforming planets and pumping out lethal gas without mercy. But things really kick up a notch in the climax of Book 1, when we get our first look at an alien race. It’s well written and engaging for all of that. At first we follow Andrew Grayson from slums, through boot camp, and then into full military service. While the series starts off in fairly typical gung-ho, America-in-space style, with the North American coalition fighting the dastardly Sino-Russian Alliance, there’s a lot more to the series than that. Set a few centuries from now on a bleak, overpopulated Earth, the daily grind of boot camp has never felt so real. The best military SF is written by those with experience, and you can tell from the opening stages of Terms of Enlistment that Marko Kloos knows his way around the army. Unfortunately, we’re not the only ones who want them… Humanity is expanding into space, settling dozens of new worlds. As such it contains minor spoilers for all books. Now let’s see what the next ten years will bring.-This is a review of the entire Frontlines series. It certainly changed everything for me–I became a full-time writer that year, and the royalties for my books have been paying the bills since then.

Whenever I read through it these days, I can very much tell that it’s a first novel, but I am also positively surprised by how well it has managed to hold up, so I must have gotten that one mostly right. It sold rather a lot more than that, which is why I had an agent and a publishing contract less than two months later. Thanks to everyone who has ever bought this book and its sequels, but special thanks go out to those of you who took a chance on a self-published work from an unknown name when I put this novel out on Kindle Direct with the hopes of maybe selling a few hundred copies. I brought it out in March 2013, and 47North bought it (and the second Frontlines novel, LINES OF DEPARTURE) in May of that year. TERMS OF ENLISTMENT is ten years old this month. Put on your party hats, because we have a birthday to celebrate.

Terms of enlistment by marko kloos