The Undigestible Mass that is War Of Honor

[elfs]

Having re-read the first nine volumes of St. Harrington and her Magical Treecat, I tried to read the tenth volume, War of Honor. And I can't, I just can't. It's ridiculous. I got as far as Weber's "Honor goes to Crossfire" and I couldn't get into the utter silliness of it. It was a huge chunk of undigestible verbiage that went on and on and on, three pages of Honor recalling every final detail of the incident in a single paragraph so long it makes me wonder if Weber's been reading Proust recently. And this was before she'd gotten to the actual dialogue! I deleted it from my EBook. That's enough for me.

Bill Snyder recently captured late Weber perfectly:

As you know, Robert, the Expository Lump in a Weber book might more justly be called the Expository Megalith, or perhaps the Expository Planetoid. The buildup to a key battle is all too likely to consist of Lieut Soquepuppit's internal monologue on the development of Space Warfare through the Ages, with particular reference to the recent re-introduction of the Gravitic Grabber, pioneered back in the Second Age of Colonization by High Admiral Tucker J. Phanwankh, but subsequently neglected over the centuries, inasmuch as the "immovable object" defense, revolving as it did around the use of a series of precisely phased energy/mass and mass/energy converters to produce a "virtual hypermass" in the attacked ship, thereby causing the attacking Grabber to exit from its carrying vessel at relativistic velocity, appeared to be a decisive counter; but with the recent advent of the Subspace Spike which allows the Grabber to be anchored to the very fabric of the spacetime continuum itself, the tactical imperatives which for the last several centuries have dictated the Disc of Battle formation (and the consequent dread in the heart of every commander of someday being "Mooned"), have begun to yield to the necessity...

That's funny; I'm sure there was a sentence there a second ago.

And what do you know, the battle appears to be all over. Shame we missed it; it was bloody, and heroic, and tragic, and incredibly exciting, and a triumph of innovative tactics over stodgy ones, and therefore entirely too much trouble to actually try to describe on the printed page. But in a minute Lt Soquepuppit will be back to choke up audibly over the incredible valor of the warriors, and muse sadly on the drifting wreckage, and then tell us how the courier ships which bear the battle-tidings home will arrive there in mere hours thanks to the replacement of the Hyperspace Sail by the Hyperspace Parasol, a recent consequence of the development of the curved force-beam...

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

After you've read Weber for a while, you learn a useful skill... how to figure out which bits are Dickensian in nature and which have bearing on the current story arc.

It's worth plowing through (or googling for virtual clif notes), and then going on to At All Costs, which does contain a couple good battles, and a few other plot elements I think you'll find interesting.

[slutdiary.livejournal.com]

So I'm not the only one who started out a fan and wandered off due to terminal ennui?

[grum]

Nope, you're not alone, I even have my father handing me the books when he's done with them. I still don't read them.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It all started as Nelson in Space. And had a few really dreadful puns: "Rob S. Pierre, for instance.

But Nelson, and Exmouth, and the rest, didn't see huge changes in technology. Which is sort of why this is science fiction. And even though the laat man to serve on Nelson's Flagship has only just died (Yes, I know it's still in commission), none of Nelson's band of brothers saw the changes in tech and tactics.

Though the First Lieutenant of HMS Shannon, because he was temporarily in command after the battle and got a promotion as a result, lived long enough to be Admiral of the Fleet, by seniority, in the age of steam, and I think it was a certain Midshipman Jellicoe who was one of the officers at his funeral.

Don't tell David Weber that.

Path of the Fury was pretty good. It hasn't been improved by the prequel, It's tedious battle-wank and doesn't add anything to the character or setting.

[(Anonymous)]

I fully agree with you that War Of Honor is mostly an Undigestible Mass. But I found that with some effort it's possible to get through it, skipping over much of the blah blah, to extract the necessary background information needed for going on with the series.

I found Crown of Slaves a quite entertaining read (but a big departure from the style of earlier Honor novels, which shouldn't be a big surprise as it's written mainly by Eric Flint and not Weber).

Shadow of Saganami wasn't too bad either and comes quite close to recapturing the spirit of the early Honor novels.

Last but not least, At All Costs is a somewhat mixed bag, but by far not as bad as War of Honor.