Orphan's Destiny - Softcover

I began writing fiction in 1994. Opposing counsel who read my briefs would argue I was doing so long before that. Born July 7 long ago on a small island situated between the Hudson and East rivers, I grew up in Cleveland and eventually slid west to Colorado. A flirtation with the Military Academies lasted as long as it took Annapolis’ recruiters to decide that small tackles could protect Roger Staubach – but not that small. I earned a B.A. from the College of Wooster, with Honors in Geology, then studied as a National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology at the University of Cincinnati. I left Cincinnati with a Juris Doctorate and an Army Intelligence Lieutenancy, both unmarketable credentials as Vietnam wound down. During those years, I worked in mining as a rig hand and prospector in the Sonoran desert of Southwest Texas and the mountains of Alaska and worked my way through law school as a petroleum geologist. I practiced law for international energy companies internationally and in the American West while I served out my Army-Reserve Intelligence Commission. Some Cold War oil-employee reservists did spy, an avocation I disclaim. Of course, as the CIA's Kim Roosevelt wrote about a former intelligence officer, "He claimed he had left that field entirely . . . but neither I nor anyone else who knew of that interruption in a life . . . would ever feel sure of that." When I'm not lawyering or writing, I run marathons, climb mountains, snowboard and scuba, all as ineffectually as I spied. I currently practice law in the Colorado Rockies and have published in the field of natural resources law. Orphanage is my first novel and its sequel will appear in the fall of 2005. The voice of Orphanage's protagonist, Jason Wander, who returns in Aspect's September, 2005 sequel, Orphan's Destiny, owes much to Kip, Robert A. Heinlein's spacefaring soda jerk from 1958's "Heinlein Juvenile" classic, Have Spacesuit Will Travel. Jason springs as well from J.D. Salinger's adolescent cynic, Holden Caulfield, of 1951's classic, The Catcher in the Rye. Orphanage is a conscious homage to Heinlein's 1959 Hugo and Nebula Award winner, Starship Troopers, and to Joe Haldeman's 1974 winner of the same awards, The Forever War. Orphanage steers an apolitical, post-9/11 course between Cold Warrior Heinlein on the right and Vietnam Vet Haldeman on the left. Though Joe might argue I veer more toward our common ancestor. My fascination with massive spaceships grew first from Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, which first appeared in, incredibly, 1941 and from A.E. Van Vogt's The War Against the Rull, another classic assembled from five stories published between 1940 and 1950. On the historical side, the scenes of outnumbered infantry arrayed in defense echo the Action at Rorke's Drift during the Zulu War, vividly described in Ian Knight's 1980 history, Brave Men's Blood - The Epic of the Zulu War, 1879. They also draw from the Union defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, famously recounted in Michael Sharra's 1974 Pulitzer-winner, The Killer Angels. If my writing can be said to have a style, it surely derives from the advice, if not the work, of Mark Twain, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway and William Strunk, Jr., author of 1935's The Elements of Style.

"An exhilarating sequel...as fast-paced and exciting as [Orphanage]." -- --Fresh Fiction

"Defines twenty-first [century] military science fiction" -- --Midwest Book Review

"ORPHANAGE is raw and real -- and a hell of a good read." -- New York Times Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson, coauthor of Dune : The Machine Crusade

Fast, sharp, this future war tale rings with the authority of a writer who knows the Army ...inside out." -- Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity

I'm sure Robert Heinlein would have enjoyed this exciting homage to Starship Troopers. . .believable as it is terrible." -- Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War