Lines of Departure and Angles of Attack fit together as sequels to Terms of Enlistment, all by Marko Kloos.  I read and enjoyed Terms of Enlistment (see review here) because it was primarily a people story in a military future/science fiction setting.  (I avoid military science fiction where the main characters are guns and ships, not people.)  Lines of Departure happens 5 years later with our protagonist Andrew Grayson in a new job, now a combat controller, the person who calls fire down on enemy positions.  Other things have not changed.

The North American Commonwealth (NAC) is still stuffed with welfare rats who have little or no hope, few protections and little to eat.  The NAC are still fighting the  Sino-Russian Alliance (SRA) and both are still losing badly to the 80 foot tall Lanky aliens.  The Lankies kill as many colony people as they can with nerve poison and the rest die when the Lanky atmospheric plants raise the CO2 level too high.

It was incredible to me that the NAC and SRA were still fighting.  Yes, I understand that the SRA wouldn’t believe NAC peace overtures until one of their colonies was destroyed.  But 5 years into the story?  With dozens of colonies destroyed?  Kloos has an extremely pessimistic view of people and Grayson frequently muses whether it would be best if the Lankys win and exterminate humanity.

Angles of Attack picks up right after Lines of Departure and has a bit more positive feel to it as the NAC and SRA work together to defend a nearly uninhabitable moon.

Characters

Kloos centers his novels on people and most were very well done.  Andrew Grayson is believable and mostly likable as is his mother whom he visits.  The scientist Dr Stewart and Constable Guest on the moon colony New Svalbard were also well done.

The character I detested was sergeant Fallon, Peter’s original mentor.  She is packed onto the large transport where Peter is assigned where she continues to use her Medal of Honor and mystique to form her own clique.  Somehow she “knows” that the admiral, a 1-star reservist, will give an untenable and illegal order and she proactively places her people in position to disobey and thwart the order.  I don’t know what one should do in a situation like this but firing upon and killing one’s own is not right.

Fallon continues her “I know best” routine in Angles of Attack.  Yet she never wants to rise above sergeant, never wants a formal leadership position.  I’ve always believed that you put your money where your mouth is:  If you truly have great ideas and strong leadership, then lead. Don’t be a shadow opponent and form cliques.  (A formal leadership position cements the informal leadership role in organizations.)

Pace

Kloos does an excellent job mixing slower paced scenes with super fast slam bang action.  That helps flesh the characters and also gives us a break and time to let the rest of the story, its setting and background, seep in.

Peter visits his Mom in Boston, which shows us how much the welfare complexes have deteriorated and how much the government police force is detested.  It lets us see the background, learn more about the characters and gives a needed respite between hectic days.

Setting

This series uses setting effectively.  We have Earth, particularly the welfare cities filled with hungry desperate people, the transport ships, then the excellent, detailed setting on New Svalbard which I particularly liked .  New Svalbard is a moon and it is very cold.  At the equator it is warm enough in summer to wear light jackets and grow food but the winters are 50 or so below zero with gale winds.  The NAC is terraforming the world to make it warmer although we don’t know what they are doing to effect the change.

Clearly Kloos believes the Peter Principle, that people rise to one level above their competence.  The NAC leaders are venal and reluctant to solve problems or even tell the populace the truth about the Lanky advance.  At the end of Angles of Attack we learn that government and military leaders have evacuated Lines of Departure Earth to some unknown destination, leaving everyone else behind to die in the Lanky invasion.  This pessimism is tiresome and made the books a little less enjoyable.  It explains why the best leaders are sergeants and captains, not admirals.

In a long career in two multinational corporations I saw the Peter Principle in play only a handful of times.  To someone at the bottom the guys at the top often look incompetent as their decisions and orders seem stupid and ill-thought, but with advancement one sees a larger picture.

Overall

You will enjoy these most if you read them in sequence without much time between each one. The plot line in Lines of Departure and Angles of Attack follow too closely to read them out of sequence except the last chapter in Angles is slower and sets up the following book, Chains of Command.

I gave Terms of Enlistment 4 stars and considered giving it 5.  Lines of Departure and Angles of Attack are also good, well-written stories with interesting people and a compelling plot line.  However I felt both were slightly less enjoyable due to the pervasive pessimism and Sergeant Fallon’s antics but I still enjoyed them and intend to read book 4, Chains of Command when I can get it from the library.  Let’s say 3 1/2 to 4 stars for these.

Author D. Nolan Clark combines circumstances and antagonists that were refreshingly unusual to write a novel of old fashioned science fiction with plenty of imaginative concepts.  Forsaken Skies uses a political back structure that has Earth as an economic and military force playing balance of power against immense interstellar corporations.  It’s an interesting concept that Clark mentions only in passing, something that explains the predicament and fleshes out the constraints.

Forsaken Skies is entertaining and introduces several characters and fascinating plot elements.

Plot Synopsis

Just before the book opens an unknown force – assumed to be a rival corporation – has attacked small, inhospitable colony world Niraya inhabited by several peaceful quasi-religious groups plus some corporate mining employees.  Both the corporation and Earth decline to aid the colony because the world is barely profitable as-is but a conniving naval office, Auster Maggs, says he can personally assist them for a very large fee.  The colony sends two people to negotiate with Maggs, paying him the equivalent of two years’ terraforming fees for his non-existent help.

Former naval hero Aleister Lanoe and traffic controller Tannis Valk, who had fought against Lanoe in an earlier war, get mixed up with the Nirayans when they overhear the situation and realize Maggs is a con man.  Lanoe recruits a few of his former squadron to come and assist the colony.

Pace and Characters

Once the group arrives at Niraya the plot gets interesting but the pace is uneven.  We have way too many pages where the two young characters indulge in the usual teen angst and self-doubt, rebel against authority and build relationships.  Those sections dragged on.  In between we have Lanoe and his team working hard to first find out who the heck is attacking Niraya and why, and second, to build a defense against what appears to be an unstoppable force.

During this phase we learn more about Lanoe and Valk and get to know them. Forsaken Skies does a reasonable job building characters although I wouldn’t give it top marks for realistic, interesting people.

The author needed to build up Maggs in order to make the ending believable but the sections with him plod along.  Maggs remains a bit of a cipher, a cardboard cutout instead of a real person.  I think author Clark could have done more with him.

Clark could have done more with Niraya itself as it clearly has a wide variety of people, anywhere from seekers of peace and piety to miners. There were a few boring pages where Elder MacRae does a Yoda imitation but the part where she is the primary viewpoint in the battle on the moon is well done.

First in a Series

Forsaken Skies stands on its own.  It has a beginning, a middle and an end and the ending nicely finishes the story arc.  Nonetheless it leaves room for a sequel, where Lanoe and/or the Earth navy tracks down the source of the attacks and gets them to stop.  I suspect a second book will be more interesting, with fewer segues into teen troubles (I hope), and a fascinating diversion into a completely different, alien culture. (Incidentally the aliens here reminded me a bit of the Star Trek episode with a doomsday machine that ate planets and ships but Clark did a much better job building a realistic and vivid threat.)

Overall

I read Forsaken Skies in a couple evenings and enjoyed it.  It is not top caliber science fiction mainly due to pacing problems and the two boring teen characters.  The aliens are very well done, unique and fascinating.  4 stars.

I received a complementary copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Terms of Enlistment kept popping up in my reading recommendations and I kept pushing it off for a couple months.  I’m not a big fan of military science fiction where the emphasis is on weapons and gee-whiz technology, but the genre has a few happy exceptions that feature people.  (Think Star Wars, which for all its special effects did not spend time obsessing about stuff, it was about people.  And we loved those movies.)

I finally borrowed Terms of Enlistment from the library and was hooked by the first page.  Our protagonist, Andrew Grayson, is a welfare rat, living in government housing, 30 floor concrete buildings all crowded together in a Public Residence Cluster.  Welfare recipients get flavored soy meals in Basic Nutritional Allowance adding to 2000 calories per day.  Apparently Andrew has no chance of getting a job despite a public college education.  His only way out of the welfare hole is to enlist and stay for at least 5 years.

Other authors have used this theme – join up to get out of the ghetto – notably Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle in Higher Education.  It’s plausible and easy to see how we could get to this point in a few decades.

Author Marko Kloos uses Andrew’s first assignments, evacuate embassy staff and quelling a riot in Detroit, to show the social background before Andrew moves to the navy and the real action that defines this series begins.  Andrew’s first extra-solar trip to a new colony turns into a fight for the crew’s (and eventually humanity’s) lives as they are attacked by giant aliens.  This clearly sets the stage for subsequent novels as the Earth forces move to counter the aliens and defend our planet.

No Extraordinary Heroics

One aspect that stands out for me is that Andrew is an ordinary guy.  Smart, brave, resourceful, lucky, but he does not do incredible deeds of derring-do.  Recall the early Honor Harrington novels where she heroically saves her ship or extricates half a million prisoners of war.  Those books are fun – once – but they don’t feel real.  It is difficult to identify with someone larger than life and frankly the story line gets tiresome. I look for realistic characters with flaws and strengths, and Kloos delivers this with Andrew and his friends.

Summary

There are now five novels in the Frontlines series of which Terms of Enlistment is the first.  Kloos does a good job setting up the conflict between humans and the far more capable aliens and the book reads like a stand alone novel, not like an extended set up.  That’s commendable in series fiction these days!

Overall this is a fine piece of science fiction, with people and interesting settings, set in a plausible future.  I’m not sure how plausible war with 85 feet tall aliens will be in the subsequent novels, but this first novel is a winner.

4 Stars

People in the Future Act Like People Today

Becky Chambers imagines the future full of whiz bang technology and the same old people we have today, even though some folks are human, some humanoid lizards, others reminiscent of mollusks.  Some seek to dominate, others want to be left alone, while others try to thread a narrow path through ties of friendship and loyalty, economics and ambition.  The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is an engaging story full of interesting people and challenges.

Chambers focuses on characters in turn, but primarily tells her story through Ashby the captain and owner of the tunneler ship Wayfarer and Rosemary, the ship’s new clerk late of Mars.  Ashby is in love with Pei, a non-human captain of a merchant ship that supplies one side of a long interstellar war.  He is also torn between his ambition to make his ship and crew better equipped to handle difficult jobs and his desire for a peaceful, happy life.

Rosemary is hiding from her father’s crimes under an assumed name.  Her family had been rich, having settled on Mars when Earth was dying and before most of its inhabitants either died or migrated en mass to other worlds via the Exodus.  The Exodans nearly died until rescued by the Aeluons and Aandrisks and given access to other planets.  The Martians and Exodans are only now beginning to talk to each other.

Sissix, the Aandrisk pilot, Dr Chef the doctor and chef, Kizzy and Jenks the technicians who each get a cameo role or two plus short feature chapters, and the two other crew and assorted friends and enemies make the rest of the story move along.  We see a bit of the fascinating Aandrisk culture, one where individuals come together for families to bond in friendship, then later join other families to raise hatchlings.

By the end of the novel I felt as if I knew Ashby, Rosemary and Sissix and we were friends already.

Excellent People-Centric Novel Set in Space

My favorite science fiction stories use space or the future as the setting and feature people.  I enjoy books that bring in a touch of the old romance we love in the best space operas without overwhelming the story about people.  The best use the future/space/science fiction to create challenges that the characters must beat, without focusing too much on the technology behind or the whiz-bang spaceship stuff.

Military science fiction can be wonderful when it keeps away from “gee gosh, let’s talk about that nifty laser thingy”.  Exploration stories can be fun when they keep the explorers front and center.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet proves even a long journey is engaging when we enjoy our traveling companions.

Angry Planet

Author Chambers asks a similar question as we confront today:  What do you do when you encounter people who instantly and savagely want to kill you?  The angry planet in the title is located near the galactic core, and is the centerpiece of a strange race’s incessant wars.

The Toremi culture believes in complete unity and consensus.  If you disagree you either leave or fight.  The Galactic Commons, which unifies many races including Aeluons and Aandrisks and humans, wants to trade with the Toremi and believe they have an agreement to do so.

The GC contracts the Wayfarer to punch a new tunnel from the Toremi world Hedra Ka back to GC space, to cut the journey time from months to hours.  Unfortunately when the Wayfarer crew attends a gathering of GC diplomatic staff, the Toremi gate crash and overhear an innocent conversation that crystallizes the urge to kill the GC folks and attack the Wayfarer.

If this novel is made into a movie no doubt the angry planet and GC/Toremi relationsihp will be the featured points.  The attack and subsequent actions are the climax to the novel’s plot; however, they are not the climax to the crew relationships or the story itself.

Summary

I thoroughly enjoyed The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.  Author Chambers set up a realistic, interesting world with complex and believable people.  She could easily add sequels or other stories set in the same universe, whether featuring same or new characters.  I will watch out for any follow ups and recommend you do the same if you enjoy people-centric science fiction.

I did wonder, though, whether aliens would not be, well, more alien to us.  These aliens were all more or less recognizable human.  At one point the characters themselves discuss this as a fact that had puzzled the different species for centuries with no answer.

4 Stars

Note:  A second book is due October 2016.

Do you expect to read about the zombie apocalypse when you start a science fiction story.  No?  Me neither.  Nor do I expect to see alien spacecraft left parked in a small town doing nothing, nor a 16 year old girl main character who doesn’t fall in love nor a town where the factory owner rebuilds the factory after a fire instead of shipping everything off to China.  Gene Doucette’s The Spaceship Next Door is original, interesting and fun and even the zombies are believable.

The plot revolves around the spaceship that landed in Sorrow Falls, rural northwestern Massachusetts 3 years ago and since then has done…nothing.  At least nothing that anyone can see.  There is a full contingent of UFO tin hat types, all camped across the road, all with homemade instruments looking for radiation? color? sound? anything?  And more to the point, an army base with plenty of real instruments that feed data to a board of Nobel prize-winning scientists all looking and waiting for the ship to do…something.

Characters

Annie is 16, pretty used to taking care of herself because her father’s gone all the time and her mother has cancer and can’t handle normal parent/adult responsibilities.  Annie is extraordinarily outgoing and friendly and knows just about everybody in town.  She works part time at the local diner/conversation hub and the library and visits the tin hat camper contingent every day and she’s smart, a little bit like Anne of Green Gables.

Annie is the only character that Doucette develops thoroughly, and through her we meet Ed, the government agent who investigates an anomaly from the spaceship, plus Violet, Doug, Rick and four of the nutty campers.

Ed is a bit of a cipher.  He is responsible, warm and friendly to Annie, in fact he agrees to act as her guardian while her mom is hospitalized out of town.  Yet he is also the author of the plan to bomb the town with nuclear weapons if necessary.  It felt to me as if he wore his analyst hat at work and didn’t think about what it was he was analyzing, that it was people.

Annie’s best friend Violet is a placeholder with little personality, in fact it’s a running joke with Annie and Violet that no one remembers Violet after meeting her.  Of course there is a reason for that!

No Romance

It was so refreshing to read a novel featuring a 16 year old girl who did not have a romance with a vampire/werewolf/demigod/demon/alien/super hero or even with a normal guy.  Annie likes guys just fine and she’s attracted to Sam, an army corporal, and good friends with her neighbor Doug.

Pacing and Ending

Several reviewers on Amazon felt The Spaceship Next Door was slow, but I didn’t feel that.  The plot takes a while to kick off while we get to know Annie and meet the camper folks, her friends, Ed and the army guys.  This is not a high octane action story.

The ending was a bit unsatisfying.  We don’t know what comes next with the aliens, the spaceship or the ex-zombies.  We get hints that Annie will go blithely on to her future but that doesn’t seem likely given she got the brain dump from a multi-zillion year old alien.  We get the obligatory threats from an evil government guy but Annie doesn’t waste time feeling threatened.

YA or Adult?

Despite Annie’s age The Spaceship Next Door is not listed as nor marketed as YA fiction (maybe because there are no nonsense love stories with vampires or demons).  Teens would like it but the book is primarily an adult, straightforward science fiction story about first contact with a twist.

Summary

The Spaceship Next Door was a happy find.  I was glad to have it on my Nook list and glad I read it.  It is not so compelling to warrant 5 stars, but an excellent read, most enjoyable.

4 Stars

I was excited when the publisher approved me for a NetGalley copy of Home World by Bonnie Milani.  The book sounded great.  Earth is in bad shape after centuries of war, the heir apparent to the Earth Protectorship, Jezekiah, negotiated a trade treaty with their former deadly enemies the Lupans and hopes to position his younger sister as the heir by marrying her off to the Lupan warlord prince.   Not to mention the book is set in Hawaii with a cast of interesting characters, all with their own plans and secrets.

The first few pages were boring as Jezekiah leaves a merchant ship incognito to escape his sister’s assassin, then it got a little interesting for a few more pages.  It was as though the author couldn’t make up her mind whether she was telling a story about people, or about a society or about technology or about plots and secrets.  It alternated between pretty good and poor, interesting and boring, plausible and ridiculous, sane and nasty violent.

The author does not explain the backstory and we’re confused for about a third of the book with few clues.  I don’t mind books where the backstory is murky or explained in dribbles throughout the story, but Home World had a complex backstory that was critical to the novel.

Technology or Miracles

I don’t usually care what technology gee-whiz things science fiction authors come up with as usually the people are the interesting part of the book.  However there were two technologies that were the book’s foundation so let’s talk about them.

Genetic Engineering.  Home World envisions multiple planets where the residents are genetically altered for survival on inhospitable worlds.  Other people are altered to a Type, trending to certain skills.  Some are Sprites, meant to be joy toys, sex objects.  Some are Aryans, blond and nasty.  There are a few natural humans even on Earth and none elsewhere.

Lupans were genetically engineered with genes contributed from wolves or tigers, with genes from hawks and eagles for eyesight.  The resulting people look human but have fangs and other special characteristics.  For example the men must Impress upon a female at some point and mate with her or die.  Oddly the women may have 4 husbands while the men have one wife.

Aside from the ethical lapses, the genetic engineering is plausible.  Author Milani hints at the cultural results but sort of sweeps them under the rug with the rest of the back story.

Real Time Communication Over Light Years.  This one was ridiculous.  The Van Buren ruling family met real time via hologram across 60-100 light years.  In fact the connections were so instantaneous that Letticia was able to make Jezekiah’s hologram respond so the other person actually “felt” his touch.

Overall computer/web/sync forms a huge part of the novel, the bedrock for some plot devices, Lettica’s addiction, the reason why some people can sneak through secure gates.  When a technology gizmo is this important to the novel it must make sense or the book falls apart.

Characters

I didn’t like any of the characters.  We’re meant to like Jezekiah; he is fighting the good fight, looking for a way to help Earth, avert a war with Den Lupan, looking for love, looking for a way to slide out of his heir status.  Instead he is 2 dimensional and boring.  Plus he’s a bit whiny and unwilling to commit to either his own wishes or his duty.

Strongarm, the Lupan prince and intended bridegroom didn’t have much personality.  His brother-in-law was the most interesting character of them all.

Keiko, whom both Jezekiah and Strongarm desire, seems to flip flop and float from one allegiance to another, just as she is able to slip in and out of the Van Buren manor, and flit between her father’s home and her grandfather’s.  Realize her father and grandfather are mortal enemies and you see the problem.  She is either incredibly naive or over-confident, accepting Tong star weapons from her grandfather even though they are illegal even to possess and sets up meetings between her grandfather and Strongarm and grandfather and Jezekiah, never thinking those meetings make ideal ambushes.

Letticia is frightened near to death, suspecting everyone of trying to kill her, addicted to Sync, addicted to power games, crude and rude and nasty.  Given an advanced society it’s hard to believe no one would have recognized the problem and gotten Letticia mental health care.

Author Milani would have a better story with more likable or interesting characters.  Given this is her first novel she may develop her character skills.

Plot and Scenes

Book includes a gang rape scene, a description of how Lupan males kill their families when exposed to the vile sex drug Venus Seed, several violent deaths, a seduction (same female, same day as the gang rape), murders, execution threats, annihilation threats, way too many plots and counter plots.

No one has a moral compass.  Strongarm and his brother-in-law casually plan to destroy Earth, render it uninhabitable if they don’t get their treaty sealed with a marriage; Keiko’s father tries to kill her as part of her Samurai trial; Keiko’s gangster grandfather casts her off until she shoots Strongarm.

Then a miracle occurs and Strongarm isn’t dead, Keiko turns out to be an acceptable bride, war is averted, treason accusations rescinded.  I really don’t like “a miracle occurs here” plot devices.

Summary

Home World is a good first start for new author Bonnie Milani but I didn’t enjoy most of it.  Nonetheless I stayed up till midnight yesterday to finish, partly because I wanted to get the book done, write the review and move on to something better but another reason was I wanted to know the ending.

I didn’t like the characters, unexplained backstory, the fact we’re plopped down in the middle of several high stakes situations without a map, the irritating pidgin, ridiculous technology, lack of morals, chimera species, overly convenient endings.

I did like the sense of excitement in about half the book (did I mention it alternates between boring and good?) and the writing style was reasonably good.  I think if the author keeps writing she will become quite good.  But please, skip the rapes, pidgin, miracle endings.

3 Stars

I received an advance copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

NetGalley is a great way to find new authors and books, most of which I never see in our library.  The premise is simple exchange:  I get access to advance electronic copies of books and promise to review each one.  Since I got my tablet with Kindle application it’s easy to access and read the books (easier than with my Nook) and I’ve been able to meet my commitment.

This is a two-sided bargain.  I must actually read and finish the book to review it.  And books from NetGalley are just like ones from the library; some are excellent, most are OK and a few are stinkers.

Galactic Legend of Life and Death uses a huge backstory, the very nature of life and death, and the long term survival of the human race.  The world building premise was grand:  Humans are invited to join the Alliance of Intelligent Clusters, but there is a catch  We have only so long to prove we are intelligent and the proof must come from a demonstrable contribution to the overall universe knowledge. You can see this could be an exciting idea for a novel!

Unfortunately authors Boian and Dora Alexandrov added in multitudes of ideas: Black holes that survive from one Big Bang to another, the endless search for immortality or the cessation of life altogether, the fight for survival on a strange world, a galactic lab where every species has its own planet and access to develop ideas and gain its intelligence license, beings comprised of pure energy, beings that live in stars, a nearly omnipresent intelligence/artificer called Cor, Wandering Dowgens who are reborn after each Big Bang and seek out intelligence, instantaneous travel, ability to ask to Cor to make any food, build any structure, alter the world, to…  You get the idea.  It is overwhelming.  I felt bludgeoned.

I would like to reread this novel after a seriously empowered editor honed it to one story, or even a novel with three or four stories.  This book has so many excellent ideas it’s as if the authors couldn’t decide which to use, so threw the all into the pot and we ended up with a book that zooms from idea to idea, plot to plot, strange planet to far galaxy to different universes and in the process forgot about people.

Boian and Dora Alexandrov did not develop the characters well.  I believe they could have done a better job on the people, made the settings even better had they selected just one main plot with a (small) subplot or two.  As it was we had so many words and ideas and quests and desires that it was a giant stew.

I read this on the Kindle app which had about 800 screen/pages and each page was around 400 words.  That’s 320,000, far too many.  Until Fanagor got to the lab and found out about the license imperative, I thought a good editor would cross out every other sentence, then cut out two thirds of the adjectives and we’d have a good story. But a better idea would be to slim the novel down to a manageable number of ideas and make each one live.

The Alliance of Intelligent Clusters, the Lab, the three Cluster types, the need for an intelligence license are great ideas that could make a wonderful science fiction novel.  Save the Tillda black hole, Tillda’s “children”, the book containing the Galactic Legend of Life and Death and the Wandering Dowgens for other novels.

Overall, had I not gotten this through NetGalley and owed a read and review, I’d have stopped about page 20.  At that point the sheer number of words and absence of any use for those words felt exhausting.  The novel got much better and more interesting further on but I cannot give it more than 3 stars.