Review (#10): "Terms of Enlistment," a novel by Marko Kloos (47 North, 2013)
By Péter MARTON
This. Is. Military. SF.
If you don't know what that's supposed to mean, feel free to quit. You can quit any time. Don't like it here? Not your genre? Go home. Why wait? Why turn even one more page? You still here?
If you're still here, it seems like you may, just possibly, be ready for this. You may even enjoy the ride. You might get an unhealthy amount of enjoyment out of it, in fact. Reading "Terms of Enlistment," you will naturally enjoy when shit blows up from time to time get that strange feeling of déja lu ("already read," that is), because of course you have: in Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein. The similarity is in the most positive sense. It is a cozy familiarity with some of what's going down that immediately works to suck you into the story, even though there are also some important differences compared to the prototype.
Chief protagonist Andrew Grayson, who narrates to us his own story, is a _gray son_ of the depressing milieu of a "Public Residential Cluster" (PRC), a "welfare rat," housed and fed on aid by a government that is unable to provide employment other than military service for its gray sons (and daughters) in the vast metropolitan areas of the North American Commonwealth (NAC)... This is a believable premise. AI and robotisation can bring us a new world in which you could theoretically always reinvent yourself, honing all of your skills, developing all your latent talents, to magically stay afloat, but chances are that for huge masses of people this will be beyond possible.
So our gray son goes through boot camp and gets to join the Territorial Army at first: a bit of a disappointment, with hopes of extraterrestrial adventures fading, and much fighting against rioting former fellow PRC welfare rats to do, in some clearly overly-militarised law enforcement action. But then all bad comes to those who enter battle, so Grayson ultimately gets his ticket off the planet and we get to see some extraterrestrial warfare, too.
The challenging part, and Marko Kloos is consciously challenging you with this, is that Grayson isn't afforded choices that are perfect in a moral sense. Most of his choices are amoral or moral only in a very narrow, constrained sense at best. Spoilers here, for the sake of better outlining the argument with some examples: He doesn't feel much connection to his parents, living their wretched lives in the place he happily leaves behind, parents who have given him his life as a welfare rat, a life that can only be expected to be nasty, at times brutish and certainly not too long. He watches impassively when a protester who tries to convince him not to sign up, outside a military base, is brutally tackled by guards. Once in the Territorial Army, he uses disproportionate force to save his fellow soldiers without hesitation, even though collateral damage is pretty much inevitable (this takes place in the Detroit PRC). During his service with the Navy, he impassively wonders about how strange it is that on Earth so many are in need, even as there they are, exploring deep space and getting fun out of it.
That is because Kloos is honest with the reader. He doesn't manufacture a clean hero who could please people's sense of political correctness. In a politically incorrect world, in a miliary hierarchy, you don't become a revolutionary. The best you can do most of the time is take good care of your own: your fellow combatants and yourself.
It is a major strength of the book that both the organisation of the military and the fighting engagements are portrayed very realistically. Hostiles have brains, for example. In this respect alone, this book is way above the average in the field of military SF. Kloos (did I mention he is from Germany?) has his experiences from the West German Bundeswehr (where he served as NCO), and he builds on these well.
I especially appreciated the scenario behind the operation in the Balkans where a small country changes political orientation upon a change of government, opting to join the Sino-Russian alliance, and the NAC embassy has to be evacuated with a lot of hostiles all around.
If you're still here you will probably find it good news that this novel is but the first in a series, called Frontlines...! (This is his author site, by the way.)
Ironic (that this could grow into a sucessful series), after Terms of Enlistment had to be self-published first, just like Dmitry Glukhovsky also had to go it alone, intitally, with Metro 2033, or as Andy Weir did, with The Martian -- and the list of course goes on.
It's a pity -- but, given the above, small wonder -- that Kloos joined what I'm beginning to call the great migration of SF talent to the other side of the Atlantic, and he now lives stateside. Just like Bogi Takács, whose work I'm planning on reviewing here next.
Previously reviewed here on EUtopias and Other Futures: Venom, the movie, largely (but not only) because of Tom Hardy
That is because Kloos is honest with the reader. He doesn't manufacture a clean hero who could please people's sense of political correctness. In a politically incorrect world, in a miliary hierarchy, you don't become a revolutionary. The best you can do most of the time is take good care of your own: your fellow combatants and yourself.
It is a major strength of the book that both the organisation of the military and the fighting engagements are portrayed very realistically. Hostiles have brains, for example. In this respect alone, this book is way above the average in the field of military SF. Kloos (did I mention he is from Germany?) has his experiences from the West German Bundeswehr (where he served as NCO), and he builds on these well.
I especially appreciated the scenario behind the operation in the Balkans where a small country changes political orientation upon a change of government, opting to join the Sino-Russian alliance, and the NAC embassy has to be evacuated with a lot of hostiles all around.
If you're still here you will probably find it good news that this novel is but the first in a series, called Frontlines...! (This is his author site, by the way.)
Ironic (that this could grow into a sucessful series), after Terms of Enlistment had to be self-published first, just like Dmitry Glukhovsky also had to go it alone, intitally, with Metro 2033, or as Andy Weir did, with The Martian -- and the list of course goes on.
It's a pity -- but, given the above, small wonder -- that Kloos joined what I'm beginning to call the great migration of SF talent to the other side of the Atlantic, and he now lives stateside. Just like Bogi Takács, whose work I'm planning on reviewing here next.
Previously reviewed here on EUtopias and Other Futures: Venom, the movie, largely (but not only) because of Tom Hardy
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