Lines of Departure

Frontlines, Book 2

By: Marko Kloos

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Vicious interstellar conflict with an indestructible alien species. Bloody civil war over the last habitable zones of the cosmos. Political unrest, militaristic police forces, dire threats to the solar system....

Humanity is on the ropes, and after years of fighting a two-front war with losing odds, so is Commonwealth Defense Corps officer Andrew Grayson. He dreams of dropping out of the service one day alongside his pilot girlfriend, but as warfare consumes entire planets and conditions on Earth deteriorate, he wonders if there will be anywhere left for them to go.

After surviving a disastrous spaceborne assault, Grayson is reassigned to a ship bound for a distant colony - and packed with malcontents and troublemakers. His most dangerous battle has just begun.

In this sequel to the best-selling Terms of Enlistment, a weary soldier must fight to prevent the downfall of his species...or bear witness to humanity’s last fleeting breaths.

©2014 Marko Kloos (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Story, science, action, this has it all

What did you like best about this story?

I loved how the author kept the science true to physics unlike so many others I have read lately. The Star Wars version of space has warped with how we see and understand moving through a vacuum. Lasers are invisible not streaks of light, space ships don't bank to turn etc. Kloos tells a great story and doesn't have me totally suspending reality to do it.

I truly appreciate science fiction that keeps to the laws of physics as much as possible.

Have you listened to any of Luke Daniels’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

The reader really rocks this story, I feel like I've gotten to know the characters in a way that I wouldn't have with a normal performance or reading it. Very well done.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, I carried it around with me and listened to in all in a week.

great listen!

I am very excited about the next book. this one is a great set up for next!!

wow

One of the best audio books I've enjoyed to date. Great writing and fantastic voice talent. I highly reccomend.

Very good story with some bad physics

I find the story entertaining and engaging and I wish there was a third one out. There's always something going on or about to go on and yet the plot doesn't take you where you expect, it's always something slightly different, or radically different, from what you thought. The characters are believable and engaging. The side issue of Earth society is dealt with in a credible manner without becoming preachy or boring.

The reader is pretty good, but sometimes hard to tell men from women and too many people have the craggy "I shout for a living" voice even when talking to normal people. I worked with UK military for a long time and have US military friends (senior master sergeant, nuclear engineers, SEAL team commander, Ranger) and none of them had that ruined voice. Mostly I liked the performance though, 97%.

As science fiction if he wants a mega gun that can do what a tank gun does today but can be carried by a normal soldier I have no issue with that. Unlikely, or according to NASA this week, quite possible FTL drive... perfectly fine by me. And there's plenty of that. SciFi does not need to explain its physics and should not try.


Slight spoilers and complaints of poor research and physics from here...

Where it broke the suspension of disbelief for me was in the mundane physics. You don't need to be specific, you can say it's a micronuke and leave it at that.

If you are bothering to tell me the weight and speed of something please bother to work out your numbers credibly when you are putting them in the mouth of a physicist. 43,000 metric tons is 43x10^6 Kg, 5km/s is 5x10^6m/s. Energy is 1/2 mv^2 so .5x43E6x(5E6)^2 = 5.375E20J. As it happens there is a well known conversion factor for TNT equivalence so 1billion tons of TNT is 4.184E18J so the number you want is 128.5GT equivalent. Not vaguely hundreds. If the blast took place in one second then it is 5.4E20 Watts, the sun is 4E26 Watts, Just about 1,000,000 times the power, all the time. So at about 8.3 light minutes it would still just be a little flash. Not a second sun for some time. Not enough to bother sensors.

If a thing happens 150 million Km away and you are using optical sensors it will take 8.3 minutes for the light to get to you, not a few seconds.

If you blow up a ship its engines can no longer propel it, so it is not still accelerating at 0.25g.

A 50 microton warhead would be equivalent to 1.6oz of TNT. Why not just use 1oz of HMX and save the technical complexity. Of course that won't do what you said, but it's SciFi, feel free to make the warhead a more believable and credible size.

There were more, but those were the ones I found particularly offensively careless.

Lines of Departure

If you could sum up Lines of Departure in three words, what would they be?

Fun. Fast. Exciting.

What did you like best about this story?

Kloos once again deftly manages action scenes . . . this time in a combat environment that includes more enemies than you can shake a stick at. Even listening to the audio book, I never felt left behind as battles, weaponry, intrigue, and shifting alliances swirled around me. Kloos maintains his in-depth description of tactics, weaponry, and military hierarchy, with a never-boring clarity that I appreciate as an easily confused reader.

What three words best describe Luke Daniels’s performance?

Entertaining. Humorous. Energetic.

Any additional comments?

Ready for the third installment in this series, Angles of Attack.

my favorite story right now. intense, well paced

luke daniels performance really makes stories come alive. this second book in the series starts out at a run and doesn't slow down.

It's a decent book

I don't understand the handful of negative reviews of this book/series. It's perfectly fine for what it is. If you like military sci-fi, this is a decent example of it. He could've explained the military reorganization earlier, as it made the story a bit confusing initially. Calling ship captains "colonel" is weird and the narrator called the Indy's colonel "captain" at least once. The characters' motivations made sense up until the very end when the Lankys decided to blockade Earth. That had better be explained well in the next book or it will be a lame artificial construct to set up the next book. So far, it seems fine except for that one sticking point.

Dual level entertainment

On one level this book is very light and fast paced and it could be taken as just a fun science fiction Adventure. on another level it discusses Humanity, over population, the rise of the welfare state, and the senselessness of governing bodies and power hierarchies even when faced with destruction. If you allow yourself any time to reflect on the background situation this is a darkly accurate portrayal of modern society. So l am enjoying the light fast paced story and relishing the background sociology

Second listen...

It's first person people. We live through the eyes of one man who isn't always the guy in the know. There isn't any POV charaters other than Andrew. Like you understand the Motives of everyone around you? This guy gets a few surprises, has no clue about politics. He's a trigger puller that has an intact moral compass.

First person narratives develop one character. Everyone else is a bit shallow. Take this as a guy telling the story from a distant future. Things are blurry 10 years from now.

The Story is a good one, it sets up a mostly plausible set of circumstances that show the rulling elite vs the little guy. We get to meet up with some solid people from the first book, meet some new ones and get some seat of the pants fun. More introspective, more character development, less blowing up people. Hurry up and wait.

Outstanding

Another masterfully crafted tale of SSgt Andrew Greyson and his fight against the SRA and the Lankies.