Marko Kloos Books in Order
Explore Marko Kloos books in order, with summaries, series overviews, reading order tips, and where to start with Frontlines, Palladium Wars, and more.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
22 books
Lucky Thirteen
by Marko Kloos
2013
New dropship pilot Halley is handed an airframe with a cursed reputation and a serial number full of thirteens. On her first combat mission she has to decide whether to trust the data, her instincts, and the ship that every other pilot wants to avoid.
Measures of Absolution
by Marko Kloos
2013
After the Battle of Detroit, Territorial Army corporal Jackson tries to understand how a routine pacification spiraled into catastrophe. Her search through ruined housing blocks and frightened civilians becomes a personal reckoning with guilt, orders, and what it really means to fight on home soil.
Terms of Enlistment
by Marko Kloos
2013
In 2108, welfare kid Andrew Grayson sees only two ways out of his overcrowded slum: a colony lottery he’ll never win, or military service. Basic training, riot duty, and his first off world deployment quickly show that escaping poverty means facing even deadlier dangers.
Lines of Departure
by Marko Kloos
2014
War and unrest are tearing humanity apart, from starving riots on Earth to a relentless alien offensive on the colonies. Reenlisted officer Andrew Grayson survives a disastrous assault only to be posted to a misfit-packed ship, where mutiny, invasion, and extinction all feel close.
Angles of Attack
by Marko Kloos
2015
Cut off on the colony moon of New Svalbard, Staff Sergeant Andrew Grayson and a starving task force must slip through a Lanky blockade to reach Earth. A fragile alliance with former enemies turns their stealth mission into humanity’s most desperate gamble.
Recommended by:
Chains of Command
by Marko Kloos
2016
After the destruction of a Lanky seed ship gives Earth a brief breathing space, Andrew Grayson trains fresh recruits for whatever comes next. Sent on a covert mission to track down deserters with stolen warships, he discovers that human politics can rival any alien threat.
Frontlines: Requiem
by Marko Kloos
2016
Set during a massive Lanky assault on Mars, this graphic novel follows Colonel Soraya Yamin and the crew of the cruiser Phalanx as they defend a collapsing front. Outgunned and outnumbered, she must choose between her duty to the fleet and the people she loves.
Fields of Fire
by Marko Kloos
2017
With Mars under Lanky control, Earth’s alliances throw everything they have into a risky campaign to take it back. Andrew Grayson and Halley command green troops on the front line, where every landing zone, orbital strike, and mistake carries a deadly price.
Points of Impact
by Marko Kloos
2018
Humanity has pushed the Lankies out of the solar system, but the war is far from over. On Mars, Andrew and Halley lead exhausted troops in brutal tunnel fighting while new weapons shift the balance, forcing them to reckon with the cost of endless war.
Aftershocks
by Marko Kloos
2019
Years after Gretia’s failed grab for power, the Gaia system lives with the war’s scars. Ex Blackguard soldier Aden, an occupation sergeant, a navy officer, and a young industrial heir each see warning signs that peace is crumbling as sabotage and quiet uprisings start to spread.
How to Move Spheres and Influence People
by Marko Kloos
2019
In this Wild Cards story, T.K., a teenage girl with one paralyzed arm, discovers she can nudge any ball or sphere with her mind. What starts as payback in gym class soon pulls her into bigger risks and a chance to use her power for more than revenge.
On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare
by Marko Kloos
2019
A secretive lycanthrope unit, the 300th Special Operations Company, is officially barred from combat and relegated to support work in Afghanistan. When Sergeants Decker and Sobieski uncover a threat worse than roadside bombs, they must decide how far to bend the rules to keep their comrades safe.
Ballistic
by Marko Kloos
2020
Trying to disappear after the war, Aden lives under an assumed identity aboard a merchant ship running dangerous cargo. As unrest on occupied Gretia worsens, a sabotaged fleet, street violence, and covert cells reveal a coordinated insurgency that could drag the Gaia system back into conflict.
Berlin Is Never Berlin
by Marko Kloos
2020
Ace bodyguard Khan takes a routine job protecting a wealthy American socialite on a Berlin vacation. When gangsters kidnap his client, he has to rely on his feline joker abilities and street level contacts to navigate the city’s underworld and bring her home alive.
Orders of Battle
by Marko Kloos
2020
Four years after Earth’s narrow victory, Andrew Grayson is stuck behind a desk until a new offensive against the Lankies needs his skills. Aboard an Avenger class warship, he leads a strike deep into enemy space where one wrong move could doom the species.
Citadel
by Marko Kloos
2021
Two weeks after a nuclear strike shatters planetary defenses, the Gaia system edges back toward open war. Commander Dunstan Park takes charge of a prototype cruiser while Idina Chaudhary and former POW Aden work planetside, where terrorist attacks and buried loyalties threaten to ignite Gretia again.
Centers of Gravity
by Marko Kloos
2022
Marooned in a dark, distant system, Andrew Grayson and the crew of NACS Washington scout a lone moon that looks barely habitable. What they find there, from lifesaving resources to disturbingly adaptive Lankies, turns a rescue attempt into a hellish survival mission.
Descent
by Marko Kloos
2024
Former Blackguard Aden is released from years in a POW camp only to be sent back to Gretia as an undercover operative hunting Odin’s Wolves, a violent nationalist insurgency. As uprisings spread across the Gaia system, his secret mission collides with Idina and Solveig’s own investigations.
Scorpio
by Marko Kloos
2024
On a remote colony hammered by a past Lanky attack, orphaned survivor Alex Archer lives in an underground shelter, running a trained shepherd dog on salvage runs. When one mission goes wrong and the aliens finally find them, survival means risking everything for her found family.
Corvus
by Marko Kloos
2025
Now a soldier in the NAC Defense Corps, Alex Archer deploys with her unit to investigate a missing warship in the Alpha Corvi system. The Lankies have claimed the colony, evolved new tactics, and turned a planned rescue operation into a brutal fight to escape alive.
Echoes of Silence
by Marko Kloos
2025
When Andrew Grayson and his ship vanish on a classified mission, Halley is ordered to keep a personal journal. Told through her diary entries, this novella follows years of waiting, command challenges, and small daily moments that fill the long silence after someone goes missing.
Cygnus
by Marko Kloos
2026
In the final Frontlines: Evolution novel, Alex Archer and her comrades confront the Lanky threat at its most dangerous yet. A new deployment forces them to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to protect the scattered remnants of humanity.
Where should I start?
If you want to begin with classic military SF: Terms of Enlistment → Lines of Departure → Angles of Attack
If you want the full Lanky war arc: Chains of Command → Fields of Fire → Points of Impact → Orders of Battle → Centers of Gravity
If you prefer a postwar space opera: Aftershocks → Ballistic → Citadel → Descent
If you like survival stories on the frontier: Scorpio → Corvus → Cygnus
If you want shorter standalones and Wild Cards tales: Lucky Thirteen → Measures of Absolution → How to Move Spheres and Influence People → Berlin Is Never Berlin
Author bio
Marko Kloos was born in Germany and grew up in and around the city of Münster, not far from where he was later stationed as a young soldier. Today he is best known for grounded military science fiction, but his path to writing ran through a mix of uniforms, odd jobs, and two different continents.
As a kid he was the sort of reader who always had a stack of borrowed paperbacks nearby. German SF pulp serials and big secondary-world epics made a strong impression on him, along with whatever science fiction he could find once he had a library card. Those early obsessions with spaceships, soldiers, and far futures never really went away.
In 1989 Kloos served in the West German military as a junior noncommissioned officer. The work was often routine, but the training, hierarchy, and daily grind all became raw material later on. After leaving the service he cycled through a string of civilian roles, from bookseller and freight dock worker to tech support and corporate IT administrator. The rhythm of warehouse shifts and office cubicles shows up in his fiction in the way characters talk about work, money, and risk.
In his mid twenties he moved to the United States and eventually settled in New England. Writing had always been in the background, but a spot at the Viable Paradise writers workshop helped turn a vague ambition into a concrete plan. Bit by bit he shifted away from IT and toward fiction, carving out early mornings and late nights around family life to draft the stories that would become his first novels.
The breakthrough came with Terms of Enlistment, the first book in the Frontlines series. It follows Andrew Grayson, a welfare kid from the overcrowded North American Commonwealth who enlists mostly for better food and a ticket off Earth. Across eight novels and several shorter works, the series tracks Grayson’s career through riot control, brutal off world deployments, and a long asymmetric war against the towering aliens known as Lankies. The books lean on Kloos’s own time in uniform for their barracks humor, sense of procedure, and clear eyed look at what soldiers can and cannot control.
The second novel, Lines of Departure, drew wide attention, including a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Kloos chose to withdraw the book from the ballot during a heated controversy around slate voting, a decision that earned him respect from many readers and peers. A few years later two of his stories, Lucky Thirteen and On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare, were adapted for the animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots, bringing his work to a wider audience.
After Frontlines he turned to a new setting in Aftershocks and the Palladium Wars series. Those books trade a single first person viewpoint for an ensemble cast spread across the Gaia system: a former soldier from the defeated world of Gretia, an occupation sergeant walking a thin line between policing and provocation, a naval officer on the front edge of a new arms race, and the heir to a powerful industrial family. More recently, the Frontlines: Evolution novels pick up the aftermath of the Lanky war through the eyes of Alex Archer, an orphaned survivor turned dog handler and soldier.
Kloos also writes shorter work between novels. Some pieces stay close to his own universes, giving side characters and offscreen events a bit more light. Others live in shared worlds, most notably the long running Wild Cards project headed by George R. R. Martin. Whatever the setting, his stories tend to come back to small units under pressure, messy politics, and the question of what duty really costs.
These days he lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two children, and a pack of dachshunds that frequently show up in his public bios. When he is not on deadline he has a fondness for bookstores, fountain pens, wristwatches, October weather, and a glass of good scotch. The tone of his public writing suggests a working writer who treats the job like a trade, page by page, rather than a pose.
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