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Omi no Kami posted:Incidentally, have the latest honor harrington books gone anywhere interesting? I was down to aggressively skimming after the first few, and think I finally gave up in the one where the good republican planet and the evil welfare planet teamed up to fight the... I think it was supposed to be a communist planet? I forget, all I remember is that their strategy was explicitly the zapp brannigan thing of building more ships than honor had missiles, and just mass-suiciding hundreds of thousands of hulls until she ran out of things to shoot at them. (Also they apparently had a manchurian candidate-esque thing they were using to brainwash republicans into shooting at them? I was honestly pretty checked out by that point.) Quite the contrary, they're pretty much boring as poo poo. The newest books have played up the tech advantage that Manticore and her allies have to such a degree that the "battles" are almost always one sided massacres with dozens or hundreds or thousands of enemy ships all destroyed with little or no RMN losses. Since all the battles are a tedious foregone conclusion, the only possible angle for anything remotely interesting is in some of the character drama stuff, but then the fact that Weber can't write that kind of stuff convincingly pretty much kills that too. I'm only still reading them out of sheer inertia. Thank god for the public library, because if I had to pay money for these things I'd be pretty damned aggravated.
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Aug 12, 2019 00:56
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Omi no Kami posted:Huh, thanks for the summaries guys- I definitely made a good call bailing out when I did. This is why I actually like In Death Ground and The Shiva Option, because they're not in the Honorverse and Steve White, Weber's co-author for those books, does a decent job of keeping Weber on task. The rest of the Starfire books are only fair to middling, and alas when White inherited the series after Weber left they fell right off a cliff. But for a couple of books there? It was pretty good. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Aug 12, 2019 |
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Aug 12, 2019 03:19
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For me, the answer is convenience. I spend a lot of time driving for work, so most of the books I "read" are actually audiobooks. While I do have an Audible account, books on CD from the library are a huge percentage of my listening material. And if I'm in the mood for some spaceships going boom books on CD at a public library, it's Campbell or Weber or nothing, and I don't want nothing.  Also, it had been long enough between the last couple of books that the trauma scabbed over.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:31
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Also BSG spawned one of the better fleet command video games of the current generation!
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Aug 25, 2019 18:49
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I've always suspected that the "MilSF love royalty" thing comes from two different angles. One, a lot of them are directly copying the height of the Royal Navy, right down to being able to make money from capturing enemy ships, going on half pay, First "Space" Lord, and so on and so forth. And if you've got the Royal Navy, you gotta have someone royal to be the head of it. There are as many faux Napoleonic era Royal Navy set ups in MilSF as there are oddball wizards living in London stories over in urban fantasy. Part of that is because, whether consciously (Rob S. Pierre, cough cough) or not the Napoleonic Wars are one of only a couple of recent naval wars that everyone draws inspiration from1. But the rest is Hornblower and Aubrey–Maturin cluttering the imagination space for how to write navies. But besides just Royal Navy fanboyism, I feel there's something relating to the way MilSF tends to write its heroes. You know, the lone admiral, burdened by the weight of command, being the only one with the courage to make the Hard Decisionstm. He or she is threatened by superiors who are too far away from the action to know what's really going on, having to guide the usually well-meaning but less capable subordinates through the dangers of war that only the admiral can navigate them through. And if you take one step further from "this is the ideal military leader" to "this is the ideal 1 = The other is the American naval war in the Pacific in WW2. Weber and White draw on that one twice in Crusade and In Death Ground / The Shiva Option. In both, a technologically inferior aggressor launches a Pearl Harbor style surprise attack against the Terran Federation (read America), does some impressive damage initially, then is stopped in a decisive battle equivalent to Midway, at which point the war sways back and forth for a little while until ultimately the better tech and higher production rates of the Federation/Americans grows to an overwhelming degree and victory becomes inevitable. In this model starfighters suddenly become a lot more important, reflecting the Pacific carrier war rather than line of battle from the sail and shot era. (Funny how no one, at least no one in western MilSF circles, ever sees fit to draw from the Russo-Japanese War.  Though to be fair, it does make sense that no one draws from WWI's "sit around, have one big battle, then sit around for the rest of the war".)2 = Their opinion, not mine! 3 = The Romans would have been appalled by this inversion. 4 = Unless it's an antagonist, in which case the mad king/queen will be deposed by the lone admiral and there will just happen to be a capable, wise, and good hearted close family relative on hand to replace the deposee with. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 16:36
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What bugs me about Weber is that, in his recent stuff, all the battles feel the same. Which is pretty damning for a series nominally about the cool battles. Between the Safehold books and the last few Harrington books nearly every battle boils down to kicking the poo poo out of a technologically inferior foe, massacring common sailors/soldiers/starship crews by the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. Taking a moment to complain how terrible it was that there was no choice than to kill all those people. Move on to the next battle. Repeat until end of book. Not only is it grisly, it's boring which is even worse. 
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Aug 31, 2019 06:38
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Yvonmukluk posted:So what's to stop a tactical genius rotating his ship 90 degrees so it's immune to enemy fire? Or is this a thing they already do in-universe? FuturePastNow posted:They do this and the smart Yeah, in the early books when you still got some energy weapon combat it was a big deal, since if you roll ship and get your wedge towards the enemy you're invincible, but then your own energy weapons are likewise blocked. Which, in turn, put a premium on fleet formations, teamwork, and tactics, such that two ships could bracket an enemy so that one always has a shot, which got increasingly complicated and interesting the more ships you had. Of course nowadays all that fairly interesting stuff is obsolete and ignored in favor of "my missiles have longer range, I shoot more of them and win" which is how all Honorverse battles play out now. 
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Sep 7, 2019 20:49
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Kchama posted:I'm not sure how he's gonna get more than one more book out of the Honorverse considering the last one basically defeated 99% of all foes forever. Anshu posted:Yeah, I doubt very much there's gonna be any more "main line" novels. But I think I read somewhere that he has another espionage-themed collab with Eric Flint lined up. I thought he said in the postscript that Uncompromising was the last book with Honor as the main character, but that he's got plans to advance the timeline, bring in some new protagonists and use Honor as the wizened senior officer that the new kids go to for advice, but that Honor's seen her last day in a command chair. Which is fine by me, I've always thought that Honor herself was one of the weakest parts of the Honor Harrington novels.
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Nov 2, 2019 00:22
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Kchama posted:Time for more "Admiral Hemphill Is All Evil In This World". Get use to this sort of thing. Pretty much every domestic foe Honor gets is incompetent and/or evil. Usually both. Spoilers for the end of the series: Of course, since Manticore ends up conquering the known universe (for all intents and purposes) almost entirely based on their technological superiority, particularly in the missiles that "Horrible Hemphill" designed, one can argue that it's really Hemphill, not Harrington, who deserves the most credit for Manticare's ultimate triumph....
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Dec 18, 2019 04:57
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The Chad Jihad posted:WHEN ARE THEY GONNA TO GET TO THE SPACE BATTLE FACTORY Second to last chapter, I think? This book has one of the better battles in the Harrington series, but you have to wade through SO much poo poo to get to it.
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Jan 12, 2020 20:33
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Stereo posted:Last year I read all of the main series Harrington books up to War of Honor, where I got burnt out again. They're not the worst things I've read but I agree the writing can be lacking and often repetitive. I dunno how many good ones there are. If anyone finds one, let me know. The Starfire books "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option" by Weber and White are adequate, bordering on pretty good. The rest of the books in the series, not so much, though I haven't read most of the ones that White's done on his own after Weber left for bigger and better things. Maybe they get better? John Campbell's "The Lost Fleet" series has some neat elements to it, but gets astoundingly repetitive from book to book. Pick one book in the series and enjoy it, but then skip the rest....they're pretty much the same book over and over. The "Vatta's War" books by Elizabeth Moon have some decent space battle stuff, especially in the latter books, but it's like 10% space battles, and 90% a lot of other things, including a whole pile of space merchant stuff in the first book.
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Mar 9, 2020 21:18
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Kchama posted:Weber's idea of what a meritocracy is is super different from the reality of Manticore as a 'meritocracy'. The sheer amount of poo poo that Young (born a noble) and Hauptman (inherited wealth) get away with simply because of who their families are shows how merit based Manticore is. Hauptman, at least, took his father's wealth and managed to grow it to the biggest fortune in a the richest star nation in the area, but Young in particular shows how bullshit the system is since we know he's a serial molester and rapist, as well as an incompetent captain whose ill-considered actions cost lives, who constantly gets away with it just because he's a powerful Earl's son.Meritocracy, my rear end. 
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Mar 19, 2020 12:11
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What should have happened is that Frontier Security would have invented a reason to jump all over Manticore within a year of the Beowulf-Manticore wormhole opening up. That said, if they ever do more of those Manticore Rising books that Zahn was writing, those could explain why and how that didn't happen.
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Apr 5, 2020 03:05
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I mean when you get right down to it, what really happened was that Weber was doing the Wars of Revolutionary France and the Napoleonic Wars from Nelson's perspective but in space. Except that the inciting incident that bankrupts the Ancien Regime isn't the American Revolution because Manticore can't possibly be allowed to lose a war the way the Brits did. So then the ), with Thiesman taking over as the Napoleon figure. Fine, sure, whatever. File off those serial numbers all you like, Dave, just give us a decent ending, will you? Except that in the end,
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Apr 6, 2020 04:21
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Libluini posted:Wait a minute, I stopped a couple books ago, is that a thing that actually happened? In the last book Honor takes the invincible superfleet to the Sol system and destroys every piece of orbital infrastructure in it, as well as the entire Solarian home fleet. By the end of it, the only things left in the Sol system (that used to have more economic value that all of Manticore's empire mind) that can still fly are the shuttles allowed to evacuate the civilian workers back to Earth on. Then she orbits around Earth and says "if you don't change your government and accept the constitution I've written for you I'm going to go around to every system in the League and blow up their infrastructure until you do."
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Apr 7, 2020 14:08
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Because the last thing I remembered was stealth ships blowing up a huge part of Manticoran infrastructure (which of course didn't even slow them down, it just happened to create pathos for the "heroes") and then Manticore winning some more battles.
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God willing it's over. But he was threatening in the afterword to do books set a few years down the line with the younger characters moving into command roles, with Honor as the grand old dame behind a desk. I can't imagine what those characters would have to do, considering how badly Dave hosed his universe, but I expect that when he needs some extra cash we'll find out. Or someone will, because even though I've been reading library copies for the last half dozen books, the investment in time these books take is no longer worth it to me. I'm out.
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Apr 7, 2020 16:53
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quantumfoam posted:My friend, it's gonna be this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirs_of_Empire , version 2.0. Huh. You know, between the Gbaba who kick off the Safehold books, the Rigellians and Arachnids from the Starfire books, as well as the Achuultani from Heirs of Empire, Dave's drawn from the "implacable genocidal species who cannot be negotiated with" well a lot. It wouldn't surprise me to see him do it again. You may be right.
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Apr 7, 2020 19:35
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Kallikaa posted:I've seen the Honor Harrington series described as CS Forester's Hornblower series 'but in SPACE!' which, going by what's posted here, I don't get since there seems to be no similarity at all? No, it is a Hornblower pastiche, it's just one that's done badly. In particular, Weber looks at all the times that Hornblower goes through poo poo because he isn't from a good family, all the times that he's stymied by an incompetent superior who is, all the times that Hornblower's on the beach nearly broke on half pay because he stood up for what was right and says "Nah, my Hornblower's going to be a hot chick who's the best at EVERYTHING, and the only people who will ever dislike her are villains."
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Apr 15, 2020 00:21
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Deptfordx posted:I watched that one season it got 20+ years ago when it first came out and I can't even recall if I enjoyed it at the time. It was quite the mixed bag, as I recall. Sometimes it had some fairly insightful things to say about an expendable cloned worker caste, sometimes it was a melange of military movie cliches with a thin veneer of sci-fi. This was matched by how many different situations the characters got into. Sometimes they were hotshit fighter pilots, sometimes they were expendable infantry grunts, one time they were crew on a space submarine! I can't help but feel they'd have done better if they'd picked one idea and stuck with it, but in the end it was doomed by the same thing that killed a lot of '90s sci-fi....it was too drat expensive to make for the ratings it got.
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Apr 25, 2020 12:22
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Libluini posted:I've always wondered where the "primary beams" in the Star Fire books came from, that's neat. They're weaponized tractor beams. Think Star Wars or Star Trek, but designed to grab a chunk of enemy ship and rip it away (Force Beams) or poke holes in enemy ships (Primary Beams). It's related to whatever they use for artificial gravity. If you want to know more than that, then I'm sorry, you're officially giving the matter more thought than any of the writers did.
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May 5, 2020 02:06
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Libluini posted:But this essentially makes grav lances a variation of force and primary beams (maybe torrent beams would be a good name) and it raises another question about why Weber hates this weapon so much. Did the Star Fire books came first and he hated writing about them or something? Because they aren't missiles? Both the Starfire and Honor universes followed the same basic tech progression: Energy Weapons < Missiles < Carriers. There are differences, of course. In Starfire the fighters are single pilot craft like an X-Wing or Starfury where as in Honor the "fighters" are LACs instead. And Starfire went into a weird Energy Weapons < Missiles < Carriers < BIGGER Missiles progression by the time of Insurrection where they were taking the whole "shoot them from outside their range" idea to the logical extreme by firing corvette sized missiles that are warp capable from system-wide distances....which is also one of many reasons why Insurrection is the books where Starfire officially jumps the shark.
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May 5, 2020 16:06
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FuturePastNow posted:Insurrection was the first one written and the last chronologically, right? Not counting the weird and lovely ones Steve White wrote without Weber later. I remember it being the roughest one to read. Yeah, though I didn't know that at the time I started reading 'em. I picked up In Death Ground on a whim off a rack in a grocery store, read it, really enjoyed most of it, then was progressively more and more disappointed by the rest of the series as I read The Shiva Option, Crusade, then Insurrection, then a few chapters of White's solo book, then gave it up entirely. Taken in isolation, In Death Ground and The Shiva Option make for a decent little duology. You could even throw in Crusade as the first book if you need a trilogy. Not perfect, by any means, but a lot more engaging than most of the Honor stuff. Just ignore everything else in the series, you'll be much better off. Libluini posted:Yeah, I remember that, now that you mentioned it. Those mega-missiles were incredibly silly. They must be hideously expensive, and extremely hideously to handle logistically. I guess a fleet of those things is kind of a binary thing: Either they smash the enemy fast, or the enemy can counter their maga-missiles. And then those silly monster ships will just die. Insurrection is just full of weird choices. The theme of "democracy is stupid because voters are stupid" that runs throughout the Starfire books that was just subtext in the other books becomes a major plot point. How easy it is for the fringe worlds to seize a huge chunk of the navy, keep the ships maintained, build new ones, and even develop and implement new war winning technologies despite have like 1% of the population and resources of the rest of the Federation is staggeringly dumb. And of course the insanity of the mega-missiles that is basically "we shoot starships at them"...yeah. It's not good.
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May 5, 2020 18:05
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I'd have sworn that the "too dumb to fool" idea was used by Weber somewhere else. I wanna say the beginning of Mutineer's Moon. Something like the sensor/ECM war between the opposing sides of the big civil war had gotten to the point that radar was ignored as irrelevant so all the Earthling radar guided missiles strike home because no one defends against anything so primitive anymore. Something like that. Could have been another series by another author entirely, but I think that's where it's from.
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May 18, 2020 06:22
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And then he arguably changed models again to Carrier Warfare with LACs, complete with a Pearl Harbor analogue when the Mesans nuke the Manticore shipyards. Except he din't go all the way and let the enemy have carriers too, so instead of 1941-45 Pacific Theater IN SPACE, we get Hunt the Bismark and Taranto and Prince of Wales/Repulse...all one sided curbstomps where it just shows that if one side has carriers and the other doesn't, the side without is hosed. Which manages to be even LESS interesting than Age of Sail Redux and ALL THE MISSILES that he'd had before.
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May 25, 2020 17:47
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Kchama posted:Not only the greatest as an officer, but as a politician, a CEO, ruler, and warrior. ...best pilot, best martial artist, best swordswoman, best pistol shooter, most beautiful, most inspiring, and overall the best person in hers or any universe as evidenced by the fact that your objective worth as a person in the Honorverse is judged by how much you love Honor Harrington. If you dislike Honor for any reason you are evil and will probably die. If you hate Honor, you are a coward and a rapist and will definitely die, probably in a particularly awful fashion. The only way to survive is to throw yourself at Honor's mercy like Hauptman and Hemphill do. Only then will you be redeemed and allowed to become truly great, even if you don't actually change your behavior. It doesn't matter if you're a bullying rear end in a top hat who throws his wealth around like a cudgel to get his way. Once you join the Church of Honor, all your sins are forgiven so long as you throw your wealth around to help Honor. You can still be a mad scientist throwing wacky ideas out there at a whim, but once you join the Church of Honor all your ideas suddenly go from crazy and unworkable to brilliant and decisive. Just don't try and claim the credit for devising the invincible missiles that made your nation the greatest military power in the universe. Clearly all credit for winning the wars goes to her divine majesty Honor whose brilliant strategy of "Fire All The Missiles" is unparalleled in naval history. More holy than Mary, gentler than Susan, surely no character in all of creation can best she for whom the universe bends a knee, Honor Harrington. ... ... ... God this series pisses me off the more I think about it. I want all those hours I spent reading this poo poo back! 
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May 27, 2020 10:00
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FuturePastNow posted:I thought the thread might like to know: Well, poo poo.
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Jan 2, 2021 07:04
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GD_American posted:I read 2-3 of the earlier Honor books. Where'd he end up going in the end with everything? Carbon copy tactical genius kids, or is 930 year old Honor Harrington still saving the multiverse? Heh. Funny story, that. It was supposed to be the former with Honor retiring and then her twin kids being the ones to save the universe from the next threat. But then Weber and Eric Flint got together for a side series of novels in the Honorverse that were more espionage based than warship based, and since Flint needed an in-universe enemy to fight who were sneaky and hidden, so Weber rather than create a new idea just brought the enemies that Honor's children were supposed to fight in 20 years and put them in the "present", so that in the end older Honor ends up destroying them too. Theoretically there's supposed to be some kind of future series with Honor as the wise old deskbound admiral giving out missions and advice while new characters do the fieldwork, but I've seen no announcements of new stuff, and with Weber's recent health problems, it may never happen at all. So as it stands right now, Honor does in fact solve all the galaxy's problems, apparently forever.
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Jan 22, 2021 07:10
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Anshu posted:A thought occurred to me the other day (not for the first time, but this time I remembered to mention it to the thread): Checks out.
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Mar 17, 2021 14:11
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quantumfoam posted:Date: Mon, 05 Sep 94 20:15:30 EDT This was correct on all points! Nice to see that people were spotting the parallels even pretty early on.
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Mar 27, 2021 07:45
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quantumfoam posted:I've read a ton of mil-fiction, mil-fantasy and mil-scifi; and bar none the absolute worse main character of a mil-fiction/mil-scifi/mil-fantasy is Miles Vorkosigan. Terrible character, worse personality. Still gotta be Honor Harrington, the Mary Sueist Mary Sue to ever Mary Sue all over a narrative.
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Jun 25, 2021 15:49
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Wibla posted:IIRC it gets worse from there? Much much worse.
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Jun 25, 2021 20:24
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Fivemarks posted:That gives me an idea for a Let's Read of my favorite short story collection: Let's Read Hammer's SLammers An excellent suggestion. Please do this thing.
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Dec 23, 2021 05:55
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