Tsaiberspace

What a coincidence from the company lending library! The acknowledgements page of Robert Buettner’s Orphanage references Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (believe it or not, all these books really were just grabbed off the shelf).

So does the rest of the book. It is a decent read, but it follows the same formula of the above-referenced works:

• A juvenile delinquent gets shipped off to basic training; dramatic boot-camp accident straightens him out.
• More nifty exoskeletons.
• Humanity fighting a hive-mind enemy.
• A twist at the end.

But … whereas the earlier two books seemed OK on their own, Orphange seemed formulaic, more derived from those works than influenced by them.