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80 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Back to War, December 19, 2005
This review is from: Orphan's Destiny (Mass Market Paperback)
Back to war. After we left our hero Jason Wander at the end of Orphanage, we believed that we were free from the slugs. Wander was one of the few who doubted it. It took him over two years to return to earth and the earth was in sad shape. The destruction that had been so devastating before he left, was now even worse. After almost 2 years of near nuclear winter, vegetation and animals were struggling to survive the climate change and it would be years before the atmospheric dust cleared itself up.
Wander has a new Military mission to convince the media and the population that the threat is over and that money should be spent on rebuilding the world, not military spending. The problem is, he is not sure he believes it. Like many veterans, he struggles with guilt: why did he survive and so many others did not? Why did he bury his love and his friends so far from home? Then his worst fears are confirmed: there is an attack that takes out earth's only military spaceport. He must once again do the impossible, and lead a small band of determined men and women back to space for a last-ditch effort to save earth from a fleet of 121 ships larger than any we have, and 1 ship the size of a city.
Read it and see if Wander can pull off a miracle a second time, or will humanity lose all hope.
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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid sf military adventure, September 22, 2005
This review is from: Orphan's Destiny (Mass Market Paperback)
Jason Wander, having survived the Slug War in Orphanage and risen, to a frightening degree (especially to himself) simply by surviving, to the rank of general and commanding officer of the Ganymede Expeditionary Force, is relieved when a new ship arrives to take him and his seven hundred surviving soldiers home to Earth. Although he has spent the months between the defeat of the Slugs and the arrival of the Excalibur taking every relevant correspondence course that he can, including a lot of military history, he knows he's not remotely qualified to be a general, but harbors strong hopes that he's at least worked his way up to lieutenant.
After a journey home that proves he doesn't have the political skills and officer training to be a general in the presence of other senior officers who know what they're doing, he's appalled to discover that he's going to remain a general anyway, because the government needs a war hero as a pr tool. And as the general who defeated the Slugs and saved Earth, he's it. There's no one else who can fill that role. It's especially difficult for Jason because he believes that current US government policy is wrong; the new administration is spending funds on economic and infrastructure reconstruction that Jason, not convinced that the Slugs won't be back, believes need to be spent on building a better defense. His dilemma gets worse once he's made a few tours in his unwanted new capacity: while he's more convinced than ever that every penny needs to be spent on defense, it's also clear to him that, after the years of pounding by the Slugs, every penny also needs to be spent on reconstruction. The government is engaged in the thankless and probably impossible task of trying to divide the available resources to do both at least adequately.
It simplifies things, in a quite unwelcome way, when the Slugs do attack again, this time from a spaceship carrying the bulk of their invasion force. Jason is at least confronted with a problem he understands somewhat better, even if dealing with that problem involves lying, cheating, stealing, and disobeying orders. And of course, persuading some of his surviving friends and subordinates from the Ganymede expedition to do the same.
This book is in many ways in the tradition of Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but Heinlein and Haldeman were each in their different ways angry when they wrote their books celebrating the infantry. I think Buettner is mostly having fun here (and certainly the reader is), while still celebrating the common foot soldier and trying not to oversimplify and cast Jason's human obstacles to defending Earth as villains, or even necessarily completely wrong.
Very enjoyable.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Diverting and Engaging, September 1, 2005
This review is from: Orphan's Destiny (Mass Market Paperback)
For a while there, I was afraid Buettner was going to throw his protagonist into the guilt-trap of many serial military novels (you know who you are)-- the endless pages of despair and self-recrimination about choices and sacrifices made in previous installments, ever escalating until it seems like I'm reading page after page of nothing but woe-is-me and it's-all-my-fault. Look for phrases like "the price may be more than he can bear" or "no one could have known the price of victory" in marketing blurbs and be warned!
But in this novel Buettner dodges the Sarlacc Pit of Guilt nicely, maintains a sense of humor through the entire novel, even in the direst of circumstances (where it's most needed). The action is a little underdescribed, but the main character is very likable and the technology interesting and believable (to this layman).
There's a real sense of emotion running through the book, very well balanced between tragedy, comedy, and victory, and I found myself engrossed and really pulling for the heroes.
I like both this book and the previous novel ("Orphanage") a lot, and will definitely pick up more of this author's work.
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