"Terms of Enlistment"

Long-time gun blogger Marko Kloos¹ has published his first novel² to Amazon, Terms of Enlistment.

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements, where you're restricted to 2,000 calories of badly flavored soy every day. You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service.

Downloaded it Sunday morning, finished it Sunday afternoon.   (Glad the tablet didn't run out of juice first!)

This is a well-written piece of Military Scientifiction³, IOW, a military thriller set in the future.  No deep sociological analysis here.  Which is fine, because that crap always bores me to tears⁴.  No in-depth politics or philosophizing, either. 

Unusually, I have no real quibbles with a piece of military  fiction.  Part of that is that, this is set in a future, and the author can run his future the way he wants.  So, if, for example, the Navy doesn't come unglued when officers and enlisted start "fraternizing", well, OK...

OTOH, Our Hero probably doesn't do a thorough enough job of blowing up Detroit, but.. Well, I can't say further without giving away the plot.  You'll just have to buy and read the book yourself.

Anyway, good stuff, well worth the $2⁹⁹ (plus tax, if you live in WA.)

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1.  Who, oddly, is not in my regular reading queue.  No particular reason, other than "I can't read them all."
2. I think.  Marko also wrote the essay "Why The Gun Is Civilization", often, or even usually, misattributed to the fictional Maj Caudill, USMC. Get it right.  Markio may not have lawyers on tap, but he has dachshunds.
3. Hugo Gernsback is said to have coined the term "Scientifiction", obviously a contraction of "Scientific" and "Fiction", to describe what he was publishing.  Heinlein preferred it to "SciFi", and I have seen articles by Larry Niven in which he used it, or it's contraction "StF", as well.    
4.  "But, Drang, what about Starship Troopers?"  You know how Charlton Heston or James Earl Jones could read the phone book and get a standing O'?  Same thing.  Only RAH could plunk a lump of expository text in the middle of a thriller and have it be interesting.  But RAH was sui generis; the trick is, who else can get away with it?