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...