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.

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

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.]