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.