Terms of enlistment
2014
- poor
- welfare recipients
- fiction
- space warfare
- tenement houses
- life on other planets
- space colonies
- dystopias
- armed forces
- fiction, science fiction, general
The story
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: You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service. Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that good food and decent health care come at a steep price.
What it’s like
Gritty, claustrophobic and fast, with the texture of a near future built from worn concrete and recycled air. The prose is clipped and first-person, full of procedural detail: the grey stairwells of the welfare tenements, the sour smell of crowded corridors, then the sterile hum of a military base with its regimented drills, lockers and mess halls. Sound is mostly the clatter of boots, shouted orders and the rattle of machinery, and the scenes of space combat carry a cold, technical clarity, with the vacuum rendered as silence and the ship's systems as a constant string of readouts. The pacing is brisk, driven by training grinds and escalating crises, and the emotional register is hard-edged and grimly determined, with flickers of dark humour among the soldiers. The protagonist's arc follows a young man who trades one kind of confinement for another, learning the cost of security and gradually finding loyalty and self-respect among his unit. Violence is frequent and occasionally graphic, with combat injuries and battlefield deaths handled matter-of-factly, plus some profanity and bleak institutional cruelty; no sexual content of note. It suits readers who enjoy military science fiction with a working-class perspective and a skeptical eye on power, reading on a long commute or in a few stolen evenings.
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