Book

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. Her task force consists of four converted and heavily armed merchant freighters to ask as lures, while Klaus Hauptman and Reginald Houseman both expect her to fail. Rich and powerful adversaries notwithstanding, the idea that sacrificing thousands of people simply to dispose of Honor is clearly abhorrent even to Hauptman, yet at least he stands to gain something if she succeeds.

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. Weber clearly enjoys the universe he constructed, and has spent significant time developing it. In Flag in Exile, Honor retires to Grayson as steadholder after losing her commission thanks in no small part to Pavel Young. This allows Weber to expound on the changes Harrington has influenced in their society as they struggle to accept her. As expected, this is much easier said than done.

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. It’s both refreshing to see slow acceleration of two or three Gs and all the problems that entails, and frustratingly annoying to read hundreds of pages of space-battle that effectively amounts to dodging obstacles for objective years of travel time.

I just finished The Short Victorious War by David Weber and I’m starting to notice a pattern here:

1. Honor Harrington thrust into difficult situation complicated by politics.
2. Honor thwarts an invasion while overcoming said politics.
3. 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. I’d almost even call this an “interim” novel.