Terms of Enlistment

Frontlines, Book 1

By: Marko Kloos

Narrated by: Luke Daniels

Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

“There is nobody who does [military SF] better than Marko Kloos. His Frontlines series is a worthy successor to such classics as Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and We All Died at Breakaway Station.” - George R. R. Martin

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world...or you can join the service.

With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that the good food and decent health care come at a steep price...and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or the gangs that rule the slums.

The debut novel from Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment is an addition to the great military sci-fi tradition of Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and John Scalzi.

Revised edition: This edition of Terms of Enlistment includes editorial revisions.

©2014 by Marko Kloos. (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Great lesson

This book is a lot of fun to listen to. Reminds me a lot of starship troopers. A good mix of movie military and sci-fi. The narrator does a great job.

Wow great story

Great story. Awesome narration. Getting the next one now. Super super why do I have to write more than I want on this review?

Loved it!

Good story but most of all realistic dialogue and interesting plot twists. So many writers don't know how to deal with male/female relationships. Believable...yay!

Excellent novel, pace slows and speeds up enough to keep me interested

Wonderful boy girl scenes without raunchy no hour long flowery scenes written for female readers. And no deep technology stuff just enough for me hope you enjoy as much as I did . Going for book TWO now

good story

It reminds me of the movie "STAR SHIP TROOPERS" the reader does an amazing job.

Fantastic military science-fiction!

An action packed, but still deeply character driven start to a fantastic military science-fiction series!

Great space opera

Story is great and narrator is wonderful can’t wait for the next books in the series.

Entertaining military scify with great characters

This review is for the full series, since I recently came back and listened to it again before catching up on the last two books.

The author is really great at telling a story and building a (mostly) believable world. And Luke Daniels is possibly my favorite narrator. My only two small gripes/why this wasn't 5 stars were: 1) these are all on the shorter side of what I'd normally go for. The number os years between releases is just excessive for a 8-10 hour book. And 2) the author's understanding of physics and whatnot can be bit frustrating from the point of view of somebody who studied this stuff in college. He does get the broad strokes right with accelerating half way then turning around to accelerate in another direction, but he completely ignores relative velocities at point of contact as being the most important dynamic of space combat, with just a few exceptions. Like in space he constant makes references to projectiles moving at Mach 8 or whatever number (a meaningless number in vacuum, and one that changes drastically even within atmosphere), and any time there's a space encounter, he's always very focused purely on acceleration numbers when relative velocity is the more meaningful number for the snapshot in time of the encounter. For instance, in one of the books, the Indy goes thru a jump point and the author explains that the ship maintains whatever velocity they go into the jump with when they exit. Great! But then he goes on to explain how due to this, the captain smartly had the thrusters burning at 4Gs going in. Orders are issued to cut them right when they get out. But like why were they even firing when they went in? They could have entered at relativistic speeds and just blown by whatever was on the other side without emitting any radiation by just going in fast and turning it all off. Then, they get to the other side and of course they're right on top of a couple ships that are close enough to touch and they're barely moving and need to burn hot to get away... It just isn't the most believable space combat for reasons like this. I wish the author would have had the opportunity to play some Kerbal Space Program before writing this... Any future space scify author should do that prior to writing any space combat.

But the ground combat is well thought out, and that's more of the focus of the series anyway. And again, the characters are great as is the overall storytelling and writing style, so I'm willing to forgive the odd space combat mechanics.

Trope lite

Avoids the most tired military tropes. Lacks the shitlib preaching required in most successful titles lately. Good linear plot. Strong characters.

Fairly good novel-Superior Narration

I purchased this book because it was on sale AND narrated by Luke Daniels. As others have mentioned, Daniels can read the phone book and entertain me. He's the kind of narrator who canl lead me to a book I might not have been interested in previously. Reading the reviews, I was going to not purchase this Scalzi like story except that Daniels narrates it and , damn, he's one good narrator. Did I mention that?

"Enlistment" is, sadly, a John Scalzi rip off-and Scalzi frequently admits to following in other SF writers footprints. Enlistment was so similar to Old Mans War Old series, but isn't nearly as well written't ......OMW was a great series and Enlistment is so-so.

Andrew, the depressed welfare kid who hasn't ever had anything of quality in his life, is a young version of Scalzi's "John Perry" an aging man who traded his failing health and senior citizen boredom for a new mutant body and opportunity to help save human life in the galaxy.

As there are only 2 goods so far in Kloos series we shall see if it continues to follow OMW. If so, I'd recumbent just buying Scalzis novels..they are excellently written, much better than those 2 that Kloos has written.

Except for Luke Daniels..I'll gave this 4 starts simply because Luke Daniels has the ability to make any book into an excellent one.