The intricacies of rank of competing branches within the military play a key role in the series. Like a lot of military SF writers, Kloos loves his details. In size, biology and morality, they are utterly different, and that’s quite a trick to pull off in what are generally quite short novels. There is nothing remotely human about them. So I am happy to see that the Lankies are a genuinely alien foe. While you can get away with that in TV and film due to the limiting factor of having to use human actors, in literature it’s a lot harder to justify. All too often they’re just people with funny accents, or wonky foreheads.
In all honesty, I’m not a big fan of aliens. Towering over humans like Godzilla, terraforming planets and pumping out lethal gas without mercy. But things really kick up a notch in the climax of Book 1, when we get our first look at an alien race.
It’s well written and engaging for all of that. At first we follow Andrew Grayson from slums, through boot camp, and then into full military service. While the series starts off in fairly typical gung-ho, America-in-space style, with the North American coalition fighting the dastardly Sino-Russian Alliance, there’s a lot more to the series than that. Set a few centuries from now on a bleak, overpopulated Earth, the daily grind of boot camp has never felt so real. The best military SF is written by those with experience, and you can tell from the opening stages of Terms of Enlistment that Marko Kloos knows his way around the army. Unfortunately, we’re not the only ones who want them… Humanity is expanding into space, settling dozens of new worlds. As such it contains minor spoilers for all books. 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.-This is a review of the entire Frontlines series. and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or the gangs that rule the slums. 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. 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.
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. The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. 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. "There is nobody who does military SF] better than Marko Kloos.
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