Terms of Enlistment

I happened upon Terms of Enlistment, by Markos Kloos recently. It's a $2.99 ebook from Amazon and that means it's independently published. I was a little worried once I started it because of its similarity to other Military Science Fiction titles I've read. On the one hand, the dystopian welfare housing project reminded me of Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories. The induction and basic training reminded me of John Scalzi's Old Man's War as well as Robert Buettner's Orphanage.

And of course, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

I was afraid this was going to be a little too close to those works.

Happily, it was not. Yes, the trajectory of the story is similar.

Andrew Grayson is a young man who escapes a hellish welfare housing project by enlisting in the military. He then goes through the Basic Training and gets assigned to an infantry unit. In a couple firefights our hero demonstrates valor and heroism.

He also manages, like Midshipman Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, to get in trouble by doing good. The trouble he gets into is his ticket to an inter-service transfer which gets him off Earth and into trouble in space.

I was pleased to see that Grayson sucks at flying a drop ship, because I've been annoyed by other stories where everything the hero does he excels at. The writer should eschew superlatives.

When the hero gets into space he's been cross-trained in computer networking. This puts him in a position to know what's going on when the action starts. The battles with the aliens remind me of

All told, I found Terms of Enlistment a pleasant military science fiction novel. The cost was $2.99 and it was well worth the money. I'd recommend it to any fan of military science fiction. Five stars.