Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos

This is a great science fiction novel and if anybody placed it alongside the all-time top tier of Military Science Fiction, I wouldn’t necessarily agree, but I would respect that opinion. I am so thankful that I read book two in the series after Terms of Enlistment annoyed me. Where Terms of Enlistment showed glimpses of hope and promise—glimpses of characters and a willingness to engage with plot implications—Lines of Departure nailed that promise, fulfilled that hope.

Five years after the aliens appeared without warning, (except the clear warning to a reader that this is Military Science Fiction and somebody said, “at least there ain’t no aliens”—talk about Chekhov's gun) humanity is getting stomped. And our main character has had five years to question things he discovered in Boot Camp, or on his first deployments in the TA, or during his legal troubles, etc. All of those interesting plot implications in the first book that Kloos mentioned then dropped, he picks those up here and hands them the keys to the story.

The key lessons to me all follow from that simple fact: the plot and technology imply things about how people and cultures interact, change, prioritize, believe—and this novel engages those implications, rides them. It’s not a philosopher’s text, with 164 pages explicating one single quote about a map (don’t get me wrong, I love that book too). Rather, instead of having the main character casually call down nuclear weapons near his position, then ignoring the shellshock that may cause, Kloos delves into it. Not for the whole book, not for whole chapters, not as much as Dostoevsky would, but as appropriate in Grayson’s downtime, and for long enough that readers understand more about Grayson. This tactic by Kloos, this balance of inspection and plot, hits a ratio that changes throughout the novel as more and less important things happen to the main character—and hits a thread with readers as this series is insanely popular across typical political divides.

The main character still bangs his head repeatedly against things he doesn’t understand—the aliens, the decisions of political powers running the war, the changes of Earth cultures, changes within himself, and the changing alliances within humanity. Kloos allows mystery and room for growth to still exist. He allows hope. In this way the future becomes a character in the book—an alluring character to Grayson, who engages in such a dangerous profession.

It seems like Kloos sat back and thought about his first novel, and this one’s story, from an outsider’s perspective, imagined how his own plot points would affect a person, discovered that his 18 year old main character in Terms of Enlistment would need a few years for those lessons to sink in, skipped those years and got straight to the point where they started to sink in. Sensational. This tactic alone let the main character become a character and not a caricature.

But this book also allows its own plot to affect the main character. As he works through the plot and story points throughout this novel, the main character recognizes more of the implications of the plot, deals or starts to deal with more of them. Sure, he’s not delving into the main character as much as Dostoevsky would, but that’s fine. I don’t need or want Russian introspection from every novel I read. I appreciate various approaches in what I read.

The rest of the series does this over and over again. There are certain plot points that are glossed over a bit too much here and there—like blowing up the seed ship or Grayson's pill dependency. Also, Grayson discovers too much firsthand about the aliens, when I would've loved to see more about how he responded to others' discoveries without firsthand experience. But the characters become better defined, change in meaningful ways, and the minor niggles do not detract from what is a great science fiction series in my mind, which has a planned end point in book 8, which should come out in August of 2022.

Quarter, Half, and Full Share by Nathan Lowell

Quarter Share

This book works for me, and that also surprises me, because the narrative structure here follows the episodic, vignette style that Terms of Enlistment follows. Where this structure did not work there, it works here. And I want to figure out why.

Plot Summary: A young boy, 18 and just about to go to college, lives in a future economic dystopia. His mother dies unexpectedly and he is about to be deported. He has three options: find a job and stay on the company planet, join a military, or ship out with a trader fleet. (and if you think for a second that this isn’t going to be a libertarian trader fleet, then welcome to science fiction! Enjoy your first book.) He chooses a Libertarian trading fleet, and the rest of the book is simply his onboarding and a couple of their first stops at stations. He starts each day, he does some stuff, he ends each day.

Some people who dislike this book seem to point to a perception that nothing happens and nothing is at stake. However, those two linked complaints don’t hold water for me. I appreciate works where “nothing happens” like Raymond Carver or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In Solzhenitsyn the stakes stay low compared to end of the world or human extinction plots that science fiction sometimes uses. Though I appreciate plots that shove humans into extreme situations—they often allow us to examine basic premises and structures of perception or belief by stripping away layers of civility—I don’t need those plots to stay interested. One person’s rock-bottom is another person’s success. But these linked complaints do show a lack of engagement on the readers’ parts: they struggled to engage with the main character’s growth, maybe because they struggled to find it. It shows the author not communicating in ways they understand. And that’s fine to me—not every book is written for me and I’m not going to like every book another person likes.

Here, specifically, I appreciate the exploration, the growth—at least of knowledge—of the main character. These vignettes show days of his life that exist, that he did not expect, where he learns something or does something to help those around him. Rather than battle scenes followed by a boss battle like Terms of Enlistment showed, Quarter Share shows the main character living. It’s more slice of life, and less skipping over interesting aspects to get back to shooting things. I’m pretty sick of shallow video games that skip over interesting implications of the plot, and books that do the same thing also bore me. As such, the lack of an overarching plot did not bother me here, I thought it was an asset for the type and style of tale that the author wanted to tell.

And that core concept will determine whether anybody else appreciates this book or not. The main character is a little too good/lucky, sure, and the others are not fleshed out enough. But I actually found this quite engaging. It surprised me.

I believe there are some missed opportunities in this short book, but these missed opportunities merely excite me, fire my imagination, and drive home questions about presumptions I didn’t think I held. I think that’s probably more on the reader than the book, but maybe it isn’t.

Half Share

To give this book credit, the first half was simply a strong continuation of Quarter Share. I enjoyed it. And then the other shoe dropped. Literally, his name is Ishmael: I should’ve guessed. Let me put it to you this way: the ship goes through an actual emergency where death is a very real possibility in about five ways—a rarity in this world, as the prior parts of this story clearly show. Ishmael is the one who solves all five, despite being in space for only 9 months, being possibly concussed at the time, being the lowest on the totem pole, and everybody else having grown up in space with way more knowledge and experience. I laughed out loud. After this “Ishmael Idiot Savant Saves Everybody at Everything” scene, or scenes, it got worse.

He then becomes a sex idol.

I should’ve put it down right then and there, but I had a couple hours left in my drive and no other audiobooks loaded onto my phone. So, the wish fulfillment adolescent fantasy took over the narrative and didn’t work. It’s unconvincing and it’s regrettable considering how Quarter Share worked so unconventionally.

Full Share

OK, Quarter Share worked and I want more of that. The first half of Half Share also worked before Ishmael started solving everything no sweat and became a sex idol. Maybe the author realized that the adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy was not the right track?

Nope. The author didn’t realize. To quote one part, one astrogator asks another to do something else “while I have a long conversation with our savior here”. Ishmael space savior slash sex idol continues and not in any engaging or interesting ways. It’s not worth it. At all.

(And then I read the reviews on Goodreads to see if anything worthwhile was coming. Apparently the next book in this fumbling series deals with sexual violence in dismissive ways and oh boy do I not want to read that.)