I promised myself that Honor Among Enemies would be my last David Weber for a while, but I’ve already started In Enemy Hands. Ah well.
This particular entry is pretty tame so far as the Honor Harrington Mythos is concerned. In order to get back into the good graces of the Manticoran military and political complex, Honor is given the task of ridding the Silesian Confederacy area of the pirates menacing their merchant and freight liners.
At this rate, I may actually finish the Honor Harrington series before the heat death of the universe. Having just finished Flag in Exile by David Weber only fifteen years late, I think I’m getting the hang of this series.
Though a friend at work recommended the series, and due to the length, I was suspicious it would be throw-away pulp; I’m willing to admit now that that my fears were mostly unwarranted.
Once again, I’ve spent another few days with David Weber reading Field of Dishonor and regardless of how the series continues, I think he’s finally come up with something truly great.
I fully understand the series is supposed to be a space opera–the painstaking descriptions of galactic fleets, impeller drives, and relativistic weapons reinforces that point admirably–but there was precious little of that here. This time, it’s all an exclusive font of character building, and the Harrington universe is much stronger than if Honor had simply defeated another immanent naval threat.
Once again, Alastair Reynolds cranks out a weighty tome in Redemption Ark (Part of the Revelation Space universe) that proves, at least to me, hard SciFi can be surprisingly entertaining.
Part of the problem with sticking directly to physics, as Alastair with his Ph.D. in Astronomy is likely to do, is that space travel is necessarily limited to current breakthroughs in physics, even when targeted hundreds or thousands of years in the future.
I just finished The Short Victorious War by David Weber and I’m starting to notice a pattern here:
Honor Harrington thrust into difficult situation complicated by politics. Honor thwarts an invasion while overcoming said politics. Profit. Now, I understand these have to be somewhat formulaic, and this book was in fact, enjoyable, so I can’t complain excessively here. The real weakness of this book is that it’s so short, and Honor plays such a minimal part in the action.
