Marko Kloos is the author of the Frontlines and Palladium Wars series of military Science Fiction. He is also a contributing member of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards consortium.
Born and raised in Germany, Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children.
He is represented by Evan Gregory at Ethan Ellenberg. Rights inquiries should be directed to Evan at (212) 431-4554, or agent@ethanellenberg.com.
Can’t even imagine starting a wiki. How do you delegate subject matter and review for errors without losing your mind?
Is there no wiki for Frontlines? You’d think someone would’ve done one by now.
Not to my knowledge!
I just finished the three books of The Palladium Wars Series and was wondering if there would be more books in this series?
So I had the day off today, I didn’t want to go anywhere for obvious reasons, so I stayed home and I re-read Orders of Battle. Now I’m tapping my finger for the sequel. Is 2022 a possibility?
Mr. Doodle is looking British Prime Minister Boris Johnson? No disrespect to Mr. Doodle.
I lived through a shugart Gordon town attack once. Went in with a platoon of 30 and me and juice came out “alive” down at ft Polk back in 2000 summertime.
Kia Ora from New Zealand!
Front lines is almost certainly my favourite science fiction series. Thank you so much for all the hours of pleasure your books have brought me. I don’t think I can explain the level of anticipation for the final book.
Please keep doing what you do so well, best of luck.
Nga mihi nui
William
I’m glad to read that mentioning Shughart and Gordon wasn’t just an accident and it was nice to see them woven into the book.
I’m currently deployed and downloaded the Frontline series before leaving. A month in, and I have completed the series. By far the best military sci-fi book series I have had the pleasure of reading. Thank you for your continued work, and I will be rereading these books awaiting the release of the next one. ‘SecFor – No Quarter’
Thank you for your kind words, and stay safe out there!
I wanted to express criticism of the latest novel, Citadel. It is clear when reading it that you have next to no knowledge of computers or hacking. I think your writing is great, most of the time, but then you hit these immersion breaking bits where you put something in that is absolute nonsense. Before I could shrug it off, because they were minor character building or plot points, and not really relevant to the overall flow. This time, you completely broke logic on a major plot device.
Specifically you have the new ship, Hecate, which you have written to have hacked 52 other ships in 5 seconds using only 20% of its processing power. This is absurd. Not, “it could be possible with sufficiently advanced technology” absurd, but just plain absurd. To put it in perspective, AES-128 (which is not the best encryption we have today) would take a billion super computers a billion years to crack. Your 200,000 times more powerful computer isn’t going to be able to crack one encrypted system ever, much less 52 simultaneously in 5 seconds, unless you completely ignore reality and/or throw scalability out the window when it comes to cyber security regarding your universe as compared to reality.
That is of course the brute force method, but other methods take time, no matter how much processing power you have at your disposal. Because they require human responses, with human response times, or testing for exploits without alerting the victim system that it is being tested. Not to mention, it doesn’t matter how fast your computer is if the computer on the other end can only process 10 commands at a time. You can send a million commands at it, but it is going to process 10 at a time.
The only way you can quick hack something is by exploiting a known weakness that has not been patched, or stealing access credentials from someone that used an easily guessed password. Both methods require having that knowledge already available in an accessible location, and often only give partial access to the system as a whole. It is also practically impossible that all 52 ships had existing exploitable weaknesses (human or software) that Hecate could find and use without tripping any alarms anywhere.
That takes us to the crux of the problem. What you did was essentially create a magic wand. So what is the point of the rest of the series? You just made a ship that can do anything when it comes to computers. Why do they need to physically find ships. You have a system wide quantum internet and a ship that has an absurd amount of processing power that can magically access any computer. Why don’t they just have it hack every database on every planet, cross check for inconsistencies, locate and ID every insurgent and their backers in the system? Given how absurdly unrealistic you made the computer it should only take minutes, or hours at most.
I haven’t read past this chapter yet, but what is the point, when I know this magic wand exists that could solve everything in minutes, because that is how powerful you made it.
Btw, and on an unrelated topic…How are there pirates? It has been a while since I read the first book, and maybe you explained it there and I forgot, but how in a system that has instant internet to anywhere and stations are controlled by the respective planets they orbit, do pirates exist? They have to refuel, repair, resupply, somewhere, and the moment they shoot at anything the victim can instantly broadcast the attacking ships profile to the entire system. Not to mention, they have to be able to trade their goods as well. Historically piracy worked because they controlled their own ports or had a friendly port of call. It is not making a lot of sense to me in your series.
I,too just finished the Pllidum series and throughly enjoyed them. I would put them on a par with any of the other space series books that I have ever read and am looking forward to the time when you publish the next volume in this wonderful story.
Absolutely love your writing and have read every book. Very Hemingwayesque in style. Looking forward to the next. Also, Neat to read you’re into wrist watches. An anachronistic sci fi writer after my own heart.
Awesome writing. I first discivered the Frontline series and now I just finished the Palladium series.
Are there plans for further installmented in the Palladium series?
I would love to know more both about the next events in the Gaia system but I am also very curious about some of its history. How humanity ended up there, how the colonisation effort happened and previous conflicts.
My nitpick is this: I don’t see the danger of a twenty kiloton nuclear warhead. Or rather, I see an irony in sitting inside a ship that can accelerate at 20g, and being worried about a nuclear weapon attack. I worked out the megatonnage of a Gretian insurgent crashing Zephyr from into Acheron from Gretia (100 million kilometres) in kinetic energy being about 1000. It would take under three hours to get there; in other words, if you detected it entering the Acheroni sphere of influence, say 10 million miles away, you’d have on the order of minutes to shoot it down. Even if you do, “down” is still pointed towards Acheron at millions of metres per second, and there’s likely nothing in the Acheroni fleet that could reliably intercept it on a perpendicularity, even if you could scramble a Hecate-class ship (it would, at that point, be travelling at 1.8 million metres per second- in other words, it’s travelling a body length roughly 100,000 times a second. If your prediction is off by more than 0.001% in speed, position, or acceleration, your interception method just becomes another problem to deal with at a later date). I think everybody makes their own line for when they throw up their hands and say “yes, but if that was an option, the story would be three pages long,” but it made me raise an eyebrow at the idea they’d find nuclear weaponry that destructive. Then again, it wasn’t so much an annoying feeling, more a pleasant half-hour applying the motion equations I thought I’d never use and trying to find a decent calculator that would tell me what 1000 megatons would be on the Richter scale (I believe it’s around 10.1).
I just finished all three Palladium Wars books in what feels like a single sitting this weekend.
I was not able to put them down, and I suspect I’ll be revisiting the books from time to time while I wait to see what happens. The Gaia system, however, I think I will be revisiting every time I have a stray moment for the next few months.
Looking forward eagerly to the next installment. I’ve got a small nitpick that’s not even much of a nitpick, but I’ll comment it separately to not clog this message up overmuch.
Thank you for your writing. I have just finished reading all of the books in the Frontlines and Palladium wars series. You have successfully got me back into reading. I wait with bated breath for the next parts of each series.
Love both series, and as a national security professional (civilian), I particularly enjoy the realism on the political/economic/social side. One quick question: how many books do you envision for each series? Is each series intended to be open-ended, or do you have a conclusion and # of books in mind/path to get to the intended conclusion? Thanks in advance,
Seth
You may want to check amazon as it looks like theres a counterfeit version of one of your books on kindle unlimited – Looks like a computer english translation of the German language version. Bad formatting and occasional German words in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alien-Wars-Operation-Attack-aliens-ebook/dp/B09B2BTZLR/
Thanks for the heads-up. I passed it on to my publisher so they can alert the Kindle Cops and have it taken down.
Just a thought: reverse the order of these comments to have the most recent be at the top so I can come read the latest comments easily.
You got it.
Tomasz:
I have long thought along similar lines, but I think the SHIPS are the “aliens” and the Lankies are like worker bees.