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. This is a review of the entire Frontlines series.
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