It's no secret that I enjoy military science fiction now and again: the fast-paced plots of pulp fiction sometimes act as predictable palate cleansers, pondering people in extreme circumstances seems human 101, and occasionally something spectacular comes out like The Forever War, or Starship Troopers, or The Light Brigade.
Marko Kloos' Terms of Enlistment leaves me wanting more in bad ways. It has an episodic series of stories, with no overarching story that I can find. Andrew arms himself to go shopping, then disarms himself to join the military, then has basic, then a milk run, then a cluster-cuss, pause for retraining/more training, then aliens. These episodic type stories work so much better in comic books and television, and have a hard time holding together as a novel—without an overarching story arc. The novel is a bound unit and I expect some cohesion throughout it, some reason for so many pages to be printed with words. As a physical device a 24 page comic book encourages episodic, 24 page pacing.
Andrew should've stayed in the Territorial Army on Earth: he starts to question things in interesting and engaging ways during the cluster-cuss and hospital stay afterwards. He wonders why the policing of the people he has sworn to protect and serve places him in a position of killing hundreds of them. He starts to be surrounded by characters instead of caricatures. He starts to reflect on his own premises and how they led him to the belief structures he operates within. The author even implies that dead character we hardly saw on-scene was actually a character in Andrew's mind. But, after a few pages or sporadic paragraphs of the book finally engaging in something other than "flechette rifles r cool", the author drops that thread, returns the cast to caricatures, and moves Andrew into the Navy, shipping him off planet and resetting the entire story and character. He even has his terms of enlistment reset from the day he transfers, meaning that his time in the TA literally meant nothing to him. As a reader I was disgusted.
Aliens. Why? Is this just what military science fiction authors all default to? "First contact! Bang-bang." Start with half a book stating a few times that there are no aliens, THEN THERE ARE. OMG. It wasn't a part of the story that felt integral: it wasn't used to develop characters, it wasn't foreshadowed for more than 1-2 chapters, and by this point the reader is 3/4 through the book, and it felt like one-upsmanship. How much more crazy could the combat situations get? We started with practice rounds in basic where nobody dies; then a milk run embassy evacuation; then a food riot that turns into a cluster-cuss; then aliens. It feels hamfisted and forced, like a D&D campaign where each combat levels up.
There were interesting questions here, but few of them lasted much more than four words before being abandoned by the author. The main character isn't one of those "perfect" wish-fulfillment characters, but I also can't think of a flaw he is battling against to achieve his agenda. It's just a series of combat vignettes strung together less well than most fix-ups I've read. In short, it was fine and I started book 2. Not sure I'll finish it though.
[Edit on 2/11/2022: To be clear, I continued the series because of two main reasons: the author got better and by the end Halley at least was starting to become a character, and because the author at least noticed that the plot was bringing up interesting questions and mentioned them in passing instead of ignoring them entirely.]
