F@$& Honorverse

David Weber's Honorverse 

Groan, another boring book review.

And to make matters worse, starting with an analogy that only I get!  Let’s compare Eric Flint and David Weber real quick.

Eric Flint’s 163X reminds me of the Clash.  London Calling is my favorite album of all time, it proved what a punk band can do with talent and creativity.  Sandinistas was disappointing, it was ambitious and creative but really could have used more focus.   IF during the recording of that triple album, the band focused on the 12-16 best songs we could be talking about another seminal album.  Instead we get Sandinistas, which I still see flashes of the Clash I love, but it’s really really long with plenty of skippable songs.  So back to Eric Flint.  1632 is like the Clash’s first album, good for the genre but nothing Earth shattering.   The short story anthology Ring of Fire blew me away, like London Calling did.  The follow up novels are like Sandinistas, so much potential but too much crap to sift through.  

David Weber’s Honorverse reminds me of AC/DC.  AC/DC have released the same album for 30 years and Weber has released the same novel for 20.  Ok that’s overly harsh, because I really like the Honorverse, but it’s also true.   You know what you are getting with the next installment, and like anyone attending an AC/DC concert, you want him to play the hits.  So after that oblique criticism here is some praise.  Weber is a very prolific writer, he releases a couple of titles a year.  And while none of them are brilliant, most of them are pretty good.  I think there’s something admirable and praise worthy in supplying consistent work as often as he does.

Anyways the series mostly revolves around the run up to and fighting a war between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Peoples Republic of Haven.  The series starts with fairly limited engagements, single ship duels or squadron versus squadrons, but by book 3 fleet actions take place.  As the series progresses, some of the Haven antagonists get more ink, and start to become protagonists in their own right.  It’s a nice evolution that really helps keep the story fresh within the similar plot lines Weber loves.

Weber gets a lot of praise for his technological development, and it is indeed praise worthy.  Once you suspend your disbelief about how ships are propelled most everything follows a logical tech tree.  Ship propulsion is done via “focused gravity”.  Now I have an engineering degree but never took ‘modern physics’ (known colloquially in Rolla as A-Bomb), so don’t have the background on why that would or would not work, and it’s a big who cares anyways.    If you read Sci-Fi, you have to buy in somewhere…

The main character, Honor Harrington, is almost annoying to me.  I really get sick of main protagonists being always right and excelling at whatever task is at hand.  And Honor does mostly.  But she faces obstacles and setbacks aplenty.    The protagonist breezing through every encounter is simply boring to me, it’s the setbacks that make the story compelling.

Weber has written enough that we can now follow several arcs simultaneously, and I think he deserves some praise for this too.  He built up to the epic story following several people.  Like any good ensemble, he started small and slowly expanded.

 

So overall recommendation :  This is not a must read for everyone, but it definitely warrants consideration.  Try the first book, its available online for free (most of his books now are, the wiki article for Honorverse has the links).