Robert Buettner

Robert Buettner is an American author of military science fiction novels. He is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology and has been published in the field of Natural Resources Law. He has written five volumes of the Jason Wander series, three volumes of the Orphan's Legacy series, several short stories, and the afterword to an anthology of stories by the late Robert Heinlein. Buettner currently lives in Georgia.

The Washington Post and Denver Post favorably compared Buettner's debut novel, Orphanage, to Robert Heinlein's 1959 classic Starship Troopers, to which, the author has written, Orphanage is a deliberate literary homage to Robert Heinlein, and also to Joe Haldeman. Other critics have compared Buettner's books favorably to the work of "Golden Age" science fiction writers Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, L. Sprague de Camp, to recent writers Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi, and to such diverse artists as Miguel de Cervantes, Monty Python and P.G. Wodehouse. Buettner was nominated for the Quill Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Orphanage was nominated for the Quill Award as best science fiction/fantasy/horror novel of 2004, and has recently been described as "one of the great works of modern military science fiction."http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/01/a-warriors-complexity-orphanage-by-robert-buettner Buettner's most recent novel, "Balance Point," was also reviewed favorably http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2014/04/paul-di-filippo-reviews-robert-buettner/

Buettner's first novel, Orphanage, made numerous bestseller lists, including Barnes & Noble's overall paperback Top 50 and the Locus Magazine paperback Top 10. Orphanage was nominated for the Quill Award as best Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror novel of 2004. Orphanage's publisher (which changed its name from Time Warner Aspect to Little Brown Orbit) reissued Orphanage in April, 2008. As of June, 2008, the book was in its sixth printing. Orphanage has been translated by foreign publishers into Chinese, Czech, French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, was published in hardcover by the Science Fiction Bookclub, and as an ebook in various formats. Orbit also markets the Jason Wander series in a separate edition geared for the United Kingdom market. The rest of the series is believed to have performed similarly to Orphanage. Buettner's subsequent series, the Orphan's Legacy series, was a nationally bestselling series. Particularly, the third book, "Balance Point" was a Bookscan national bestseller when released in trade paperback in April, 2014.

All five books in the Jason Wander series are told in the first-person viewpoint and distinctive voice of the protagonist, Jason Wander. They follow his coming of age and growth from misfit soldier to maverick general during a decades-long interstellar war. Buettner said in an interview that "Writing generation-spanning space opera through a single, first-person-viewpoint character is like painting the Death Star with a toothbrush."

The three books in the Orphan's Legacy series are also told in the first-person viewpoint, primarily, although not exclusively, through the protagonist Jazen Parker.