Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297156 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
Mankind's first alien contact tears into Earth: projectiles launched from Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, have vaporized whole cities. Under siege, humanity gambles on one desperate counter strike. In a spacecraft scavenged from scraps and armed with Vietnam-era weapons, foot soldiers like 18-year-old Jason Wander - orphans that no one will miss - must dare man's first interplanetary voyage and invade Ganymede. They have one chance to attack, one ship to attack with - and their failure is our extinction.

Customer Reviews

Off to War
"We crabbed shoulder to shoulder down the cargo nets to our landing craft bucking in the Channel, each GI's bilge -and-sea-soaked boots drenching his buddy below. In that moment I realized that we fight not for flags or against tyrants but for each other. For whatever remains of my life, those barely met strangers who dangled around me will be my only family. Strip away politics and whatever or whenever, war is an orphanage."

-Anonymous letter fragment, Recovered on Omaha Beach,

Normandy, June 1944.

Orphanage begins with this quote but it began a long time ago. This book is written in homage to Science Fiction Greats Robert A. Heinlien, and Joe Haldeman, who each wrote political commentaries on War set in science fiction stories. Heinlein wrote his original Starship Troopers in 1959, and Haldeman wrote his The Forever War in 1972 and revised it in 1975. Each of these books follows a young man from basic training through to great battles to attempt to save the earth from aliens, as does our story.

Our grunt is Jason Wander, a young man mad at the Universe, his parents were killed in the first meteor impact. After a few run-ins with the law because of anger and lashing out after his loss, he is given the choice to serve prison time or in the military. At some point in his training he goes from being apathetic, to deciding to become a good soldier. His adventure lead him to the moon where he is the first human to encounter the slugs who are trying to wipe out all life on earth, then onto Ganymade where the first major conflict of this war begins. Ganymade is the outpost in our solar system for our alien enemies that we are being bombarded from. During the heroic battle as the force of 10,000 is knocked down to a few hundred, he is promoted time and time again, for succeeding and rising to the occasion. Field promotions are hard earned for they come at the loss of good men and women, and with each promotion you become responsible for more lives. Can he take the pressure, can he save earth, read it and find out.

(First Published in Imprint 2005-09-02 as 'Science fiction goed to battle' and reprnted 2005-09-23 as 'Slugs attempt to wipe out life')

'Starship Troopers' without the thinking
This book is too similar to 'Starship Troopers' not to draw a few comparisons. The story follows a recruit in the infantry as he trains to fight a slug-like alien enemy who are busy destroying major cities on Earth using huge projectiles. There are also supporting characters in the form of a school friend who becomes a pilot and the usual stereotypical drill instructor. A mission is launched to take the fight to the enemy and save mankind. Sound familiar?

Although this is essentially the same story as 'Starship Troopers', this story has enough of its own ideas and interesting enough characters to stop this being a problem. I particularly liked the idea that mankind has not been at war for a number of decades and hence the recruits are forced to train and fight with largely obsolete equipment taken out of mothballs from previous conflicts. A lot of the book is devoted to the story behind how Jason Wander ended up in the military to start with, and his subsequent basic training. Although this is interesting enough to keep the reader going, the action really starts when the proposed mission to Ganymede to fight the Slugs begins to enter the story. The following battle provides a satisfying conclusion to the story, while leaving it open enough to allow a sequel to be written.

I recommend this book if you liked 'Starship Troopers' but could take or leave the political side to it.

One heck of a good military science fiction novel
It's not every day that a writer's first novel draws praise from Joe Haldeman (author of The Forever War) and comparisons with Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Robert Buettner's Orphanage, though, certainly deserves many of the accolades it has garnered. The novel doesn't have the complex socio-political subtext of a Starship Troopers, but it does serve up one heck of a good military science fiction adventure. There isn't time for political rumination or sociological analysis in Buettner's Earth of 2040. The Earth is under attack from an unknown extraterrestrial enemy, and it needs people to go out there and kill some aliens - and that's where Jason Wander fits in.

Wander's life changed the day his mother visited Indianapolis, only to be killed by an alien projectile. He becomes something of a juvenile delinquent, popping Prozacs to keep himself from thinking about his loss. After getting into trouble, he is given a choice between jail time and the life of a soldier. In boot camp, he continues to screw up - until nearby Pittsburgh is destroyed instantaneously by another projectile. Even then, he makes another huge mistake and should really have been booted out of the infantry for good - but he wasn't. Thus it is that this most unlikeliest of soldiers becomes the first human to ever see a live alien and plays a crucial role in mankind's first offensive mission of the intergalactic war. If you like to see normal human beings in your science fiction, Jason Wander is your man. He's as real as they come - funny, sarcastic, temperamental, and as cowardly as he is brave - in other words, he has the makings of a true hero.

These aliens, I should mention, are Slugs, an alien life form that intelligence specialists struggle to understand and defend against. Their attack on the Earth comes in the form of unarmed projectiles which decimate city after city across the globe. A few decades of peace have made the world woefully unprepared for such a military crisis, and the good guys go to war with a lot of equipment dating as far back as the First Gulf War or even World War II. After discovering that the Slugs have established a firing base on Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons, UN forces prepare a daring counter-offensive, secretly launching it years before it is officially supposed to be ready. Despite a series of court-martial offenses, Wander is there. The attack does not go as planned, not by a long shot, and that only makes Wander's story all the more intense.

If you're wondering about the title of the novel, it comes from the idea that war makes orphans of all soldiers. When you're there in the heat of battle, your only family consists of the men and women fighting alongside you - and, when it comes right down to it, you fight like hell for them - not for yourself, not for your family, not even for your country (or, in this case, planet). Wander fights primarily for three of his compatriots - his old buddy Metzger, a rocket jockey who got famous by shooting projectiles out of the sky; his fellow gunner "Munchkin," an Egyptian lass he treasures for more than one reason; and a pilot named Pooh, the new love of Wander's life (a life which promises to be a very short one indeed).

The war as we see it in Orphanage is a personal war - Wander's war. As a former military intelligence officer, Robert Buettner proves himself more than capable of presenting battle at is most visceral level, as seen through the eyes of a grunt. There are some interesting science fiction elements involved in the storyline, and yes, there are certainly similarities with the science fiction of Heinlein and Haldeman to be found here, but Orphanage really tells its own story - and a thrilling story it is.