Frontlines Series Book 1
Earth won’t be a fun place in the near future. Most of the people are miserable in the concrete ghettos of giant cities, they don’t have any meaningful job to do or meaningful life at all. Space has been discovered, distant planets are already being populated, but only the very rich and very lucky can get out… and the soldiers.
Andrew Grayson is one of the billions who lives this misarable life. The only way for him is to break out of his hopeless situation: he will become a soldier. However, things on Earth became more complicated than expected, in addition there will be an adventure in outer space that was never happened before.
Marko Kloos, with a military background, wrote Frontlines while raising his two young children, mostly in the morning and evening, and then, after several years of serial rejection by book publishers, finally published it on Amazon himself. As the saying goes, the rest has been history: The Frontlines became an explosive success in the community of military sci-fi fans. Kloos has written several sequels to this great novel.
An opinion
I think it says it all about how much I liked the book that I read it in two days. The Scalzi effect was felt in the story, at first it was stronger and then faded.
The story itself is based on simple and well-known foundations. A male man wants to get out of misery, enlist as a soldier, train, and walk through the military world pretty slowly, first in the ground army and then get out into space. Maybe I’m just such a warped chick, but I really enjoyed both the training and the fighting parts. Of course, it’s easy to read about the “sufferings” of others, especially when they had to run for an hour and do other physical fitness exercises…
The story itself was easy, there were no ciphers, no explanations as to how this hostile situation on Earth developed, perhaps the writer will address it in his following books. And in the second half of the novel, our protagonist gets out into space and gets involved in newer, more exciting adventures, which I enjoyed even more. I’d love to read about this alien race, I think they’ll pick up a fight with humans.
It was readable and fun, definitely worth reading for fans of the genre!