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Larry Parrish posted:It's never the settings where travel is long and theres no FTL comms that have pirates, for some reason. You mean, like the Honor Harrington setting, where interstellar travel takes weeks or months, and they don't have interstellar FTL comms?
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Oct 18, 2019 03:34
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Kchama posted:Well, that's part of what I was getting at.  Wormholes are good for commerce because that they let you skip a lengthy trip via conventional FTL, thus saving you both time and wear on your ship(s), but they're not like GO in Monopoly where you get given money just for passing through. You still need people to trade with at the other end, so you go to where they are, even if where they are is "not particularly near" the closest wormhole, because they settled the area before the wormhole was discovered.
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Oct 28, 2019 04:39
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Kchama posted:The reason why those places have so much piracy is they are poor and have nothing to trade, and thus no money for defenses or reason for people to post permanent guards there to protect trade. ... But they still keep sending people through those systems, even when they have no financial reason to. I brought up the wormholes as that would be a possible reason for why you'd want to be in them, but there's nothing like that. Taking your last point first, that's because Manticore built the physical, political, financial, and military infrastructure to make people pay fees for the privilege. It's not an inherent property of the wormholes themselves. Regarding the Silesian Confederacy, the reason they have so many pirates is because their government is so weak, they can't enforce whatever local anti-piracy laws exist and can't stop unscrupulous system governments from cooperating with pirates for financial gain. I expect Silesia is poorer than Manticore (a nation noted as being unusually wealthy), or the Andermani, but that doesn't mean they have no money or nothing to trade.
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Oct 28, 2019 18:28
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I don't recall Weber going into a lot of detail on that, but I think that is most or all of the trade going on, if your definition of "luxuries" includes things like pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs derived from plants or animals native or unusually modified or adapted to the local environments and biospheres, that are difficult to replicate or cultivate on other planets.
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Oct 28, 2019 22:03
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I think that was the 10th one.
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Nov 1, 2019 19:02
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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.
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Nov 1, 2019 23:08
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:This is foreshadowing for later when Charlene, who is totally smokin hot, marries Caleb to join her elite armies to Caleb's bomb-rear end fleet and a later character to battle the Dumb Fake Jesus Sword Guys. I can't remember the details offhand, but we definitely get a peek into Sharleyan's internal monologue where she rolls her eyes at court poets habit of trying to make some feature of hers sound pretty, so I'm pretty sure she's not meant to look super hot, just... fine. More or less ordinary. IIRC, Cayleb's the gorgeous one in their pairing; she just lucked into having (was written to have) really good chemistry with him. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's kind of amazing how in Weber's writings political marriage between two monarchs always deepens into love, and never ends with them gritting their teeth and loving out a child and then fooling around on the side like many real monarchs in history. I'm pretty sure it's not literally all royal marriages, just the ones he decides to spend time with. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's also amazing how despite all the linguistic drift causing silly names, the characters speak in remarkably modern English with none of the poetics or grandeur you would expect out of the mythical True Just King. "Slash lizard" and "sand maggot" are just bad and manage to draw and quarter any attempt at solemnity the scene had. The conceit behind the names vs. the rest of their speech is that the "Holy Writ" got used as a reference standard not only for rules of moral behavior and a practical guide to the best possible low-tech medicine and terraforming procedures, but also for their language, with the result that while the underlying grammar and in-character orthography are all practically identical to Standard English, and all the linguistic drift has been in sound changes and pronunciation. Weber is attempting to show us a bit of those sound changes by rendering the names phonetically, while leaving the rest of the dialogue and such in normal orthography for the convenience of his English-speaking readership. As for why the True King and his Goodly Heir don't speak in a higher register, I think you're doing Weber a slight disservice there. Neither he nor the characters think of themselves in those terms; given later revelations, Haarahld definitely knows that any divine right bullshit is just that, and presumably took some pains to develop a similar attitude in Cayleb, even if he couldn't tell his son all of the reasons behind it. However, I'm in complete agreement on your disgust for "slash lizard" and "sand maggot". Imagine naming animals after where they live, or what makes them dangerous. Ridiculous! It would have been much better if he called them something like "giznar" and "sliggle" and interrupted the story for a few paragraphs to explain what they are and why the characters are using them as a metaphor. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Unfortunately, while the books are poorly constructed there is little shock value to be derived from them. You don't have crap like Goodkind's literal rape pits or Ringo's Waffen-SS worship where you can point to the awful poo poo happening and make fun of it. It's all a dull, unexciting mediocrity. Wasn't the SS worshipper Krâtmân, not Ringo? (diacritics added to make it harder for him to google himself) TheGreatEvilKing posted:The puzzle of Weber isn't "why is this so bad", the puzzle is "why does this poo poo sell" and I think that's the question we're all trying to answer in this thread. I can only speak for myself, but I guess it's a bit like comfort food. He has his formulas in how he builds his worlds, constructs his plots, and writes his characters, but he also plays with and varies them enough that so far I find it familiar but not samey or contrived – the vast majority of the time, anyway.
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Jan 5, 2020 01:30
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Guess I'm doing this, huh? Well, good of you to pop in. I do remember she and Cayleb fall in love at first sight, but it's been a while since I read the latter books. I remember that too, now that you mention it, and I also seem to recall that he says he thinks she's beautiful. I would chalk that up to a combination of his relative youth, the euphoria of his diplomatic gambit paying off, and a bit of beauty being in the eye of the beholder – but the fact that Sharleyan's court poets seemed to feel obliged to try to say something nice about... whatever the flaw was suggests to me that it's not entirely in her own head. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Most of the ones he decides to spend time with are his stock Good and Wise Monarchs. Manticore and Charis both embrace monarchy, and despite them being the most "advanced" nations in the setting there is never a question of whether or not people deserve to rule by birthright. Even the venal corruption of people like Pavel Young never seems to inspire any demand to get rid of hereditary privileges, and the good characters like Caleb and Honor are distinguished by their royal bloodlines and their royal privilege they take for granted. A bit of a side tangent, but I feel like Manticore isn't a good example here, in that political marriages don't really appear to be a thing therr? The royals are constitutionally obligated to marry commoners, which is much less restrictive than the opposite – there are a lot more commoners than nobles, so even if a Manticoran royal does fall in love with a noble, it seems pretty likely they could find at least a tolerably congenial marriage partner, rather than being stuck with someone they can't stand for the sake of some treaty or whatever. Anyway,  it just doesn't bother me that much. In fact, I kind of prefer the honesty of the explicit class systems Weber writes to the pretend-egalitarian crypto-aristocracy we have to deal with in America, and I'd much rather Weber pair that with depictions of loving relationships than cold or even outright abusive ones.TheGreatEvilKing posted:First, I don't actually care. If Weber actually wanted to show cultural stasis there are better ways to do it (such as having the characters quoting modern Earth stuff like Shakespeare rather than indigenous authors) and quite frankly the characters all speaking English isn't that important to our series about the clash between church and state (which I think this is supposed to be about?). Forcing the reader to decipher "Dynnys" and "Nahrman" to reveal...they're just English names is irritating and doesn't matter much. The image of the Temple literally just being as the angels left it works a lot better for this anyway, as it implies people aren't making new art or music to glorify the Archangels. That's a much bigger indicator of cultural stasis to me! I feel like you've maybe missed the point somewhere. I don't think the series is about Church vs. State, it's about Tolerance vs. Intolerance, and maybe also Means vs. Ends. The Archangels' own plan limited what Earth cultural stuff they could give the mindwiped colonists. Giving them buttloads of out-of-context cultural material is not a good idea if your plan is to preserve the human species by setting up a largely muscle-powered agricultural society with no memory of where they came from on an alien planet, and keeping them at that tech level by ruling as ostensibly divine superbeings. The "Archangels" can't tolerate anyone else having pre-Safehold knowledge because of the threat it poses to their desired social order, which would in turn risk technological developments that would draw the attention of the xenocidal aliens they're trying to hide from. The colonists probably won't be able to overthrow you, but they're almost certainly going to be able to put things together that you didn't want them to know, and then you have to start killing the ones who know too much, and then somebody will wonder what it was that got that person killed, and now this is turning into one of those plans, where you kill everyone that notices that you're killing people, the dirigible is in flames, and you've lost your hat. No, better to start them with just the carefully written holy book. They'll have to invent their own culture, but there's only so far they can go with just the pieces we've given them, right? Except that's where their plan starts to fail, because while the overall culture hadn't yet grown outside the intended bounds by the time the main action starts, it was starting to creak and totter and collapse into a mess, and who knows where all the pieces will fly off to! As the church becomes more and more corrupt, people grow more and more dissatisfied with it, and challenging its supremacy becomes more and more thinkable, because the culture isn't static, and wouldn't be static even if there weren't secret caches of pre-Safehold knowledge influencing certain areas behind the scenes. Anyway, on the names thing, I don't understand why people feel "forced" to "decipher" the names rather than just take them at face value. Maybe it's because of my exposure to so much schlocky fantasy, but I have no trouble accepting "Dynnys," "Nahrman," and the rest as just What Those Individuals Are Called – and now I'm typing that out, I'm reminded of the line from the ProZD's skit: "Do you have an English name?" TheGreatEvilKing posted:As feudal kings, Haaralhd and Cayleb would probably be more educated that the rest of the populace. I don't remember Cayleb ever questioning whether or not he should rule Charis based solely on his birthright. He questions whether or not he would be a good king, but never the idea of kingship or the idea that making executive positions based on heredity is bad. The characters (as of...five books in?) don't develop the idea of the social contract, so in the end Cayleb rules not by the will of the people but because the military answers to him. I will point out this illuminating bit from Haarahld when asked about why his great-grandfather abolished serfdom in Charis: quote:"The Writ teaches that God created every Adam and every Eve in the same instant, the same exercise of his will through the Archangel Langhorne," Haraahld said. "He didn't create kings first, or nobles, or wealthy merchants. He breathed the breath of life into the nostrils of all men and all women. Surely that means all men and all women are brothers and sisters. We may not be born to the same states, in this later, less perfect world. Some of us are born kings now, and some are born noble, or to wealth, or all three. Yet those born more humbly are still our brothers and sisters. If God sees men that way, then so must we, and if that's true, then men aren't cattle, or sheep, or horses, or dragons. Not something to be owned." TheGreatEvilKing posted:See how even though the game is set in the far future with weird poo poo, the characters are still capable of making analogies that an actual human would make? I do not know what a sand maggot or a slash lizard are. They don't exist. Weber could have added a sentence about the terraforming ships dropping earth life forms and we could have had an actual threatening metaphor. The babe set upon by wolves conjures a horrifying image of a small child being ripped to pieces, and shows the brutality of the character. The sand lizard...doesn't exist and readers are not familiar with it. The ecosystem of Safehold does not actually play a big part in our conflict between empires and isn't particularly interesting. Well, you see, I thought that it stood to reason that people would make analogies based on animals they are familiar with, and that as these are people living on an alien planet with alien wildlife with no memory of Earth, that the animals they were familiar with include alien ones, and I was able to infer that it was meant to be threatening from context. No, I know about that one, it's actually my main exposure to the matter. It was my understanding that Ringo's name is on it mostly because it's set in his Posleen universe, and that the actual content of the book was all on the other author.
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Jan 5, 2020 07:37
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I would confess I would be a lot more comfortable if people were named made up poo poo like Valkar and Katniss and whatever than the obvious parallels to English names. Isn't half the command staff Chinese? Did nobody named, say, Okonkwo board the ship? Why do I give a gently caress how they pronounce Dennis? It's deliberately jarring and it doesn't feel like it contributes any meaning. TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's the benevolent dictator fantasy. And furthermore, because of the knowledge they have and the conspiracy they're part of, I feel like we're supposed to infer that the Ahrmahks haven't been ruling purely as military dictators in fancy clothes, but have been pushing (as much as they dare) toward a more humanistic society. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Then make the alien life actually theatening. When I hear "slash lizard," I think this. Seems to me like, yet again, this comes down to our personal prejudices, where I'm fine trying to project myself into and inhabit the secondary world Weber has constructed, and you're refusing to meet the material halfway. It's like reading Tolkien and complaining that he should have used brutish ape-men or something instead of inventing these stupid-sounding "orcs" nobody's ever heard of before.
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Jan 5, 2020 23:03
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Larry Parrish posted:your take on class and aristocracy is highly liberal so basically yes. your dumb for indulging in the History's Only Perfect King thing that Weber constantly writes You know, you may have a point there. I first started reading Weber when I was... 12ish, I think, and I only started thinking in terms of leftists opposed to liberals in the last few years. I'll have to do some self-examination on this. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I legit don't think the Gbaba come up at all in the first...five books. I think they come up a handful times, but only very briefly in each instance. They're very much tomorrow's problem so far.
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Jan 5, 2020 23:43
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Thinking on it for a minute or so, maybe the use of "Old Earth" is to signify the use of the proper noun referring to humanity's birth world, as opposed to more figurative uses of the generic word "earth". In text capitalization does the job for you, but that's not always clear in speech.
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Jan 13, 2020 01:37
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Gnoman posted:You couldn't be more correct here. Almost everyone uses the exact same slang and has the exact same verbal habits (for an extremely obvious example, everyone except the Graysons and Masadans use their own pronouns when referring to an unknown officer). They even use the same military ranks terminology, which doesn't make sense even within the groups that come from English-speaking cultures, which at least two of the major powers don't. Personally I like the pronoun thing you point out here; it serves as a linguistic demonstration of how (most of) the setting's cultures have embraced gender equality: if the default person has a gender, they have same one you do, regardless of what role or position they occupy. It could be argued that the singular they would be even more progressive, since it includes nonbinary folks, but given when Weber started working on these novels I'm inclined to forgive him for that oversight.
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Jan 19, 2020 08:09
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Kchama posted:It costs them nothing except of course Manticore becoming very aware that they plan on conquesting Manticore instead of being vaguely unaware despite the Queen agitating to kill Haven NOW (though I don't think that's been brought up in this book, even though it's a thing the later books say was always going on). This may be my memory of later events coloring things, but I don't think Manticore is "vaguely unaware" of Haven's intent to conquer them. They don't know any of the specifics, but my impression was that Manticore's government was definitely assuming they were on Haven's list of intended victims and trying to gear up for the fight. They're definitely aware of it by the second book, since that's all about coalition building in anticipation of the war which begins in the third.
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Jan 19, 2020 09:02
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Kchama posted:Honestly I'm not entirely sure what the play is suppose to be here. Like they want to make the international community give up custody of the Medusans due to not being able to handle them, which is fine I guess but it's never really parlayed into how this will result in Haven getting control over Medusa, or what control of Medusa itself will really do. Like I get the idea is that it'd give them an in on attacking Manticore but they... really already have it, and gaining control of the system is just going to convince Manticore to actually beef up the systems, and I'm pretty sure ships can be moved in faster than 'international community' support can be gained. Haven wants Medusa because control of the planet gives them a territorial claim on the system in general. They also don't have to rely on the "international community" granting them title to Medusa, because under their plan, they would already be in physical possession of the planet, and if possession is nine tenths of the law in civil affairs it must be at least ninety-nine hundredths of the law in international ones. Furthermore, I think you're greatly overstating the obviousness of the drive modifications to Sirius. IIRC, it took a detailed visual examination to detect, and they had to manufacture an excuse to set up the orbit that gets them close enough to collect that information.
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Jan 30, 2020 05:13
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C.M. Kruger posted:
You might be pleasantly surprised by the quality of that one, too. It also garners a lot of hate because Kay "ruined the harem fantasy" by portraying an honest and loving open relationship where the succubus has sex with men other than the protagonist, and he doesn't care.
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Jan 31, 2020 19:49
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Kchama posted:Thinking about it, Honor never really was ON Basilisk Station, was she? She was actually always doing stuff away from it and just messaged Basilisk Station a lot. Kchama posted:I don't think that bit is ever relevant. It is, thankfully, put in a place where it is actually a decent place to serve up the information and thankfully brief for Weber. I think you're right that the speed limit for going into hyper never comes up again, but crash downward translations and the physical discomfort they cause do show up with some frequency. Kchama posted:They aren't 'old-fashioned' then. They're CURRENT-fashioned. I don't mind him being embarrassed that his tech is backwards but there's no indication that they have lesser technology because they haven't met the Manticoreans yet. Uh, as I believe you yourself pointed out, Grayson clearly has had prior contact with the rest of human space, since some of their upper crust were sent to Harvard, so it's perfectly plausible they'd be aware of the tech imbalance. As for their advancements, I can only remember two things the Graysons are credited for being better at: inertial compensators and fission generators, the former because they stumbled onto a more effective design, and the latter because they kept using and refining fission while everyone else switched to fusion. Kchama posted:I'm not sure why it's such a shock. Surely Manticore would have a massive plethora of much bigger ships. It'd be more likely Honor would have a more Solarian League view of "Impressive, for neo-barbs".
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Mar 10, 2020 01:38
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Graysons traveling to other systems isn't the only way they could have been exposed to outside technology. This isn't a first contact situation; Grayson and Manticore are both aware of and know a little about each other, which means that Grayson has had prior encounters with other interstellar travelers. That would be enough to give a high military official an idea of how technically behind his forces are, even if only an intellectual and second-hand one. Regarding the # of ships passage, all I can say is it's always been clear to me that Honor was impressed by the scale of Grayson's activity relative to their technological inferiority. Reading the final sentence as you're suggesting feels like it requires ignoring the context of the rest of the paragraph.
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Mar 10, 2020 02:10
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Do you also poo poo on JK Rowling because Emma Watson is prettier than Hermione is supposed to be?
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Mar 16, 2020 03:26
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General Battuta posted:Actually a real problem I’m having is how comically easy it would be for Manticore to back down and get a negotiated settlement. You need to play up the Mesan manipulation and the League’s concerns about their deterrence posture to keep Manticore from growing a brain and just saying “let’s call it even and take this to court.” I might be misremembering, but didn't Manticore make an essentially similar offer, first after beating Byng, and then again after beating Crandall, but the Solarian League rejected it both times in favor of escalating the conflict to preserve their position of hegemony?
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Mar 26, 2020 22:22
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FuturePastNow posted:Secret massive base in a previously uncharted system is exactly what Haven does. It doesn't ultimately win them the war, but Manticore never finds Bolthole. The Mesan Alignment's base and shipyard is also such a location, and it still hadn't been found by the good guys at the end* of the series. That's not the same thing, though. Both Darius and Bolthole have colonized worlds to provide local logistical support to their secret shipyard and research facilities.
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Apr 14, 2020 16:38
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The Solarians literally just fly to Manticore to attack it. They lose not because their crews are tired but because Weber executed dramatic tension behind the woodshed and their tech is still garbage despite getting supermissiles from the Space Illuminati. Yes, and they do this decades later, after the Manticore-led advances in missile technology made decapitation strikes a viable strategy. At the point of the story we are discussing, those developments have not yet happened. It's like you're arguing that the US should have deployed nuclear weapons against the Central Powers in 1918.
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Apr 14, 2020 16:44
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General Battuta posted:Uh but the Solarians are operating on pre-war technology and they go right for a decapitation strike. It doesn't work due to said missile advances, but it would've worked back in 1900 PD or whenever the war started. Driving 500 dreadnoughts right to Manticore would've been totally viable then. Yes and no. By the time of the Battle of Manticore (which is what we're discussing), the Solarians have had ample demonstration of how missile tech has advanced, and while they haven't had time to design any new ship types taking that knowledge into account, they have equipped their old-style SDs with pod-launched multi-stage missiles in an attempt to even the playing field. Broadly, though, I think you're right that decapitation strikes are only carried out when one side thinks they have a decisive edge, whether that's technological or numerical.
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Apr 14, 2020 19:03
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General Battuta posted:In Chapter Ten of Mission of Honor: Retold, we finally get some naval shooting and a look at the Solarian League Navy's upgraded hardware. This continues to be excellently done! I loved the absurd plausibility of the software crash. General Battuta posted:The missile accounting will continue.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:30
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General Battuta posted:"Anywhere else" I would aim for a situation in which Manticore+Friends force the League to balkanize, but then have to vie for influence against the Mesan Alignment in the new polities.
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Apr 20, 2020 19:59
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blackmongoose posted:I think balkanization makes the most sense because a) the league as written is terrible for storytelling so killing it is better if you decide to do future stories and b) it's probably the only realistic way to have an ending that isn't super depressing. I wouldn't have it be Manticore forcing it though, just that the crisis reveals a lot of the already existing underlying issues and tensions. That's actually what I meant, but I can see how what I wrote wasn't really clear.
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Apr 21, 2020 00:19
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Kchama posted:We don't have completely identical ship designs in real life. You can, if you're looking, tell the difference between a destroyer and a dreadnought (aka a battleship) by how they LOOK as opposed to internal armaments that you can't really ever see, which are really convenient for lazy-rear end authors. Form follows function; take this image depicting various ship types of the WW2-era US Navy.  Apart from the carriers - which have a distinct function leading to their distinct form, all the designs more or less blur together: funnels roughly amidships, raised areas for improved visibility, flat deck space on which turrets are mounted, etc. The cruisers and battleships are especially difficult to pick apart at a quick glance, since most of them seem to be of comparable sizes. It's only when you zoom in and look at details like the number and placement of gun mounts and funnels that the differences become apparent. Of course, Honorverse ships have fewer external cues to their size; being space vessels they of course can't have open deck spaces, their power plants don't produce exhaust, and no ship needs more than 2 impeller rings, each mounting the same number of nodes. I suppose that in particular is a flaw in the imagination of the secondary world; if larger ships required more impeller rings, that could serve as a nice distinguishing feature, like the number of masts or funnels – but given the givens, I don't understand the complaint that Honorverse ships are hard to tell apart by the casual observer. So are lots of things IRL: military ships like those pictured above, large commercial aircraft types, small commercial aircraft, for that matter... even many makes of car look fundamentally the same as their counterparts from other manufacturers.
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May 5, 2020 06:42
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I suggest that the reason you can pick out the differences between RL, WW2-era ships so easily is because you're so much more familiar with seeing them. That's practically inevitable, given the ubiquity of WW2-related media and the fact that Honorverse ships are almost exclusively presented through the medium of text.
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May 5, 2020 07:23
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Kchama posted:He didn't seem to have any revelation when he made Beowulf into a corporate hellworld with corporate royalty (that Honor is a member of). Kchama posted:It's described as having a literal Board of Directors as the government and Honor's uncle is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors and thus basically the king/president, which means king in Weberspeak. The members of the executive branch are all only Important (Aristocratic) family members. So it's rule by corporation. My impression – and this may be wishful thinking on my part, since it's never explicitly detailed – was that the Beowulfan government had a corporate organizational structure, but that all Beowulfan citizens were (at least formally) equal shareholders. That is, Honor's mom's family are prominent because they've carefully managed the prestige they got from leading the rescue of Old Earth, not because they own more stock in Beowulf Incorporated.
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May 9, 2020 18:16
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FuturePastNow posted:All citizens are shareholders but I doubt they're equal shareholders. And Corporations are people, too. You're right that that's likely how it would really work out, but I really think Weber meant for Beowulf to be better than that.
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May 9, 2020 22:27
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Kchama posted:How does this work. 'almost too stupid to fool'? If ECM didn't work for whatever reason as a defense, then are the missiles being smart an actual disadvantage? But yeah despite the near point-blank range of it, all of their stuff is easily countered and the Manticorean ships don't even need all of their defenses. LACs are pretty worthless. If you create a camouflage pattern that's optimized against opponents who see in the ultraviolet, it will be less effective, and possibly completely ineffective, against opponents like humans who cannot perceive that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Grayson and Masada are worse at miniaturization than Manticore or Haven, so for a given size of missile, they can't mount as many different kinds of sensors or as much processing power as the two larger powers can; thus the Masadan missiles are 'almost too stupid to fool' because they can't detect all of the Manticoran ECM, and that portion which they can detect might not be enough to degrade their locks enough to divert them in the desired manner.
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May 18, 2020 04:46
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Kchama posted:Honor just has a thing for old men who mentor her, huh? This is definately a running theme with her. I'm pretty sure she means a filial sort of love.
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Jun 10, 2020 23:00
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Raoul is 52 years older than Honor (96 to her 44 in this book) where Hamish is only 39 years older. That 13 years may not seem like all that much of a difference between the two men, but you should also consider the contexts in which they meet Honor. Raoul met Honor when she was at Saganami, presumably sometime during her initial Cadet training from the ages of 14 to 18, while Hamish never meets Honor until the end of this book, at which point she's a grown woman. By the time Hamish has his epiphany ten years down the line at the age of 93, Honor herself is 54 – and neither of them perform their attraction to the other until ~8 years later, when they're 101 and 62, respectively.
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Jun 11, 2020 02:18
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Kchama posted:You type all that out like it really matters as to whether or not Weber likes 20-30 year old women hooking up with much older men. Especially since the age difference is the same through all of that and Honor still looks 40 years younger than him no matter what. The age difference stays the same (that's how time works), but as a fraction of their respective ages it decreases. A 30yo with a 20yo is iffy, but a 40yo with a 30yo much less so, and a 60yo with a 50yo barely merits mention. This is a more extreme example, both in terms of the size of the gap and the lifespans involved, but the principle still applies. As for your accusation regarding Weber's taste for pairing younger women with older men, the only other examples springing to my mind are from The Apocalypse Troll and (God help me) the Empire of Man series he did with John Ringo. I can't recall any similar age gaps portrayed with similar levels of okay-ness in the Honorverse spinoffs and short stories, or Dahak, or the Multiverse. Safehold could maybe count depending on how you want to judge a theoretically immortal 1000-year-old-but-has-only-been-awake-for-about-30-years male-passing/identifying robot with the uploaded mind and memories of a long-dead female space naval officer getting together with a 50-plus-year-old spymistress/madam. What I'm saying is, you're trying to make out like this is some skeevy urge Weber habitually expresses through his writing, but the evidence for that assertion is pretty thin on the ground as far as I can remember.
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Jun 11, 2020 04:42
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Kchama posted:Like I said, I was making fun of how he and wrote it poorly wrote Honor's reaction to his death and used wording that you'd see for someone talking about their love interest, and even pointed out that before then I never thought anything between them.   In your first response, you dig in your heels on the romantic interpretation.   Here you start shifting blame onto Weber's use of language, but continue to insist on the romantic angle.  It's not until this post that you introduce the idea that the joke was about the mismatch between the language and the emotion Weber is attempting to portray. We can see you moving the goalposts in real time.
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Jun 13, 2020 04:52
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A thought occurred to me the other day (not for the first time, but this time I remembered to mention it to the thread): Mesans. Masons. Freemasons.
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Mar 17, 2021 11:58
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Also, I'm rereading Weber's Multiverse series via audiobook, and I've just been reminded that I love the cheerfully bloodthirsty way he characterizes the orcas when psychics talk to them. It's all but explicit that sometime in the last few thousand years, the orcas decided, "These other cetaceans are thinking creatures, like us." – (later extended to include humans) – "Therefore, we will no longer eat them, despite how delicious they are," and you get the strong sense that modern orcas are continuously and consciously choosing to abide by that decision.
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Mar 22, 2021 07:04
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I meant in the context of the books, yeah
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Mar 22, 2021 21:26
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Cobalt-60 posted:There was a short story in one of the Honorverse compilations that seemed to have been written off the prompt: "How can we tell a story about cluster-bombing a civilian population and have it done by the good guys?" Not a bad story (one of the series that helped turn the PRH from Evil French Commies into something approaching realistic, but realizing exactly what had been done was disquieting in retrospect. If it's the story I'm thinking of (the one where the Napoleon-expy cements herself as indispensable by putting down an even-more-radical uprising against the Committee for Public Safety), I'm not sure I'd say it was "the good guys" doing the clusterbombing, exactly.
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Nov 23, 2021 12:01
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Epicurius posted:Over the course of the book, Lee comes to learn that the future views the Confederacy, its values, and its racism, repulsive, and the only people who still consider them heroic are racist cranks like the AWB, and the book ends with a wiser Lee, having realized that, coming around to support and push through abolition in the hope to start to change those values. Yeah, except that the actual historical Lee is much more likely to have viewed our future as degenerate, to be prevented at all costs, rather than enlightened, able to pass accurate judgement on him. Relevant information here.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:34
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Hm. That argument is similar to things I've said defending Eric Flint's characterization of Gustav II Adolf in the Ring of Fire series – defending it to you in fact, if my memory does not deceive me. I personally will concede the point, at least insofar as, not having read Guns of the South, I don't know enough to dispute your description.
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Feb 27, 2022 01:07
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