Honor Harrington

Re-reading the series through again, as a time filler at work when nothing's happening, I find myself less and less resistant to calling the whole White Haven/Harrington romance thing prior to the 3-way marriage an Idiot Plot, with everyone staying quiet in spite of their gut feelings about bringing it up, even one of Honor's longest-term friends, Mike Heinke.

On a purely rational level I don't think it really fits IP, mind you, but every mention of internal dialogue along the lines of "I should bring it up but I won't" makes me want to reach through the screen of my smartphone and start wringing the necks of all characters involved.

Basically, I read Basilisk Station (a while back now) and I think he did a lot right, and much more wrong. I enjoyed it overall, but I have many bugbears that stop me from reading another sentence of his.

1. Cardboard characters - very two-dimensional characters, and even when he tries to flesh them out, it's poorly executed to the tune of 'I can see the puppermaster's strings, and I can see exactly what kind of response you're trying to get out of me - immersion break'. Honor herself is a perfect example - she's basically a flawless character with no noticable character flaws, but she has an incident in her past where some doofus tried to force himself on her. It's like the mud hut of character building.

2. Infodumps. Anyone who've read these know what I mean. Doesn't help that I had just finished Starship Troopers before reading it, and so when I reached his explanation about his space marines, I couldn't help but draw comparisons.

3. Something that annoys me in a lot of books is how most of the 'good/decent' characters just sorta align with the main character's purpose/mission and are almost unrealistically accomodating and friendly. They meet, they like each other from the start, when problems happen they work together flawlessly and bounce suggestions off each other or back them with vital support from afar. It's like they're just vehicles to provide stuff for the main character, so that the plot can get along more smoothly, there's no hint of personal ambition or preference or anything. Real people disagree. Basilisk has this in droves. Takes me right out. Plus it's boring.

4. She's a bit Mary Sue. Things just work out perfectly for her, naturally.

Mary Sue?

Really?

I've heard that song before.

Still, if you don't like the books you don't like the books. I'm not sure it's worth convincing you to try again.

I'd say that having her ship shot to crap and half her crew dying in battle is not "working out perfectly" both IC and OOC.

But then, I'm so stocked on the new Rebels trailer that I'm not really in the mood to have that argument either ^^

Aww, no reason to jump on the man for having a negative opinion. Those are perfectly valid things to post as well and are pretty helpful things to have in a thread, in case people peek in to get a general view on how a series is viewed.

I mean feel free to tell why you think he's wrong but if you're just categorically dismissing him without a conversation, well might be better to not reply at all.

And now that I've defended him I'm going to lose all credibility by saying that I mostly agree with him.

I'm someone who usually goes thumbs up on an good infodump and I didn't think they were that obnoxious in Basilisk Station but once you get further into the series they become so ubiquitous and long that they started bothering even me.

Most of the supporting cast or the villains don't get much of a characterization outside from a trait or two that will entirely dictate how they behave. One of those few ways a character is defined is one that I think is at the root of his third complaint, namely whether they're really impressed by (good guy) or envious of (bad guy) Honor. It gets obvious really quickly.

And yes, Honor does suffer from the "can do no wrong" symptom of main characters associated with Mary Suedom. If her decisions have negative consequences, they nearly always feel like they're grudgingly added to state "see, her victory wasn't flawless so stop complaining". So yes, things like suffering red shirt casualties when taking on impossible odds and coming on top. That's not a flaw in a plan, that's war.

All that being said, I rather enjoyed Basilisk Station. You get way too few decent books in the Military Scifi genre and it scratched that itch regardless of the flaws and even the following books are variable levels of enjoyable.

It was around War of Honor when things get hair pullingly and frustratingly inane and I couldn't read another word.

edited 17th Jul '16 2:16:01 AM by GabrieltheThird

You call Honor Harrington a Mary Sue and say you've, like, read the books?

edit

Actually, never mind. I don't think it's worth the drama.

edited 17th Jul '16 2:30:00 PM by TamH70

I will add that I did enjoy Basilisk Station - there's a good story there.

I just don't care about any of the characters (they're all shallow and very two-dimensional, including Honor), the convenient way some people just *click* together and form a working relationship (or are obstinately antagonistic) smacks of plot convenience and feeds back into my previous point, and the infodumps are bad. I don't mind infodumps, in their place. Heinlein often infodumps, but he does it sparingly, spread out and holds your attention. Weber just drops down walls of text that completely halt the flow of the story for me.

These bugged me enough so that I'd probably score it 5/10 rather than 8/10, and to not go on to the next book, especially considering I'd heard some of these problems only get worse in the later novels.

On Basilisk Station was the first book in a whole new SERIES. Weber was trying to introduce an entire new universe - yeah, I know, it's heavily influenced by the Hornblower series (which would usually be a downer for me as I vastly prefer the Richard Bolitho series by Alexander Kent), but still, it's in space. He had to do an infodump or a lot of readers wouldn't have had a clue what's going on. Particularly me as I was newish to the whole space saga thing - I'm Eddings and Feist and Donaldson trash.

The closest thing to the Harrington books I'd read before was the Vorkosigan Saga, and that's a lot less heavy on the description porn for the space combat, and the main Baen Books (Weber's publisher) works that I read apart from that are set in a mid-Thirty Years War Germany that's had a whole American small town dropped on it in a collision that makes the one that wiped out the dinosaurs look like a minor fender bender. In short, I'm out of the target market for the books and I still ended up loving them.

There are plenty of series-starting and universe-establishing books which do not have dreary info dumps of 3 pages or more about sci-fi technical trivia that has little to no bearing on the plot.

Yes, he had to introduce a whole new universe, yes he had some world-building to do. You can do that *without* info dumps if you want, and if you don't then you can make them interesting/entertaining, pertinent and to the point or concise. Weber managed none of that, and that is my problem with his info dumps - not that they exist but that they're awful.

So, yeah... a bit late to this thread, but I only found out about it a few days ago. Sorry for the necroposting, if that's actually considered a bad thing here (this is my first post on TVT, by the way).

I enjoy the Honorverse. I'm not unaware of the problems within it, but I don't have much of a problem overlooking or skimming them. But then, I'm a bit biased...

Years ago, I started reading the HH series, and enjoyed them enough that I started trying to 3D model the ships, based wholly on whatever I could find in the books (text descriptions or the Russ Isler art), and what little information outside the books I could find while searching the web. While posting in-progress images on a 3D modeling forum, I apparently caught the attention of Tom Pope, head of Bu Nine, the fan group that works directly with David to flesh out background tech, history, politics, etc. I was invited in, and the results of being in the group (and having access to information available nowhere else) are here: http://maxxqbunine.deviantart.com/

I noticed earlier in the thread that someone had mentioned going to Honor Con in 2013 - I was a panel member at a couple of the presentations given: Starship Design, and Art - Function Over Form, and some of the other presentations given by other Bu Nine members used my models.

Anyway, I just posted to introduce myself, and see if anyone was interested in talking about my models.

Oh, hey :) been a fan of your models for a while. And don't worry, necroing outside of OTC is not an issue.

However as someone graphically absolutely untalented I am afraid the extend of my part in discussing them is: I like them a lot!

Per the "Toni's Table" forum on Baen's Bar, where head editor Toni Weisskopf can be found, the next book in the series, Uncompromising Honor, is planned to be out in October 2018, with the long wait time due to various issues, including but not limited to issues with David Weber's health.

Suspected as much :/ Hope he gets better.

It's actually over, as I understand it (haven't followed the honorverse forum in ages now, too much stuff in it I wasn't interested in), it's just taken time to recover, and he also has other contractual commitments calling on his time.

Well, in March the new Manticore Ascendant book is coming out too.

Not only has David turned in Uncompromising Honor, he has been posting excerpts from it on his forum.

Uh, links?

Here is the index of the ones posted so far : http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8993

I'm reading the snippets on Dark Fall, the Bolthole novella. And damn which deity did these colonists piss of...

Also. fuck the Legislaturists.

edited 27th Sep '17 4:29:17 AM by 3of4

Dark Fall will eventually be posted to the website as part of Baen's free fiction program, a month before the hardback release of UH, per Toni on her Baen's Bar forum.

Of course, for those who do eARCs^* electronic Advance Reader Copy, pre-editing electronic versions of books, in case anyone didn't recognize the initialism the snippets are fine, but I'm okay with waiting for the finished product. Baen is hardly lacking for authors to help fill in the spaces between Honorverse books, after all.

(I don't get eARCs, and wouldn't even for one written by the hypothetical and figurative love child between Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, and like half the Baen author stable. Too much breakage of enjoyment by the lack of editing for my tastes.)

Got the series from a friend who died. He lend me the first 3, Read the first one, setting was interesting but main character is too perfect to create interest. I was gonna send him back the book but the friend died, and I inherited all the series.

By.. duty for him, I was gonna try to finish the series, but at the end of "honor among ennemy", Honor is a now a exemplary captain and admiral, a better gunslinger than her bodyguard or a professionnal duelist, easily beat at swordmanship a world champion on a planet with a fetish with old tradition, and his informed weakness, being bad at social and political stuff, is now void, now that she has telepath power and has taken the role of a countess. In short, she is better than everyone at... pretty much anything, now. And the other people are either evil, jalous and dumb, or on her fan club.

And there is so many book left... I'm wavering.

Tell me. If its Horatio in space. Is there a Napoleon that will provide a credible threat and some balance in the setting ? Honor, and generaly Manticore, seem so superior to his adversary that it need a Thrawn on the other side to be fair.

It's competence porn in its about how Honor is so wonderful and awesome.

Sadly, after War on Honor, the series throws all challemge out the window.

There are some genuinely great books during the Haven War, though.

I don't know whether to thank or thump Zahn et al for the ending of A Call to Vengeance.

Really, a coin toss?!

My library has several Honorverse books but I don't know where to start

On Basilisk Station

Edit for clarity. That's the first book and traditionally you start at the beginning.

edited 16th Apr '18 4:07:44 PM by KnightofLsama