Sable Aradia's Blog, page 22
July 3, 2019
Book Review: Shadow of Freedom by David Weber
Shadow of Freedom by David Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This novel has received a lot of mixed reviews. But I personally really enjoyed it!
Okay, here’s the thing: if you came here looking for Honor Harrington, you’ve come barking up the wrong tree. She’s not here, man. People quote her from time to time and refer to the things she’s done and has been doing.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for space opera… man oh man, you are not going to be disappointed!
Michelle Henke, who just handed the Solarian League the most humiliating defeat in their history, is confused when one of the leaders of a planetary resistance movement in the Verge tells her they need that promised Manticoran Navy support right now. Nobody in Manticore has heard anything about this.
But the Mesan Alignment, the conspiracy of genetic supermen Nazis who have been sucker-punching Manticore and Haven both for the past several books, has been hatching a Byzantine plan to pretend to be Manticoran agents provocateur, encouraging resistance movements against the Solarian League’s Frontier Security on planets that are being “assisted” by them (thank you for the scathing critique of American Imperialism, Mr. Weber.) And then they will fail to provide Navy assistance at a critical moment (because of course, the Manticoran Navy has promised no such thing) and no one will trust Manticore ever again.
In the meantime, the Solarian League is blustering and puffing and threatening Manticore with more and more violence, dancing around the declaration of war. They seem chronically stupid – and certainly, the Manticoran characters don’t help, as they lament how stupid the Sollies seem to be – but in fact, the Sollies are faced with the same dilemma of the British at the outbreak of the First World War. They have been the supreme masters of the waves for so long, they haven’t yet realized that technology has taken a completely different turn and they have been left behind. And with information having to travel over such a huge distance, sometimes they don’t get the memo until its too late.
Granted, there are a plethora of Sollie assholes throwing themselves at Manticore. It would boggle belief, except that it is to be remembered that the Mesan Alignment are seeking these people out to throw at Manticore deliberately.
Mike (Michelle) Henke has been tasked with defending the Talbott Quadrant, a recently-annexed confederation within the new Star Empire of Manticore. But if she doesn’t do something about these rebellions who are expecting Manticoran aid, all outside support for Manticore will collapse.
So she does. And the solution is brilliant.
The two biggest complaints I’ve heard about this book are 1) that Weber has repeated whole passages from other books, and 2) that we follow “a bunch of minor characters who don’t matter and sub-stories that have nothing to do with the main plot.”
Let me address those criticisms, because they seem legit, when you take the book on its own (hence, the four, and not five-star rating,) but as a writer, I don’t think they’re fair. I don’t think people understand what it is that Weber is trying to do.
In the first case, the repeated passages: yes, that’s a thing. But I contend, as I have for some time, that the problem here is that the novel is insufficient to the task Weber has before him, and unfortunately, we don’t have a better medium yet (or at least, not one anyone would read: serials would have covered this just fine, but nobody wants to read serials).
This is a huge, overarching epic story. It’s too big for one book, or even one series (this one is told over three different series: Honor Harrington, Saganami Island, and Wages of Sin.) So in some cases, certain scenes are part of two, or even all three, of the series. If you’re reading the series separately, you need that information, so he has no choice but to repeat them! If you’ve read it before, just skip or skim over it and stop whining about it, is my suggestion.
In the second, the “minor characters with stories that don’t matter to the overall plot”: first, you’re wrong. Those characters are all going to be around for the next few books. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but they are. Second, their stories only don’t matter if you don’t care about the tragedies going on in the rest of the universe as a result of the troubles the Mesan Alignment are creating.
It boggles my brain how everyone can praise George R.R. Martin for A Song of Ice and Fire as being “a grand epic!” and being all excited about how wonderful and broad the world he’s created is, and how cool it is that he tells the stories of the common folks as well as the lords of the land, and here Weber is, doing exactly the same thing, and people are whining about it.
This is a deliberate subversion of the “heroic space opera” where a superman solves everyone’s problems just by existing, because they’re so much better than everyone else. This is an uncomfortably fascist element of heroic science fiction, and Weber rejects it. The future of his universe is shaped not just by the great and powerful, but also missile techs, bodyguards, common soldiers, spies, politicians, and even desperate poor people.
Just adapt to the fact that Honor Harrington is one character in a broad universe of characters who all have their own stories and own realities. Sorry that you were expecting “the tales of superhero Honor Harrington,” but that’s not what this is. Get used to it.
Anyway, this book had me on the edge of my seat. I loved it. After the past couple of books, I felt like I did when Daenarys sailed north to fight the White Walkers with John Snow in Game of Thrones. HELL YEAH!
So I guess I’d have to say that this book is not to be read without the context of the rest of the series. But if you like vast vistas of space opera, this is a real winner.
I’ve started my True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, as I said I would in the last couple of Honorverse reviews I did. You can check it out at the link above!
July 1, 2019
Book Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear
Blood Music by Greg Bear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.
Basic plot: mad scientist full of his own god-complex is told to shut down his experiment, but he persists anyway, and then THINGS GO HORRIBLY WRONG. Basically, it’s Frankenstein.
Except that this is Frankenstein with a cyborg nanovirus taking things into the realm of the truly weird and horrific through a gray goo apocalypse.
Except that it’s all that’s good about Frankenstein, not just what you’ve seen in monster movies in black and white at 3 a.m. It explores deep philosophical and existential questions. Like: what qualifies as “intelligence”? What qualifies as “consciousness?” How does consciousness work? How does memory work? What does it mean to be human? If conscious observation really affects reality, as a prominent theory of quantum physics suggests, what would having a concentration of literally quintillions of consciousnesses in one place do? And ultimately, we are left to decide if the end is the apocalypse for the human race, or a transhuman evolution to the next stage of existence.
There’s not much I can tell you about the plot without spoilers, so I won’t. Instead, I will crow vaguely about how Bear turns the tables, and how the protagonist is not at all who you think it is. And that’s where I’m going to leave it.
Enjoyment of this book seems to depend on how familiar you are with science fiction. If you’re new to the genre, this, perhaps, is not the book for you. But to an “old stardust” like me, it’s not at all surprising that this book was nominated for, or won, just about every major award in science fiction in 1986. And it desperately deserved them.
June 29, 2019
Book Review: A Rising Thunder by David Weber
A Rising Thunder by David Weber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’ve been trying to read the Honorverse books in chronological order. This book brings a lot of disparate storylines together. As a result, little of Honor Harrington is seen in this book, although her story is central to the action.
This book is more “space opera” in that it tries to consider a broad milieu of action. As a result, there’s not as many good space battles as in some of the other books in the series, and a lot of it is build up. I think it suffers when considered on its own, as a result. However, when considered in the scope of the entire story, it’s necessary and important. And there’s still enough tension, cloak-and-dagger, and good space battles to keep me interested. Not the best book in the series, but a good one nonetheless.
I’ve started my True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, as I said I would in the last couple of Honorverse reviews I did. You can check it out at the link above!
June 28, 2019
Book Review: The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read for the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.
This is one of the great classics of science fiction by one of the Triumvirate (the others, of course, being Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein.) In a city in the far future, the human race has achieved immortality of a sort. Their personalities and memories are stored in a massive computer database, and reloaded into bodies which are also created by computer when their bodies die. However, this city is (they believe) the only one left on a dying earth, where the oceans are long gone and the moon has been destroyed because it was going to crash into the earth. And not all humans are “alive” at any one time, because, of course, they are limited to a single city. Artificial realities are created to entertain the humans in the city, and nobody really wants anything more… except occasionally, a “Unique” is born who has no previous life or memories. We follow one of those Uniques, Alvin, as he grows to adulthood and then makes escaping the city and finding out what else is out there his raison d’etre.
Thousands of years ago, humans had expanded to a vast interstellar empire, but they encountered some kind of existential threat out there that made them crawl back into their own navels forevermore. No one supports Alvin’s efforts, and they even work to actively thwart them. But eventually, of course, Alvin gets out, and he discovers that a) no, the city isn’t the only human civilization left on Earth, although the other one that he finds is extremely strange to him; and b) the Ancients have left a spaceship buried for someone to discover.
This novel has received a lot of criticism for a) not enough action b) lack of character development and c) a narrative that doesn’t blast into some grand climax. I think these reviewers are missing the point. As my partner has postulated, popular fiction is about the arc of the plot, literary fiction is about the arc of the character, and good science fiction is about the arc of the question. Clarke’s question is, “What makes us human?” More than that, “What are the best qualities of being human?” And I think he answers this beautifully. The end creates as many questions as answers, but since the civilization that Alvin comes from do not ask questions, that, itself, is the resolution.
An excellent book, well worthy of its status as a science fiction classic.
June 24, 2019
A True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, Part 4 @DavidWeberBooks
I’m re-reading the last ten books in the Honorverse space opera series by David Weber in true chronological order. That is to say, I am reading it all as if it were one big story, not several separate books, in the order in which the events described took place (as much as possible.) I will even be skipping around between books as necessary. If you’d like some insight into why I’m doing that, and what I recommend you read before we begin (if you’d like to follow along,) please see my other posts in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Prerequisites: War of Honor, Crown of Slaves
Suggested: “Service of the Sword” from Service of the Sword.
Books Required for this Post: The Shadow of Saganami, At All Costs
Background:
The Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven. Unbeknownst to the characters, but knownst to us, Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola has altered diplomatic correspondence between the two star-nations to raise tensions between them in order to increase his own power base by undermining President Eloise Pritchart and her administration. He was aided and abetted by a contact within the elected right wing High Ridge government in Manticore who was manipulating events for her own reasons, encouraged by a third party. Neither nation really wants to fight, but they feel they have no choice.
In the meantime, systems in the Verge known as the Talbott Cluster, have petitioned for annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore, who recently discovered a major wormhole nexus, the Lynx Terminus, in their region of space– again as a consequence of the events on Torch. This is in part motivated by the lurking threat of the Office of Frontier Security (Solarian League,) which has a habit of gobbling up nearby systems into their vast empire and then exploiting them, always under the pretext of having been invited in to “help maintain order.” The Talbott Cluster systems believe that Manticore will be able to protect them from Frontier Security.
Reading Order:
I remind you that my idea of the sequence of events at this point is probably, in part, inaccurate. I am making my best guess. If someone is out there who’s better at crunching the numbers than I am, and you can tell that I am in error, please let me know and I’ll make the changes.
I’m basing my estimation of the timeline on a few things:
On the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, a chronological reading order of the books is posted. It tells me that:
Torch of Freedom begins November 1919 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami begins June 1920 PD;
At All Costs begins July 1920 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami ends July 1921 PD;
At All Costs ends August 1921 PD;
Storm from the Shadows begins December 1920 PD.
On the same wiki, a loose chronology of events is posted. It gives me a series of significant events (though often without a lot of information) and at least the rough date at which they occur. Some of these events are retold in different points of view between books. Even when they aren’t, they are often referred to in other books, and have effects which reverberate through all books. They can be used as checkpoints to line up dates, and as cross-references.
All other times are estimates based roughly on the speed of ship travel or on how long I think it would take to accomplish specific tasks. These are often not mentioned specifically, and therefore represent my best guess.
Last Episode:
A new class graduates from Saganami Island. We join a few of the new graduates, including Helen Zilwicki, whom we have met before, as they prepare for their middy cruise aboard the Hexapuma, which will be captained by Captain Terekhov. The crew also included Lieutenant Abigail Hearns, the first woman in the Grayson Space Navy, as a junior tactical officer. We’ve met her before too. They will be assigned to the Talbott Cluster under the command of Admiral Khumalo, whom we know is a Conservative, by-the-book administrator type.
The “Strategy Committee” on Mesa has been manipulating everything that’s happened in the past few books behind the scenes for their own reasons, including the resumption of hostilities between Manticore and Haven, the pressure on the situation that led to Torch, and the Erewhonese breaking from their alignment with Manticore. But things haven’t gone exactly the way they wanted. Torch’s liberation and Erewhon’s alliance with Haven were not part of their plans, and those events played out that way because of the actions of Cachat and Zilwicki. They are planning to seize control of the Lynx Terminus by giving new ships to the Monica System, and by rabblerousing terrorist groups in opposition to the proposed annexation. They are also planning something called Operation Rat Poison, which involves assassinations with the use of some experimental new nanotech.
At home on Grayson, Honor prepares for the imminent death of her friend Howard Clinkscales, and spends some time with her nieces and nephews. She is urged to get on with creating an heir for the Steading, so that her much-younger sister doesn’t get too comfortable in the role before it’s taken away.
July (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 4 – Honor returns to Landing & White Haven, enjoying the company of her lover, Hamish Alexander, Earl White Haven, and his wife, Emily. For those who haven’t read the previous books, this is an established relationship, kept secret from the general public, which is happening with the full consent of all involved. (Kudos to Weber for writing a healthy, fulfilling polyamorous relationship! It’s nice to see!) The reason that it’s being kept secret is that Honor and Hamish’s political opponents tried to drum up a scandal around a supposed relationship between the two of them under the High Ridge administration, and now that there actually is a relationship between them, there’s a lot of political baggage around that. There are no rules limiting marriage to one man and one woman in a society where life-extending Prolong exists, but when Hamish and Emily were married, they originally vowed monogamy, and as any fan of the series knows, vow-keeping is a big deal in Manticoran culture. However, Emily was in a severe accident several years ago leaving her mostly paralyzed, so there are extenuating circumstances. It doesn’t help that their treecats, Nimitz and Samantha, are mates, either, especially since their empathic abilities has a bit of a rollover effect on their bonded humans, something fans of Pern will recognize.
July (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 5 & 6 – When he learns that Kevin Usher, Cachat’s direct superior and mentor, is investigating the matter, Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola plots with Colonel Jean-Claude Nesbitt to make it look like someone was trying to frame him for altering the diplomatic correspondence with Manticore, instead of trying to hide that he’d done it at all. They conspire to frame Yves Grosclaude, Giancola’s co-conspirator, for the frame job. (Head swimming yet? Mine is!) In the meantime, the White Havens and Honor and their treecats enjoy each others’ company. There’s a bit of comic relief as Honor and Hamish try to make it look like they weren’t both sleeping in Hamish’s bed in the morning, even to their staff, and Honor isn’t as hungry as usual in the morning.
July (?) 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 6 – The crew of the Hexapuma does a simulator exercise, and Helen Zilwicki makes a significant tactical mistake. Abigail Hearns oversees the exercise. It’s beginning to look like the crew might be running undermanned, which means that even though she’s too junior for the position, Hearns, as the acting tactical officer may end up filling the role.
July (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 7 – Hamish and Honor are summoned to an audience with Queen Elizabeth III. Honor is appointed to Captain the Unconquered, Captain Saganami’s ship (restored,) which is a special honour in that it’s the only ship in the Navy that can be commanded directly by a flag officer. They attend an audience to promote Honor to Grand Knight, mostly a PR thing, since Honor is regarded as both lucky and good by the Service. The senior civilian leadership and military leadership discuss the tactical situation with Haven and the Alizon raid. Their wall of battle and new technical toys are explained to the reader in the course of their discussion. We are reminded that Manticore is outnumbered, and Haven is in the middle of a big build-up they can’t match. We learn that within two years, Manticore will probably be simply overwhelmed by Haven, so if they’re going to have a victory, there’s a time limit.
July (?) 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 7 – We meet Agnes Nordbrandt, who is starting a terrorist movement on the Talbott Cluster planet Kornati in opposition to the annexation. She meets with a man named Firebrand, who says he is coordinating movement to oppose the annexation on many planets in the Cluster, and he promises her modern Solarian weapons, purchased by (supposedly) stealing money from the Kornatian oligarchs.
July (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 8 – The Havenites do an intel-gathering raid on the Zanzibar system. The Zanzibaran leaders decide to ignore Manticoran Navy advice and treat it like a serious attack. Their secret system defenses are revealed to the enemy as a result.
Observations:
You might think that reading back and forth between two books like this would slow down the pace, but it really doesn’t. There’s enough mixing of tactical tension, the beginnings of action, and personal character stuff that it keeps bopping by pretty much as any Honorverse book ever has. The downside is that keeping track of this many characters at once can be daunting, as any fan of A Song of Ice and Fire can attest to. This is, in part, why I’ve bolded many of the important characters’ names. Feel free to come back and use these posts as a reference.
The story is progressing in earnest now, and there are a lot of balls in the air. But I think it will be fulfilling to see them all coming back together at once.
One thing I enjoy quite a bit about this series is Honor’s essential humanity. She has a life outside of the Navy, and feelings, and we care about her life because we care about her. Many other writers of military fiction are content to leave all of that off-screen. I don’t like that myself. I can watch movies if I want nothing but action. I want to know why characters do what they do. I want to know who they are. Weber is a master of giving us that, both with the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and often, even villains turn out to be heroes later in the series.
On the other hand, he’s not afraid to give us some genuine garbage people, too. Some people are just assholes, and they have no reason to do what they do other than their own selfishness, arrogance, or love of power. I like to see the villains plot because I want to see them get what’s coming to them in the end. Or at least, I hope that they do.
We’ll resume with The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 8, next time.
June 22, 2019
Book Review: Mission of Honor by David Weber @DavidWeberBooks
Mission of Honor by David Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Honor! I’ve missed you!
Since I’m trying to read the Honorverse books in chronological order from On Basilisk Station, it’s been some time since I’ve seen much of Honor Harrington. The development of the overarching macroplot that is the focus of the current books started with other characters, and only starts to splash on Honor peripherally at first, such as by sending her back to war with Haven (see At All Costs.)
But now she’s in it up to her ears. Things are exploding between Manticore and the huge and powerful Solarian League in Talbott, and the war against Haven is one they really can’t afford to have in the face of such a threat. So she is sent to Haven to decide the war once and for all . . . by making peace.
What a joy it is to watch our battle-seasoned heroine serve as a diplomat as well as a soldier! She is fortunately aided by her empathic link with her treecat, Nimitz, and her own subsequently enhanced empathic abilities. She’s been a voice of reason in support of the new Havenite administration for a long time, so it makes sense to send her, despite her lack of diplomatic experience. She’s an iron fist in a velvet glove – her battlefleet remains parked in Haven’s home space while she tries to negotiate – but she really means it in her attempts to bring an end to hostilities.
Action is cut between Honor’s efforts and the rapidly escalating situation in Talbott, where Mike Henke is attempting to hold the fort. Some good space battles happen that get the blood stirring.
And in the meantime, the provocateurs at Mesa laugh and twirl their mustaches as the tsunami they’ve unleashed crashes off to destroy Manticore and Haven both.
Then something happens that nobody sees coming, and the game completely changes.
I would give this book five stars for its excellent action and plotting, except that we end up bogged down in a number of apparently unnecessary conference scenes while people speculate about what others might be thinking and planning. It’s good strategic thinking, but it really derails tension when the characters are constantly saying, “This is my idea of what they’re thinking. Oh, they could actually be thinking this.” That “oh” became a frustrating refrain.
For the discerning space opera fan, the scale of the space battles starts to ramp up in this book noticeably. There’s a lot more ships and a lot – a lot – more missiles flying. I love it! Bring on the explosions! Bring on the worlds-shattering, high-stakes fleet battles!
But then, I love the high-stakes politics just as much. When the fate of worlds hangs on the utterance of a word, I’m just as there as I would be with a battle to the death in spaceships.
Weber once again proves why he is one of the modern masters of space opera. Definitely recommended.
And hey! I’ve started my True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, as I said I would in the last couple of Honorverse reviews I did. You can check it out at the link above!
June 20, 2019
A True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, Part 3 @DavidWeberBooks
I’m re-reading the last ten books in the Honorverse space opera series by David Weber in true chronological order. That is to say, I am reading it all as if it were one big story, not several separate books, in the order in which the events described took place (as much as possible.) I will even be skipping around between books as necessary. If you’d like some insight into why I’m doing that, and what I recommend you read before we begin (if you’d like to follow along,) please see my other posts in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Prerequisites: War of Honor, Crown of Slaves
Suggested: “Service of the Sword” from Service of the Sword.
Books Required for this Post: The Shadow of Saganami, At All Costs
Background:
The Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven. Unbeknownst to the characters, but knownst to us, Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola has altered diplomatic correspondence between the two star-nations to raise tensions between them in order to increase his own power base by undermining President Eloise Pritchart and her administration. He was aided and abetted by a contact within the elected right wing High Ridge government in Manticore who was manipulating events for her own reasons, encouraged by a third party. Neither nation really wants to fight, but they feel they have no choice.
In the meantime, systems in the Verge known as the Talbott Cluster, have petitioned for annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore, who recently discovered a major wormhole nexus, the Lynx Terminus, in their region of space– again as a consequence of the events on Torch. This is in part motivated by the lurking threat of the Office of Frontier Security (Solarian League,) which has a habit of gobbling up nearby systems into their vast empire and then exploiting them, always under the pretext of having been invited in to “help maintain order.” The Talbott Cluster systems believe that Manticore will be able to protect them from Frontier Security.
Reading Order:
I remind you that my idea of the sequence of events at this point is probably, in part, inaccurate. I am making my best guess. If someone is out there who’s better at crunching the numbers than I am, and you can tell that I am in error, please let me know and I’ll make the changes.
I’m basing my estimation of the timeline on a few things:
On the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, a chronological reading order of the books is posted. It tells me that:
Torch of Freedom begins November 1919 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami begins June 1920 PD;
At All Costs begins July 1920 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami ends July 1921 PD;
At All Costs ends August 1921 PD;
Storm from the Shadows begins December 1920 PD.
On the same wiki, a loose chronology of events is posted. It gives me a series of significant events (though often without a lot of information) and at least the rough date at which they occur. Some of these events are retold in different points of view between books. Even when they aren’t, they are often referred to in other books, and have effects which reverberate through all books. They can be used as checkpoints to line up dates, and as cross-references.
All other times are estimates based roughly on the speed of ship travel or on how long I think it would take to accomplish specific tasks. These are often not mentioned specifically, and therefore represent my best guess.
Last Episode:
Manpower, a transstellar corporation that produces genetically-engineered slaves against interstellar law as observed (at least by lip service) in most star-nations, operating out of the planet Mesa, has recently lost a slave planet to a slave liberation movement. Now called Torch, its new Queen, Berry Zilwicki, is concerned about the fate of her people. Her father, Anton Zilwicki, super-spook of Manticore, and a family friend, Victor Cachat, super-spook of Haven, whose governments have agreed to cooperate on Torch despite being at war, know that Manpower should not be sustainable in a hostile universe, and they have too many resources for the size of what they seem to be. They have decided to go to the planet Mesa to find out what’s really going on.
Sector Governor Oravil Barregos of the Maya Sector (Frontier Security,) and Admiral Luiz Rozsak of the Maya Sector, are conspiring to build a navy in secret that will allow the Maya Sector to break off from the Solarian League and stay independent.
Zachariah McBride, tech geek, and his brother Jack, a spook, are both deep inside “the Onion,” which is the secret layer within layers of the Mesan Alignment conspiracy. We know it has something to do with genetic engineering, and all those within the Onion are genetically-engineered supermen like Khan’s people in Star Trek.
A Mesan Alignment tech named Herlander Simoes is asked, along with his wife, to raise a child who is the result of an experimental gene complex. Children so engineered are super math geniuses, but usually degenerate into an extreme form of autism before they reach adolescence. It is hoped that being raised with other math geniuses will help to prevent that from happening.
June 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Prologue to Chapter 4 – In the Prologue, we are reintroduced to Captain Aivars Terekhov, whom we’ve met in previous Honor Harrington books, and we learn that he is suffering from PTSD that comes from having fought his ships bravely in an impossible situation. He wakes up from a flashback nightmare, and we learn he is now going back to active duty.
In Chapter 1, a new class graduates from Saganami Island. Honor Harrington is the one who gives them their final speech, about the extraordinary self-sacrifice of Captain Saganami, and how they may be called upon one day to make that choice. So I think we get an idea about how the book is likely to end.
This class includes Helen Zilwicki, whom we have met before. We also re-meet Lieutenant Abigail Hearns of the Grayson Space Navy, who is serving aboard the ship the new Saganami grads are reporting to, under Captain Terekhov.
We are also told about the situation in the Talbott Cluster, where their squadron is being assigned, to aid Baroness Medusa and Admiral Khumalo in putting in a good show and protecting the sector. Khumalo express his concern that Terekov may not yet have recovered from the shock of his experience enough to do his duty, and we are shown that Khumalo is a by-the-book kind of man. This combination likely does not bode well.
July 1920 PD – At All Costs, Prologue through Chapter 1 – In the Prologue, Haven launches a probing attack against the Manticoran ally Alizon, which gives Weber a chance to explain the tactical and strategic situation to us through Havenite eyes. We learn that they don’t intend to destroy Manticore, just force them into a situation in which Haven can dictate peace terms.
In Chapter 1 we catch up with Honor having a rare family moment, where she reads a story to her nieces and nephews on Grayson. The book she reads is important to the story, but unless you have read the book (which I have not,) I find that Weber’s references are largely lost. The Protector of Grayson strongly suggests to Honor that she might want to make her own heir to her Steading soon, so that it minimizes the disruption in the life of her much-younger sister, who is her current heir. They are talking about the imminent death of Howard Clinkscales, a character we’ve gotten to know and appreciate in previous books.
July 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 2 – We meet some bad guys! Aldona Asinimovna meets with her superior, Albercht Detweiler, in some secret library on Mesa to meet with a bunch of people to discuss the Talbott Cluster. Asinimovna and Isabel Bardasano are called to account for the situation getting so out of hand on Torch.
Apparently Manpower has a special interest in its local wormhole junction. The Strategy Committee of Manpower did not anticipate Manticore and Haven working together because they have been shooting at each other after a while. They also didn’t like how they had stopped shooting at each other prior to the event. Their ally in Manticore, Descroix, remains in place in return for financial support and access to their intelligence, but she was unwilling to work against the ceasefire. They were displeased by the triumph of the Havenite revolutionary government under Pritchart, but pleased by the Manticore High Ridge administration’s political tone-deafness.
Technodyne wanted access to Manticoran tech through Erewhon. They started stepping up action at Torch (then called Verdant Vista) to draw out anti-piracy activity from Erewhon so they could pounce on the anti-pirate craft and take them out (and study their tech.) They hoped to antagonize Erewhon against Manticore because they knew the High Ridge government would decline to intervene, and they intended to offer Erewhon tech and ships through Technodyne to defend themselves when they withdrew from their alliance with Manticore. Instead, when the break happened, Erewhon went to Haven, thanks to the work of Governor Barregos.
Zilwicki and Cachat, apparently, partially neutralized Descroix by removing her access to blackmail files against many Manticoran nobles and officials, and then she disappeared, which was probably Asinimovna’s doing.
Are you still following? I know it’s complex. The TL;DR version is that this Strategy Committee on Mesa has been manipulating everything that’s happened in the past few books behind the scenes for their own reasons, including the resumption of hostilities between Manticore and Haven, the pressure on the situation that led to Torch, and the Erewhonese breaking from their alignment with Manticore. But things haven’t gone exactly the way they wanted. Torch’s liberation and Erewhon’s alliance with Haven were not part of their plans, and those events played out that way because of the actions of Cachat and Zilwicki.
We learn this Strategy Committee has something to do with five centuries of genetic engineering and something out of ancient history called the Slav Supremacists. They and they ancestors have been planning for some big goal, and they view Manticore and Haven as the biggest threats to that goal. They are happy the two are shooting at each other again, but they don’t want them to expand into Talbott. They still don’t have any Manty Naval hardware, though, which they want.
They mention that an operation is already underway to destabilize the situation in Talbott. Another operation is underway to work out some deal with Mannerheim so that armed takeover of the Torch system can proceed.
They also discuss something called Operation Rat Poison, which Bardasano is responsible for. They discuss now Bardasano and Asinimovna are to meet with Verrochio, and warn them about how they’ll have to deal with various members of his group. (This helped me to construct this timeline, because I know that meeting happened after this one.) They are to keep an eye on Valery Ottweiler, to see if he should be “brought fully in.” We learn that Operation Rat Poison will involve the use of some new, almost impossible to detect nanotech in an assassination, but Bardasano has some reservations, since it is largely untested in the field.
July (?) 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 5 – We meet more bad guys as they sit around discussing their plans for the Talbott Cluster, and the “neobarbs” of Manticore (short for “neo-barbarians.”) They are wearing the latest Solarian fashions, surrounded by tasteful luxury (which is often a hint we’re dealing with bad guys in Weber’s books:
Commissioner Lorcan Verrochio , Frontier Security Commissioner of the Madras Sector, which is near the Talbott Cluster.
Aldona Anisimovna – Manpower operative and full member of their Board of Directors.
Isabel Bardasano – Cadet member of the Jessyk Combine, which is actually owned by Manpower.
Volkhart Kalokainos – Representative of Kalokainos Shipping, who clearly views the annexation as a threat.
Vice-Commissioner Hongbo Junyan – Whom we know is manipulating his superior, and has been good at doing so for years, and it has something to do with Manpower because Anisimovna knows about it.
Valery Ottweiler – Representative of the Government of Mesa.
Brigadier General Francisca Yucel , Commander of the local Solarian Gendarmerie, who has a reputation for being “willfully brutal.”
Izrok Levakonic , Representative of Technodyne Industries
We learn that the bad guys recognize that Manticoran policies would be bad for their plans of exploiting the Cluster, that Mesa’s government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of its transstellar corporations, and that the Solarian Government is deeply penetrated by Mesan transstellar agents. We learn that they view Manticore as a special threat because of its advanced tech and its proximity to Old Earth (just a week away through wormholes.) Or at least, this is the apparent motivation that Asinimovna and Bardasano are using to justify their involvement to their erstwhile “allies.”
They decide to aid fringe factions within the Cluster who are willing to take violent exception to their planets joining Manticore, knowing that the unrest and resistance to annexation that would create, would give Frontier Security an excuse to “intervene” under the pretext that they meant to ensure that the annexation vote was fairly and properly counted (which, of course, they would then manipulate.) They believe it will be easy to manipulate Solarian public opinion against the Manticorans, who are already unpopular due to their war with Haven and the established Havenite propaganda machine.
They also hope to provoke a direct military confrontation with forces of the Solarian League. We learn that Bardasano and Asinimovna are plotting to destroy Manticore and bring great harm to Haven as well, and they and Ottweiler also plan to “have a talk with their friend Roberto Tyler” about providing him with Technodyne equipment for a potential armed conflict.
This is a very important chapter. Don’t make the mistake of skimming over the villains doing their mustache-twirling. I did on the first round, and regretted it for the next several books. I kept asking, “Wait; who is this guy, again?”
Observations:
Read in this way, we guess that the “Mesan Alignment” is the conspiracy motivating the Mesan Strategy Committee. And we see that Zilwicki and Cachat are absolutely right; something is rotten in Manpower. Clearly, Manpower is the direct arm of the Mesan Alignment, and many other Mesan transstellar corporations are either directly involved or being manipulated by them.
But we have no other hints about this conspiracy; just that it has something to do with genetic engineering and probably a genetic supremacy movement, and that it exists. We know it controls a lot of things it shouldn’t on Mesa and has a lot of fingers in a lot, a lot, of pies. But what are they hoping to accomplish and why? And why do they view Manticore and Haven as such threats? We have no idea.
Manpower’s motivations, we thought we understood. They’re evil corporate bastards who don’t view human beings as anything other than tools and equipment. We get that; that’s what large corporations are all about, after all. This is just a bit extreme.
I can’t help but wonder, did Weber consider pronunciation when he came up with this idea? “Mesan” sounds a lot like “Mason” when you say it aloud… And I have to compliment him on the way he distributed this information between books. I had no idea that he’d given us all of this, this soon, until I did this blog post. Remember, while we are reading in chronological order, At All Costs was not published until a year after The Shadow of Saganami, even though the meeting on Mesa it described happened before the meeting with Verrochio, and Torch of Freedom wasn’t published for four years after that. Bloody clever!
Is your head spinning yet? Mine is! I think we’ll leave off here for now, and resume with At All Costs, Chapter 3, and The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 6, next time.
June 17, 2019
A True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, Part 2 @DavidWeberBooks
I’m re-reading the last ten books in the Honorverse space opera series by David Weber in true chronological order. That is to say, I am reading it all as if it were one big story, not several separate books, in the order in which the events described took place (as much as possible.) I will even be skipping around between books as necessary. If you’d like some insight into why I’m doing that, and what I recommend you read before we begin (if you’d like to follow along,) please see my first post in this series.
Prerequisites: War of Honor, Crown of Slaves
Suggested: “From the Highlands” from Changer of Worlds, “Fanatic” from Service of the Sword.
Books Required for this Post: Torch of Freedom
Background:
The Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven. Unbeknownst to the characters, but knownst to us, Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola has altered diplomatic correspondence between the two star-nations to raise tensions between them in order to increase his own power base by undermining President Eloise Pritchart and her administration. He was aided and abetted by a contact within the elected right wing High Ridge government in Manticore who was manipulating events for her own reasons, encouraged by a third party. Neither nation really wants to fight, but they feel they have no choice.
To add insult to injury, the High Ridge government was so successful in alienating Manticore’s allies that one of them, Erewhon, has allied with Haven instead. They brought a great deal of Manticore’s superior technology to their new allies right before war was declared once again. The Manticorans are outnumbered, heavily demilitarized after the High Ridge administration, and they took a heavy beating in the opening salvos of the war. so it is a race against time to get Haven to back down before the Havenite build-up of new tech goes online, and Manticore is fighting from a position of weakness.
As a consequence of the events in Erewhon, which also involved manipulators from the planet Mesa (linked to a company called Manpower, which produces genetically-engineered slaves, despite interstellar law that forbids such things,) the slave planet Verdant Vista declared its independence as a star nation, overthrew their masters, and have named themselves the Kingdom of Torch. They were aided in this by:
Victor Cachat , attache to Erewhon and super-spook for the Republic of Haven;
Anton Zilwicki , Manticoran super-spook from the planet Sphinx;
His girlfriend Catherine Montaigne , a Liberal Manticoran politician who has been aiding a terrorist group of former slaves, now intimately involved in the Torch government, known as the Audubon Ballroom ;
Manticoran Princess Ruth Winton , who’d been sent to Erewhon as Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore’s representative because she is serving her traditional Navy service as a Winton in ONI (Manticoran Navy Intelligence);
Berry Zilwicki, now Queen Berry I of Torch , who was serving as a proxy and body double for Princess Ruth before she became a Queen;
Captain Oversteegan , an aristocrat within the Manticoran Royal Navy;
A Frontier Security Sector Governor named Oravil Barregos and a detachment of Solarian League Marines;
Thandi Palane , a “Scrag” (genetically-engineered super-soldier) who originally worked for Manpower but switched sides to support liberation;
The Audubon Ballroom itself, headed by one Jeremy X .
Haven, Manticore, and the Solarian League have decided to work together to aid the fledgling kingdom, despite any tensions between them.
In the meantime, systems in the Verge known as the Talbott Cluster, have petitioned for annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore, who recently discovered a major wormhole nexus, the Lynx Terminus, in their region of space–again as a consequence of the events on Torch. This is in part motivated by the lurking threat of the Office of Frontier Security (Solarian League,) which has a habit of gobbling up nearby systems into their vast empire and then exploiting them, always under the pretext of having been invited in to “help maintain order.” The Talbott Cluster systems believe that Manticore will be able to protect them from Frontier Security.
Reading Order:
How I wish that Weber had started dividing up chapters according to month and year earlier! There’s none of that to be found in At All Costs or The Shadow of Saganami, and it’s not part of Storm from the Shadows either (although that won’t matter until later.) Torch of Freedom is much easier, because I think that’s when he started doing it; although the headings aren’t as easy to find (later he puts them on splash pages.)
Therefore, my idea of the sequence of events is probably, in part, inaccurate. I am making my best guess. If someone is out there who’s better at crunching the numbers than I am, and you can tell that I am in error, please let me know and I’ll make the changes.
I’m basing my estimation of the timeline on a few things:
On the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, a chronological reading order of the books is posted. It tells me that:
Torch of Freedom begins November 1919 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami begins June 1920 PD;
At All Costs begins July 1920 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami ends July 1921 PD;
At All Costs ends August 1921 PD;
Storm from the Shadows begins December 1920 PD.
On the same wiki, a loose chronology of events is posted. It gives me a series of significant events (though often without a lot of information) and at least the rough date at which they occur. Some of these events are retold in different points of view between books. Even when they aren’t, they are often referred to in other books, and have effects which reverberate through all books. They can be used as checkpoints to line up dates, and as cross-references.
All other times are estimates based roughly on the speed of ship travel or on how long I think it would take to accomplish specific tasks. These are often not mentioned specifically, and therefore represent my best guess.
November 1919 Post Diaspora (PD) – Torch of Freedom, Chapters 1 through 2 – In these chapters, we are introduced to the complexities of the overall plot. We learn that Sector Governor Oravil Barregos of the Maya Sector (Frontier Security,) and Admiral Luiz Rozsak of the Maya Sector, are conspiring to build a navy in secret that has the power to defend the Maya Sector in an effort to break off from the Solarian League and stay independent. They are concerned about the effects Cachat and Zilwicki’s activities around Torch may have on their plans.
December 1919 PD – Torch of Freedom, Chapters 3 through 4 – Anton Zilwicki returns to Torch. He and Victor Cachat realize through mutual discussion that “something is wrong with Manpower.” Manpower, as a business model in a hostile universe, should not be sustainable. So why has it existed for so long? And where was it getting the money to fund its activities around Torch? Clearly something else had to be going on. They determine they have to go to Mesa and find out what it is.
January 1920 PD – Torch of Freedom, Chapters 4 through 5 – We are first introduced to the Mesan Alignment through the eyes of Zachariah McBride and his brother Jack. Zach is a tech geek and Jack is a spook. They are both deep inside “the Onion,” which is the secret layer within layers of the Mesan Alignment conspiracy. We learn it has something to do with genetic engineering, and we learn that all those within the Onion are genetically-engineered supermen like Khan’s people in Star Trek. They discuss the implications of previous and current events on what they believe the Alignment’s plans are.
January 1920 PD – Torch of Freedom, Chapters 6 through 7 – A Mesan Alignment tech named Herlander Simoes is asked, along with his wife, to raise a child who is the result of an experimental gene complex. Children so engineered are super math geniuses, but usually degenerate into an extreme form of autism before they reach adolescence. It is hoped that being raised with other math geniuses will help to prevent that from happening. We won’t see them again for a while. In the meantime, further implications of a mission to Mesa are discussed on Torch. We won’t see them again for a while, either.
Read in this way, these opening chapters of Torch of Freedom become a Prologue for the rest of the grand story. We know they’re going to be important sometime, but at the moment, they seem so removed from the next series of events we’re going to get into that we can’t see how. We know there’s something moving out there in the shadows, and we even have a face we can put to some of them, but who are they? What, exactly, are they doing? And why is this important to the Star Kingdom of Manticore?
This post has already become quite long. We’ll begin working on The Shadow of Saganami and At All Costs in the next post.
June 13, 2019
A True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, Part 1 @DavidWeberBooks
I’ve now finished reading the Honor Harrington “Honorverse” space opera series. Mostly, as I’m sure you can tell by my reviews, I’ve been impressed. I thought some books were better than others, and like many fans, I became impatient with sections that were repeated between books.
But as a writer, I began to notice things. Like how those repeated scenes were always told from different points of view. Like how the events of one book changed the course of other books, even when those events were happening simultaneously. In the last few books of the series, not all of which directly featured Honor Harrington, Weber even started separating groups of chapters by month and date, so that you could track when simultaneous events were taking place.
I began to wonder at his process. I started to see exactly how grand in scope the tale was that he was telling. In great space opera tradition, the fates of worlds turned on single decisions, and the scale of the events was breathtaking.
I don’t know David Weber, so I can’t speak to exactly how his process works. But I began to visualize a writer sitting in his office, realizing what a huge undertaking he had decided to embrace. Realizing there would be no way he could fit all the events of even a single month into a single book, because the result would have been not just a brick, but a cinderblock. Realizing that the art form of the novel was as insufficient to the task ahead of him as it was to Lord of the Rings.
I can see him thinking about it, and realizing he was telling at least three stories simultaneously that all intertwined.
So I see him putting headings onto whiteboards. “Honor,” for all the parts of Honor Harrington’s personal story. “Torch,” for all the parts that involved Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki. “Saganami,” for all the Saganami Island graduate-related tales, including Mike Henke, Honor’s best friend. And then I see him getting out a bunch of Post-It Notes and putting the various events under the appropriate headings.
I imagine he started with the Honor Harrington material, because she was his first major character and his world is largely seen through her eyes. Then it was easy enough to separate the Cachat and Zilwicki material, especially since that series is co-written with Eric Flint, and they’d have to be in agreement about what went into those books and what didn’t. “Saganami” would have to encompass everything else.
So then he would have played around with those Post-Its, deciding on where to end one story and begin another within those categories. He dropped the hints about the beginnings of this grand tale in War of Honor (2002,) and then began to release them in a loosely alternating schedule:
Crown of Slaves (Torch)–2003
The Shadow of Saganami (Saganami)–2004
At All Costs (Honor)–2005
Torch of Freedom (Torch)–2009
Storm from the Shadows (Saganami)–2009
Mission of Honor (Honor)–2010
A Rising Thunder (Honor)–2012
Shadow of Freedom (Saganami)–2013
Cauldron of Ghosts (Torch)–2014
Shadow of Victory (Saganami)–2016
Uncompromising Honor (Honor)–2018
You may have noticed some long blanks in there between dates, but Weber was far from idle. In that time he also wrote several short stories that appeared in anthologies, the Treecat Wars series, and the Manticore Ascendant series, which may have been his way of working through processes that related to the new role of the treecats and of ONI, much in the same way that I think Fire & Blood was George R.R. Martin’s way of working through ideas about the Targaryans that he needs to know, even if the reader doesn’t, to finish the last couple of A Song of Ice and Fire books.
Looking at this, I realized that Weber has been grossly underestimated. This isn’t a bunch of novels, some of which are better written than others, many of which rehash the same material, as his critics have said.
This is one big story.
So I thought, “What would happen if I read it that way?”
I determined to re-read these last several books, with their entwining storylines, in true chronological order. That is, I would try to read them in order of the events being described, even jumping between books as necessary!
I am aided in this process by the Honorverse Fandom Website, which lists the books as they appear in chronological order, and then a loose chronology of events, in different places on its site. So thank you for that!
If you’d like to follow my progress, I’m going to be blogging about it. Feel free to start your prep by getting caught up on the prior Honor Harrington books, and then read Crown of Slaves. because very little of that book overlaps, as far as I can tell, with other events. It takes place about one year before the intertwining saga begins to unfold, but it is absolutely essential if you want to keep up with what’s going on, because it was the beginning.
There is at least one short story that takes place in the middle of the chronology, but I’ll be skipping it because it doesn’t directly relate to the overall story. It does give context on what happened to Grayson after Operation Oyster Bay, so you might choose to read it anyway for that purpose.
You may also enjoy reading a few of the short stories to give you some context:
From the Highlands (Changer of Worlds) – introduces Anton and Helen Zilwicki, Victor Cachat, and the future Queen Berry.
Fanatic (Service of the Sword) – introduces Victor Cachat in more detail.
The Service of the Sword (Service of the Sword) – introduces Abigail Hearns and Captain Oversteegan.
Other than that, what you need to know is that Honor Harrington is an Admiral in the Royal Manticoran Navy, who rose through the ranks, and to political power on her own world and a patriarchal theocracy called Grayson, by means of her own luck and heroism. The early books are very much in the feel of C.S. Forester. Honor is a deliberate Horatio Hornblower parallel, and the RMN is the Royal Navy.
They have been at war for many years with the People’s Republic of Haven, a sort of a Stalinist France, which has recently experienced a revolution (a la French Revolution) and become the Republic of Haven. They declared a ceasefire with Manticore while the revolution was settling in, and even worked together with Manticore to aid the people of the fledgling star-nation of Torch (see Crown of Slaves.)
It looked like they might finally make peace (note: France and Britain’s relationship during the American Revolution has many parallels.) but a right wing government was elected to Manticore’s Constitutional Monarchist Parliament (lots of prescient parallels to the Trump administration!) and they alienated allies and treated Haven rudely.
Eventually they went back to war over discrepancies in their diplomatic exchange, and both sides blamed the other for the dishonesty. What they don’t know, but the reader does, is that a Havenite official who prospered under the old regime, with the aid of a contact in the Manitcoran government who was working for a third party, deliberately altered the contents of the diplomatic exchanges to heighten tensions.
In my next post, we’ll begin in November 1919 Post Diaspora (from Earth,) with the first few chapters of Torch of Freedom. Once we’re done with that, we’ll be reading The Shadow of Saganami and At All Costs pretty much simultaneously.
Let’s be about it!
May 30, 2019
Book Review: Torch of Freedom by David Weber & Eric Flint
Torch of Freedom by David Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I chewed through the Honorverse Saga over the last little while because a housemate is also reading the series, and I’m trying to keep ahead of him so that we can talk about it. So expect a lot of Honorverse reviews from me in the near future.
I find myself wondering at what Weber’s process was when writing this and the remainder of the series. I suspect he said to himself:
“Okay, I’ve got this huge George R.R. Martin-style saga to tell, but if I did it that way, I’d have a book so thick you could use it as a brick with a little mortar. Welp; I’m really telling three different stories, aren’t I? So which events fit into the three different stories? Story one: Honor’s perspective. Story two: Cachat and Zilwicki. Story three: Michelle Henke and Saganami Island. Let’s divide them up with post-it notes.”
And then he set about telling those three separate stories. He lets you know that because he starts giving timeline information (ie. one section of chapters will appear under a heading like “March 1921 Post-Diaspora”).
As a result, some events are repeated, because some events are places where the three stories, and their characters, intersect. Sometimes he’s able to tell them in a way that provides new events and new insights. Sometimes he isn’t. I would argue you could skip those redone scenes, but skim them so that you know you haven’t missed anything important. There is, fortunately, very little of that in this book, as if they were making efforts to avoid it.
I’m not sure Weber wouldn’t have been better off telling all three storylines at once; or perhaps, merging the Honor and Saganami Island storylines and leaving Cachat and Zilwicki their own space (because he co-writes this storyline with Eric Flint.) But I can see why he didn’t. The story is really just too damn big for that. Not even Baen would publish it that way! So it’s the limitations of the genre that dictates the form.
On the other hand, BIG stories are a hallmark of good space opera.
That said, I absolutely love the Torch/Cachat and Zilwicki stories in this sub-series! I don’t think you can go wrong with the marriage of Weber and Eric Flint! Flint injects humour and humanity that I feel that Weber, despite the fact that I am a fan, sometimes lacks. Cachat and Zilwicki stories are buddy-cop tales (or, in this case, a buddy-spy one) in the tradition of Lethal Weapon. It’s all about their relationship and how it goes on in response to the crazy shit these guys find themselves in.
We are introduced to a host of secondary characters in this novel as well. They are important to the present and future storyline, so I don’t object. Besides, they’re fun and interesting, and you can tell that either Flint, or Weber, or both, were invested in their futures. If you like intense third-personal focus on one or two characters, you may find this burdensome, and based on the mixed reviews, I’d say many readers did. I did not. Instead, I got invested in these secondary characters, almost as much as I did the Dynamic Duo who drive this series, and enjoyed reading their novelettes interwoven among the grander tale.
My verdict? Not his greatest work, because I have given five-star reviews in this series, but certainly outstanding nonetheless, especially if you’re an enthusiastic space opera fan. If you decided to skim through or skip over books in the Honorverse, don’t pass over this one!
Now that I’ve read the series to the end, I’m probably going to re-read these last several books simultaneously. That is, I’m going to stack them all on my table, start with the earliest date in the sequencing, and go through all the books reading what happened in that month. Then I’m going to go on to the next month and do the same thing. And so on. I suspect it will have much more immediacy and intensity that way.
