April
25,
2007
David Weber’s Ashes of Victory
confirms the downward trend of the past few Honor Harrington books; Weber has given in to a bad case of laziness by now. It shows up in a number of ways. There are the “witty repartees” whose wittiness is strongly attested to by twinkling eyes and impish grins, but not by any actual witty dialogue. There are piles and piles of quotations attributed to “someone on Old Earth” or “an Old Earth poet,” which combines the tiresome trope of antiquarians in space with a bemusing unwillingness for future-people to remember anyone’s name. And mostly, there are the interminable, hideously dull internal monologues that every character engages in all the time.
And yet, in the last couple hundred pages, Weber remembers how to write a taut action thriller, and events just rip past with the same absorbing intensity found in the earlier volumes, and I still want to read more Harrington.
I don’t toss around accusations of “bloat” very easily; I’m fond of long books, and I enjoy sprawling, digressive narratives. So when I say this book is bloated, you know I’m not just some devotee of 20-page short stories struggling to adapt to this new-fangled “novel.” The most frustrating thing is that there is a good book inside here, and all it would take to bring it out is liberal application of the delete key. I literally think that someone could download the electronic version, strike out about 50% of the book’s material, write not a single word extra, and end up with a very good Harrington novel.
Alas, Weber’s given us a version with metaphorical packing peanuts surrounding all the good stuff, so you need to chew through a lot of styrofoam. I’m not particularly optimistic about the next book, a 1000-page epic saga. But dagnabbit, I want to find out what happens next, so onward.
| :::
April
18,
2007
David Weber’s Echoes of Honor
may be the book where the Honor Harrington series starts to fall apart. It’s never a good sign when a series that’s had books in the 300-500 page range suddenly spews forth a 700-page entry; it’s even less a good sign when that book is filled with all sorts of tedious internal monologues that go on for pages and pages to no end whatsoever, and practically beg for a good hard editing. This book is the first Honor book where I’d occasionally finish a chapter and not want to instantly read more of the book. “Well, that’s enough of that for now,” isn’t a thought that’s accompanied me in my march through the Honorverse so far.
That said, it’s possible this is just a temporary blip. The 700+ pagecounts of later books argue against that theory, but in favor is this: Honor isn’t really the main character of Echoes of Honor. She’s off-screen for the majority of the book, in fact, which means we spend a lot of time with characters we don’t give a fuck about. (And unfortunately, Weber doesn’t seem to know how to write books in which main characters aren’t incredibly awesome, so these secondary characters end up acting in nearly Harringtonianly awesome ways, which is slightly preposterous.) But when we do see Honor, the book is as engrossing as ever. So if Weber gets back to refocusing this series on the hyper-awesome protagonist we’ve come to know and love, things might get better, bloat or no. And either way, this is the eighth book of the series, and it’s a rare series indeed that manages to stay tautly compelling even that long, so any run of sucking that begins here shouldn’t diminish Weber’s previous accomplishment.
| :::
April
5,
2007
The almighty Honor Harrington manages to get captured in David Weber’s In Enemy Hands
, which hopefully isn’t a spoiler for people who read titles. I think it will also come as no spoiler to note that Honor gets captured not because of any failing on her part, but because she is incredibly noble and courageous. Furthermore, the reader may deduce from first principles that being captured is not the end of Honor’s reign of awesome.
What the reader may not have entirely expected is how Honor’s “good” enemies (who you know are good because they’re described as hating their own evil society, even as they unstintingly fulfill their duties to blow people up defending it, because they’re that fucking honorable and duty-filled), the ones that have come close to defeating her in previous books, all cluster up around her capture here, because 1) they’re the only people worthy of capturing Honor, and 2) they need to be subsequently outraged when people are mean to Honor, so that we can understand that being mean to Honor is the greatest offense in the entire universe, appalling to allies and enemies alike.
Moral of the story: Don’t fuck with Honor Harrington. In fact, that may actually be the moral of the whole series. I am not willing to cross her, so am immediately pressing on to the next weirdly-addictive volume of this series.
| :::
April
2,
2007
In most respects, David Weber’s Honor Among Enemies
is exactly what you’d expect. Honor continues to wear a +20 Hat of Awesomeness; the Havenites continue to show the reader what a horrible idea socialism is, for all the socialists out there these days; space adventures continue to be had in a rousing fashion; and telepathic bonding animals continue to be really fucking twee.
(Aside: How come, for all the talk about how telepathic bonding animals are equals, they’re never really treated like it? The people of Valdemar don’t go live in the fields when they bond with horses, and Honor doesn’t go live in the jungle with the treecat tribes. The animal sidekicks hang around with their human partners, and generally act like smart pets rather than actual equals. It’s not really bothersome in general, inasmuch as I have no real desire to read books where people go to live in the jungle with tribes of hunting cats; but it is a notable failure of the reality to match the rhetoric.)
All that aside, there are two new and bothersome things about this book:
- It’s longer than the previous books. Most of the earlier ones were hovering around 350 pages, and this is over 500. Looking ahead on my shelves, I see that a few books down the road, they start to creep over 700 pages. I don’t want to say that it’s bloat for sure, but it’s inauspicious when page counts start creeping up late in a series.
- It’s a motherfucking flipbook! I sort of expect that a current edition pulled off the shelf won’t have this, but I swear to god that in the upper right corner, there’s a little picture that, if you flip quickly through the book, is an animation of a ship exploding. What the hell is this? It’s the most inexplicable thing I’ve seen in a book in a very, very long time. I haven’t seen a flipbook corner-thing since this one Donald Duck comic I read as a kid (wherein Donald did a hula dance). It creeps me out a lot.
Bothersome things aside, I continue to be inexplicably engrossed by Honor’s story, while not for a moment thinking it’s actually legitimately good. I can’t explain this, but it keeps on being true.
| :::