The suggestions include things like built-in deterrents, waiting to release games until more bugs had been worked out, giving paying customers extra content, and engaging with the community. Some of these solutions are more popular than others, of course. When you provide extra perks to people who bought new, it can come off as taking them away from people who buy used.

And in the end, the article suggests, it may not matter just what non-DRM measures (or even DRM measures) you take to reduce piracy—plenty of people will still pirate anyway. Sadly, this is the truth—even publishers who bend over backward to make their games more attractive to pay for than pirate find people will still happily rip them off.

For example, the games in the first Humble Indie Bundle could be purchased DRM-free for as little as a single penny for all of them—but a developer still estimated that as many as 25% of the games downloaded from their site were snagged via reshared links with no payment at all—and that’s not counting possible peer-to-peer or cyberlocker retransmission.

(Though oddly the same thing doesn’t seem to be true for DRM-free e-books; Baen’s DRM-free offerings are much less pirated than offerings from other publishers. Perhaps e-book readers are more loyal and principled than video gamers?)

And when that happens, developers don’t really have much recourse. As CD Projekt found, suing (alleged) pirates is a great way for game studios to tick off their customers even worse than DRM does.

The article closes:

If there’s a final, definitive solution to online piracy that doesn’t in some way involve Digital Rights Management, it has yet to be found. We can only hope that when such a solution is implemented, it’s one that’s as just to a product’s paying end users as it is to the companies that designed it.

But unfortunately, as crackable as most DRM is, DRM isn’t much of a “final, definitive solution” either. Some level piracy may just be a fact of life.

Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud services. He proposes fighting piracy through education and legal action, and adopting “Digital Rights Morality” instead of Digital Rights Management: leave off DRM in the cloud, watermark downloadable e-books visibly and invisibly, and just use DRM for library e-books or in selected cases.

As with the music industry, Berlucchi states, this would prevent silos and monopolies, offer more value to end users, and increase competition by allowing anyone to sell e-books for any platform.

Although Berlucchi states early in his presentation that these views are his own, not those of Anobii, publishing pundit (and DBW chairman) Mike Shatzkin nonetheless called the argument “significant” because Anobii is part-owned by the UK divisions of major publishers HarperCollins, Penguin, and Random House.

Going DRM-free has certainly worked for Baen, which includes instructions on its e-book site for how to load its books into several major e-reader platforms. And it has worked for the music industry. It would be nice if publishers would see how well it worked for them, too.

(Found via The Bookseller.)

We find ourselves again asking why we are not publishing digitally by instalment today? The Keita novels in Japan thrive through instalment and Stephen King and others have also ventured down this digital route, but why hasn’t a publisher grabbed this clear digital opportunity by the throat? Is it down to the way many write today? Has the publishing and editorial process got in the way of the instalment? Is it just too revolutionary?

Interestingly, serial publication was the way that many of the early writing circles on the Internet worked, as writers would write chapter-sized chunks of their stories and post them to the mailing lists or newsgroups they used. (See my entries on “Paleo E-Books”) And it’s also how some of the new experimental fan-sourced projects such as Shadow Unit are going. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller did this with the rough draft form of two of their books, and Diane Duane did it a bit less successfully with one of hers. And for that matter, Baen has been doing something of the sort (albeit on a much more coarsely-grained scale than a chapter a week) for over ten years. So it’s not as if nobody does it. But it seems that the support network to allow commercializing it on a broad scale hasn’t really been built yet.

Daniels also notes that Dickens “embraced the new”, making significant use of new technologies such as railways, telegraphs, postal services, and even world travel. And he “enhanced his works” with illustrations (though given that everybody did that back then, I don’t think that should really count specifically for Dickens). And he wrote in the language of the people, using rendered dialect to represent the class and origins of his peoples. (Though I heard an amusing anecdote the other day that suggests Dickens was very good at writing women in public, but his scenes that involved just women alone with each other fell flat, since naturally Dickens had never had the chance to observe how women behaved alone together.)

But Daniels missed one rather important point of Dickens’s relevance to today, and that has to do with how he fought piracy. At the time Dickens’s books were in print, the US didn’t recognize international trade copyrights. Consequently, a lot of US publishers were ripping off Dickens, grabbing his books off the latest ship and printing up cheap, pirated editions of their own—from which Dickens received not one red cent.

Dickens knew that he couldn’t expect either his or our government to do anything about stopping piracy, so he put in the effort himself to outcompete the pirates—he came to American shores and did reading circuits, building a face-to-face relationship with his fans. And he contracted with American publishers to offer inexpensive officially-endorsed (and royalty-paying) versions of his books.

Given that today authors and publishers find themselves and the government powerless to stop digital piracy, perhaps they should take Dickens’s example and meet the pirates on their own ground.

Sadly, with this change Baen is no longer providing OPDS catalog support for downloading e-books directly to Stanza. This is disappointing given that some people (such as me) don’t have iOS devices recent enough to use the new system, the catalog was helpful for other apps such as IbisReader that also supported OPDS access. Of course, users of up-to-date Apple devices can download e-books directly into iBooks through Mobile Safari, but everyone with older devices will just have to use Calibre, I suppose.

I’m a little surprised Baen is ditching the “Webscriptions” brand, given that it had built up a lot of recognition over the more-than-ten-years it’s been in operation. But on the other hand, there’s something to be said for simplifying the name so new users immediately understand the point of the site—and when you get right down to it, a “Webscription” wasn’t really a true “subscription” anyway.

As it turns out, that is exactly what did happen. When Weber turned in his manuscript for A Rising Thunder, it was even longer than his last book, Mission of Honor—so long that Baen decided to split it into two books. The next one will be published later—though it’s not clear exactly when, I’d guess in a few months or so. And so we end up getting only half the story now.

(Though, to be fair, this may not be entirely the reason. Rumor has it that rather than splitting the book in the middle, Weber chose to pull out all the parts of it that took place in one particular subsection of the setting to build a thematically separate novel around. It still feels to me more like the book abruptly stops than ends.)

This isn’t the first time Weber has turned in a book that was too long for individual publication. His and Linda Evan’s Hell’s Gate books were another such, and one of his Honorverse books (which I haven’t reviewed yet) had to have a significant chunk carved out of it to make a novella in a short story collection. Nor is it the first time it’s happened to books in general. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was always conceived to be a single novel, for all that it had to be published as three. Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion was another such book, as were the first books in Charlie Stross’s Merchant Princes series.

Speaking of Stross, last year, I covered his essay on why most mass-market hardcover books in the USA are capped at 424 pages (except for a few special exceptions that have to be sent to more expensive specialty binderies). Undoubtedly that cap had a lot to do with the reason A Rising Thunder was split. But there’s no reason at all to split a book like that if you’re publishing it electronically.

The first e-book I ever bought was a “doorstop”, as it happens. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep weighed in at over 500K—fully 25% of the total storage space on the Palm IIIe that was my first e-reader. Adobe Digital Editions enumerates the EPUB edition at 541 pages. (According to Amazon, the paperback is 432 pages, and the hardcover is 534—making it one of the special exceptions to the 424 page rule) But the annotated version of Fire is even thicker—700+K, 712 Adobe Digital pages. (Mission of Honor was 586 ADE pages and A Rising Thunder is 434.)

The interesting thing is that the annotated version has never seen paper publication—it came out on a CD-ROM first, then much later as an eReader e-book. I imagine it would be hard even to think about publishing it in print—apart from the expense of binding it, who would want to have such a massive thing on their lap? And undoubtedly a lot fewer people would really have been interested in the annotations than just wanted to read the story, so it wouldn’t have been worth the overall expense.

So that does suggest that in the future, when e-books are the dominant form of publication, there might be less reason to split up these doorstop books. But will there really? If the book is going to be published in print at all, it still makes sense to keep it shorter to save that printing money—not to mention ding people’s wallets twice instead of once for the same content no matter which format they buy it in.

I still hope that we’ll see size limitations matter less the more common e-books become—I like reading a long story as much as the next guy, whether it’s published as a single book or several.

Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium itself (well, unless you’re one of those people who like to smell books), but for the information contained within them.

With books and music, we consume the information ourselves, but with games we let our computer consume it. In the end, as with e-music, the result is almost exactly the same whether we buy the physical edition or the digital: we see or hear the same thing either way. (With books, of course, we read them on a device rather than off paper, but apart from that the principle is the same.)

Baen Books I’ll Never Read

As I’ve bought e-books over the years, I noticed something interesting about my buying habits. A lot of the time I would buy a whole month’s worth of Baen Webscription e-books at a time. If there were two or three books in there I wanted, I’d figure it was worth paying for the whole thing just in case I wanted something else from it later on.

As a result, when I look at my current Baen e-library, I see dozens of titles I’ve never read, and may never read—either they’re later books in a series I never got the first of (in some cases I can’t get the first ones, because they came out when Baen was still a print publisher and never have been converted to electronic versions yet), or they just failed to interest me. Sometimes I do go back and look for something interesting to read, and occasionally find a neglected diamond in the rough amid my Baen library, but I have little doubt I will grow old and eventually die never having read every single e-book I’ve paid for.

(There are also a few e-books I bought on sale from eReader or Fictionwise that I never got around to reading, but not all that many.)

Damn You, Valve

What brought this to mind was an on-line friend’s repetition of the stock phrase, “Damn you, Valve,” over the last few days. I usually found myself in agreement with the sentiment.

Valve, whose digital game distribution system Steam has the power to win video game pirates back over from the dark side, has been running daily sales, knocking various game titles down to 75% or even 90% off. And there are some titles there that are simply so good that when they become cheap you feel like you can’t pass them up. Hence, my friend’s mostly-kidding invective against the company for making him feel like he has to spend money there several times over the last few days when critically-acclaimed titles went on one-day sale.

I know that feeling well, because looking at my own Steam library I see far more games that I’ve bought but not downloaded than those that I have. Out of several dozen games on my account, I’ve played maybe a dozen of them, and I’ve only put hours and hours of play into 5 or 6 of them. Not all of these are due to Steam sales, of course—I’ve kicked a few bucks in for most every Humble Bundle so far, and they all come with Steam download codes (and this is actually more directly like my experience with Baen, since I don’t really care about most of the titles in the bundle but just buy them for the ones I do want)—but a lot of them are.

Some of these are very popular recent or slightly older titles: The Back to the Future game series. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. All the episodes of the first Sam & Max game series. Grand Theft Auto 1, 2, 3, San Andreas, and Vice City. (When did I get those? I don’t even remember buying them!) The Monkey Island games. Civilization III and IV. Spore. (I did play that some, but drifted away after a while.) The X-Com series. Even You Don’t Know Jack. They’re all waiting there, in the cloud, for me to reach out and grab them. But I never have, and given how little free time I have anymore between my day job, TeleRead, and once-and-current addiction City of Heroes, I don’t know when I ever will.

The Digital Choice

Thinking back to my life before e-books and game downloads, I can’t conceive of buying books that I never read or games that I never played. Even the games I got on sale got given a thorough spin. I can only point to 3 or 4 games, out of the couple of dozen on my shelf, that I bought and never tried. And why would you buy something just to take up space?

But with e-books and digital games, it seems there’s more danger of “out of sight, out of mind”. It doesn’t feel like I’m buying an artifact—it’s like I’m buying a choice. Pay this amount, this trifling little sum, for the choice to be able to read The Stars At War, or play Back to the Future, at some future time when I might want to. I don’t know when I’ll want to—I might never want to. But there’s at least a chance I might want to, and if I pass up this sale price, it might cost a bundle if and when I do.

(And Valve knows this entirely too well for the continued well-being of my pocketbook. That’s why they do it. Damn you, Valve.)

The Implications

Now, obviously it would be premature to generalize from myself to the entire rest of the world. I could be a special case. (Though I doubt Valve or Baen would be doing so well if I were.) But if I feel that way, I imagine at least some other people will, too. Come to think of it, Amazon says that people are buying twice as many e-books as they used to buy paper books after buying the Kindle, but are they actually finding twice as much time to read what they buy? This could result in more e-books getting bought than are actually read, more games being bought than are actually played, and perhaps more revenue going to creators than they would otherwise see.

Of course, there could also be people who buy even less now that it’s digital. (I know my parents don’t have any interest in paying new-book price for even paper books, let alone ones they can’t resell used or donate to a library if they want to.) It could all balance out.

Would creators rather people buy but don’t read their books (or buy but don’t play their games) than people read (or play) without buying (via library, rental, or piracy)? The money is necessary to live, of course, but most people who write will tell you that the egoboo of being read is at least part of the equation. I suppose whether authors will laugh all the way to the bank or cry that they’re being bought but not read depends on how big a part that egoboo is. (Though also, people are only able to pass along recommendations to books they have actually read.)

I suppose I’m going to continue buying Baen e-books and cheap video games that I might never read or play. I imagine a lot of people are. I wonder whether this is going to change the way books and games are published in a larger sense? Or perhaps the changes are simply part and parcel of the way electronic media are changing the publishing world as a whole.

As I’ve done for the last couple of years, I looked back at previous Thanksgiving posts I made to see what I had to be thankful for in the e-book world. It hasn’t changed much lately, Most of the things I’ve mentioned are still going strong. I’ve got an iPod Touch again (and an iPad, and a Kobo) that I like to read books on, Baen and its Meisha Merlin writers are still going strong, and e-readers are getting even cheaper.

As I said last year:

There are still a lot of annoyances in the e-book market as a whole—agency pricing, territorial restrictions, obnoxious DRM—but we should probably pause for a moment and give thanks for how good we have it now, compared to, say, five years ago. E-books are on a lot of people’s minds now, and the more people read them the better they’ll get. Sooner or later we’re going to have that dirt-cheap “disposable” e-reader the way we now have dirt-cheap “disposable” cell phones.

It looks like even more people are going to get e-readers this year than last, given how the prices have fallen. And the more people start e-reading, perhaps the more people there will be to complain about some of those annoyances and perhaps get some of them redressed.

So I’m going to go right on appreciating the good things in the e-book world today, and hoping the not-so-good things get fixed.

This book begins a phase of the series expressly focused on the politics of Haven, with a turn to focus expressly on the politics of Manticore a few books away. Still later in the series, it will swing around again to focus on the politics of an entity that doesn’t even have any (obvious) pieces on the board yet. And at the same time, Honor’s love life starts to resemble a soap opera even more than it already did. Small wonder it loses a bit of audience here!

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. A Beautiful Friendship
4. Young Honor and Elizabeth
5. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
6. On Basilisk Station
7. The Honor of the Queen
8. The Short Victorious War
9. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
10. Field of Dishonor
11. Flag in Exile
12. Honor Among Enemies
13. Of treecats and grapeshot

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• In Enemy Hands by David Weber

Honor has returned from her (costly) success fighting pirates with fragile Q-ships in Silesia with a new treecat member of her family—Samantha, whose human bond-mate was killed in action during the last great battle of Honor Among Enemies. She gets a much-overdue promotion to Commodore, and returns to Grayson on the way to her new duty as a squadron commander, and happens to encounter Hamish Alexander, Lord White Haven,

Harrington and Alexander have met a couple of times in previous books, for short periods, but they’ve never really gotten to know each other. And it just so happens that at the start of this book, they do get to know each other—rather better than either of them had anticipated or expected. In fact, during a flaming row over the advisability of new types of naval weapons, they quite unexpectedly fall in a sort of psionic-assisted love at first sight.

This is problematic for both of them, because Alexander is married to one of the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s most-beloved and tragic figures, Emily Alexander, who has been confined to a hoverchair since a terrible aircar accident many years ago. Because of that, Alexander, who fell in love first, was determined not to let his new feelings show in any way—but of course Honor, whose link to her treecat Nimitz lets her sense the emotions of other, could tell the moment it happened. And to her horror, she discovered she reciprocated those feelings herself.

So, desperate to put some distance between her and Alexander, Honor returns to duty several weeks early, and her squadron is assigned guard duty over a supply convoy. And not to spoil the book too much, but it should be obvious from the title where Honor eventually ends up.

Meanwhile, on Haven, Rob S. Pierre and Oscar St. Just are dealing with the aftermath of the coup attempt chronicled in “A Whiff of Grapeshot”. They’ve decided to bring Admiral Esther McQueen into the Committee of Public Safety as the new Secretary of War. Even though she’s known to be ambitious, clever, and sneaky, they think that they can manage her—and she has a pretty clear stake in seeing to it that Haven wins, too. They hope that she can undo some of the damage done by the Committee’s policy of shooting military officers and their families in reprisal for failures.

Cordelia Ransom, another of the Committee’s original members, does not like McQueen’s appointment at all (given that she has a pathological dislike of the navy), but allows herself to be persuaded. Then she hops aboard a State Security cruiser, the Tepes, to go out and shoot some footage of Admiral Thomas Theisman, who has been assigned to defend a star base that is the obvious low-hanging fruit for Manticore’s next attack. (Perhaps this is at least in part so she doesn’t have to deal with McQueen herself.)

Like an irresistible force heading for a fateful encounter with an immovable object, Harrington and Ransom are destined to meet—in an encounter that will try the souls of Honor and her crew, and also those of sympathetic Havenite navy officers Thomas Theisman, Lester Tourville, Shannon Foraker, and Warner Caslet, who happen to be on hand for the encounter.

But after you get into enemy hands, there’s only one way to go from there—and without giving too much away, the scheming of Honor’s crew to enable their escape is a section I like to read over and over. The sneakiness of one particularly-intelligent non-commissioned officer plays a major role.

As the first book to go really in-depth in its focus on Havenite politics, the political situation is interesting. Rob S. Pierre’s situation really does illustrate that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. As I’ve mentioned before, he instigated a coup because he honestly thought he could do a better job running the nation than those who came before him—and to an extent, he has been right. But he has also carried on many of the same excesses as his predecessors, because he felt he had no choice—and because of the sort of people he had to get in bed with to pull the coup off.

In particular, Cordelia Ransom. We haven’t gotten a good look at her prior to this book, but the more we see of her the more it becomes apparent what a “prize” she really is. Her extreme antipathy for anything to do with the military, including military concepts of honor even among enemies, have already damaged the relationship of Haven’s government with its military. In this book, they are set to do more than that.

I wonder if anyone on the Manticore side, in the later books in the series, is ever truly aware just how much of the change that is to come in the next few books traces directly to what happens to Honor while she is, well, “in enemy hands”. The confrontation between her and Ransom crystallizes the attitudes of a number of sympathetic Havenite officers (and People’s Commissioners) and sets the stage for important events in future books.

Something else that could have major implications is the way Harrington is accompanied to Grayson by a gaggle of treecats who’ve decided they want to start a colony on another planet, to the consternation of Sphinx’s human authorities. Among other things, this starts to demonstrate the native intelligence of the little critters. And something that happens to Nimitz in this book is another seed that will grow into something more important over the next few volumes.

And finally we come to the strange empathic romance, the “love at first psi” if you will, between Honor and Alexander. Fortunately it barely shows up in the first part of the book, and then is absent save for occasional angst on White Haven’s part over the next couple of books, but it hints at a bit more annoying angst to come.

It’s not really fair to complain about it being needlessly soap operatic—it’s not as if this is the first time a romantic relationship has been milked to give characters something to agonize over. But it is a touch…abrupt. The potential for this attraction wasn’t even hinted at in any of their previous encounters, and then bam, there it is. I suppose I’ll have more to say about it when it pops up again in future volumes.

I look forward to reviewing the next book, Echoes of Honor, which is one of my favorites—or at least half of it is.

On GigaOm, Kevin C. Tofel presents a 10-second YouTube video of a demo of the e-ink technology, showing a screen scrolling around on a website. It looks pretty good; comparable to what it looks like to scroll around on a standard LCD screen except in black and white.

Tofel is glad to see the company is still around and innovating, but wonders whether Bookeen’s device sporting the new technology, the Cybook Odyssey, will make it to the US where Kindle, Nook, and Kobo pretty much have the market sewn up.

I would be more inclined to wonder, if it does make it to the US, if it will make it in the US. Though no price has yet been announced, I would imagine the device will have to cost more than equivalently-sized current-generation readers that don’t scroll, and will anybody really want to pay that much for a third-party reader? People don’t seem to have any problem reading e-books a page at a time on current devices, and especially in this economy people are very conscious of price. (Certainly that’s where Amazon is competing with its Kindle.)

Perhaps it might be better, financially, for Bookeen to concentrate on licensing its technology to the other companies that are in a position to sell many more units. But I guess we’ll see.

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. A Beautiful Friendship
4. Young Honor and Elizabeth
5. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
6. On Basilisk Station
7. The Honor of the Queen
8. The Short Victorious War
9. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
10. Field of Dishonor
11. Flag in Exile
12. Honor Among Enemies

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• “Changer of Worlds” by David Weber (Changer of Worlds anthology)
• “A Whiff of Grapeshot” by S.M. Stirling (More than Honor anthology)

“Changer of Worlds” is another story concerning the treecats, told from the treecats’ point of view—and is currently the only such tale apart from the three stories in the “Treecat Trilogy” above (plus the novel A Beautiful Friendship), It’s also the only story where we actually get to see Nimitz and Samantha (or “Laughs Brightly” and “Golden Voice”, as they name themselves) as other treecats see them.

The story forms a sort of companion piece to the much earlier treecat stories, as in those stories the treecats decided to conceal how clever they truly were. Now, after their experiences in the humans’ war, Nimitz and Samantha have concluded it is time for the treecats to end their charade and expand, with the humans’ help, to form colonies on other worlds. The question is whether the older and wiser treecats at Nimitz’s home clan can be convinced of that.

The story brings out a number of revelations about the ‘cats which the humans in the story don’t get to learn until several books later. For example, Samantha is an extremely unusual treecat in more ways than just being an adopting female. She’s also a memory singer, one of the treecats who is gifted with an extraordinary memory and psychic projection abilities that she can use to pass on accumulated treecat knowledge.

As with the other stories, treecats’ psychic conversations are rendered as idiomatic English, which some may find a trifle unrealistic given how treecat communication is presented from humans’ point of view. But it helps to demonstrate the treecats’ distinctive personalities, and even rendered into English the treecats still speak differently than human characters.

From an action standpoint, not a lot happens in the story: it’s basically one long psychic conversation. But the decision the treecats make is an important one, and the first direct result is seen in the next novel, In Enemy Hands. It’s not strictly necessary to read the story to understand what happens the novel, of course, given that Honor pretty correctly pegs the reasoning behind it at the time. Still, it’s interesting to see it from the treecats’ point of view.

I wonder why there aren’t more treecat stories, or treecat points of view rendered in the novels? Perhaps it’s because a little goes a long way, and Weber doesn’t want to dilute the specialness of treecats in his stories—or doesn’t want to annoy further the people who find treecats annoying enough already.

(And as an aside: I think that the story collection Changer of Worlds has one of the most awful covers of any of the Honorverse novels. It does have the starships at least roughly correct, but on the other hand it has a couple of rather awful depictions of treecats, not to mention Honor Harrington’s giant…blue face in the background. What a mess!)

The other story, “A Whiff of Grapeshot,” represents the first chronological appearance of Esther McQueen, another one of those characters who is a direct analogue of a historical figure from the French Revolution. McQueen shows that, despite giving Pierre, St. Just, and Admiral Lester Tourville similar names to their historical antecedents, Weber does have some sense of restraint—otherwise he would have named McQueen “Esther Bonaparte.”

Indeed, the phrase “a whiff of grapeshot” harks back to Napoleon clearing the streets of an angry mob in 1795 by firing cannons into it. (It was coined by British historian Thomas Carlyle, not said by Napoleon himself.) And that is essentially what happens in this story, albeit scaled up to futuristic military levels.

Rob S. Pierre and his Committee for Public Safety are under assault by a huge mob, prompted by a group of anarchists that wants to unseat them in a coup. With its communications paralyzed, almost every unit in the Havenite navy is unwilling to act lest the rest of the navy think it is taking part in the coup. It’s left up to Admiral Esther McQueen, already under suspicion from the Committee for her demonstrated ambition, to rescue the Committee and disperse the angry mobs with her own form of “grapeshot”—much more lethal than anything the original Napoleon ever had.

McQueen is shown to be very clever—perhaps too clever for her own good, as she demonstrates to her political minder Erasmus Fontein that she had a squad of marines on call ready to charge in and rescue her on a moment’s notice. But Fontein (and his superiors in the Committee of Public Safety) soon have ample reason to be glad she did.

This is the first story, chronologically, that goes into any real depth concerning Pierre and cohorts in their tenure as the rulers of the People’s Republic of Haven, which means it is a sort of introduction to the politics that characterizes subsequent books in the series. The events covered here set up some changes in leadership that come during In Enemy Hands—as well as certain climactic events further down the road.

Rob S. Pierre makes an interesting contrast to Weber’s usual run of villains. Unlike the rest of the cavalcade of self-important idiots or scheming manipulators, Pierre always struck me as something of a tragic figure—spurred into taking out the Harris government by the death of his son in a military action, he started out thinking that he could make great changes and rescue his society from the rut it was trapped in. But when he got to the top, he found the seat of power was as much prison as throne, because the old system simply had too much inertia to allow the reforms he wanted to make—Haven’s citizenry might well turn violent if he tries, and as this story shows there are those who will try to unseat him no matter what he does.

Pierre seems to be a decent person trapped by circumstances, unlike his fellow rulers—the sociopathic Oscar St. Just, the psychopathic Cordelia Ransom. He is often troubled or even horrified by their excesses, but there isn’t much he can do except continue to ride the tiger and hope he doesn’t fall off. But even if Pierre manages to survive the mob attack in this story, it’s pretty clear that things are probably not going to end well for him.

Of course, both the Committee and McQueen will see much further action in the next Honor Harrington novel, In Enemy Hands—as will the treecats. I’ll have more to say about that in the next Honorverse review.

Weber is very optimistic over the studio’s intentions to be as faithful to the books as possible (especially since they’re also fans of the series), and has been doing a lot of consultation with them on how best to adapt it. It will probably be five years or more until the first movie actually hits the big screen, and there’s plenty of time for the process to derail (as happens to lots of movies we never hear about, and as happened to the Mutineers’ Moon anime project with ADVFilms), but fans have at least some hope of seeing ship-to-ship combat on the big screen eventually.

Now, on with the reviews.

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. A Beautiful Friendship
4. Young Honor and Elizabeth
5. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
6. On Basilisk Station
7. The Honor of the Queen
8. The Short Victorious War
9. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
10. Field of Dishonor
11. Flag in Exile

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• Honor Among Enemies by David Weber

Jesus said that no prophet is ever respected in his home town, and that seems to hold true for military prodigies, too. After spending a year or so as the second in command of Grayson’s growing space navy, Honor Harrington is recalled to active duty as a captain in Manticore’s navy. A couple of her worst domestic enemies—Klaus Hauptmann, who threatened her parents in On Basilisk Station, and Reginald Houseman, who she slapped for cowardice in The Honor of the Queen—have arranged for her to command a squadron of “Q-ships” to protect shipping from piracy in the Silesian Confederacy (the setting’s equivalent of Europe’s Balkan states).

Fighting piracy in Q-ships—civilian vessels converted to pack a disguised military punch, but not much armor—offers a pretty good chance of killing Honor, which is just fine with Hauptmann and Houseman, but Hauptmann also recognizes that whatever else she is, Honor is a damn good naval officer, and might just do a lot of good against the pirates before that happens.

As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, the Manticoran navy’s personnel office is tightly pinched for able bodies at the moment, so Honor gets a mixture of so-new-they-squeak academy graduates and the bottom-of-the-barrel discipline problems who would have been chucked out the door in a heartbeat in a peacetime navy. And when Honor gets to Silesia, she will find that not only is the piracy more organized than it should be, but the Peeps—the space navy of the People’s Republic of Haven—are dipping a toe into commerce raiding as well.

Meanwhile, in a subplot borrowed from The Karate Kid (and every other 90-pound-weakling-takes-a-level-in-badass story), a young enlisted tech named Aubrey Wanderman runs afoul of some of those bottom-of-the-barrel hardcases but is too scared of potential retaliation to report them to his superiors after one of them beats him up. So he gets taken under the wing of none other than Chief Horace Harkness, who along with some Marine buddies sees to it that Wanderman learns how to fight.

More of our favorite characters from previous stories return, most notably Warner Caslet and Shannon Foraker. We briefly meet Admiral Javier Giscard and his political watchdog Eloise Pritchart, who become much more important in later books. But there’s not a whole lot of stuff from a Havenite viewpoint (apart from Caslet’s) in this book, in sharp contrast to later books in the series. The book also introduces the treecat Samantha, who will play an extremely important role in books to come.

There are also some great humorous moments, such as Nimitz and Samantha’s courtship, or learning that Chief Harkness has gone from picking fights with Marines to marrying one. It’s also amusing to learn the real reason behind Harkness’s brawling, and great fun to watch Wanderman have his Karate Kid moment. It’s a fun little book all around, really, and makes a great break from the heart-wrenching angst of the previous books—just what the pacing of the series needed at this point.

Give or take a book or two, this is about the point in the Honorverse where many people feel it “jumps the shark”. It’s easy to see why. Honor Among Enemies marks a turning point in the series. It’s the last book that could be considered a simple space navy story, without much attention given to politics. (The previous pair of books involved some politics, but mostly relating to the Star Kingdom and Grayson, and mostly surrounding Honor herself.) It’s the last book where Honor gets to command a vessel directly (at least in a normal naval situation), and the last one where she only has to worry about beating down the bad guys.

Starting immediately after this book, the Honorverse takes a screeching U-turn into interstellar politics, beginning by devoting huge chunks of the books to Rob S. Pierre and his Committee for Public Safety as they try desperately to stay on the back of the hungry tiger that is the “Mob” of Haven’s citizenry, and on the higher-ranking officers in Haven’s navy as they try to survive the politically-charged climate. They’ve only rated the odd chapter or two up to this point, as the story has focused tightly on Honor and friends, but they’re about to become a major focus. And that’s only the beginning, as it won’t be too long until the seeds of the next political crisis front are planted.

The next book is also where Weber starts to graft on some soap operaish aspects that don’t sit well with some readers. Even I find them a bit silly, but I’ll go into that more at the time it happens.

Given that readers who like space navy stuff may not care for politics (or soap operas), it’s easy to see why some people are put off by the series’s sudden change in direction. I appreciate the series for what it is, and I think so will anyone able to wrap their head around the sudden change in direction, but I can see why other people think it took a downward turn at this point.

I will, of course, discuss the change further in the next review, where it happens.

I’d also like to mention the cover art for this book. The American cover art for the Honor Harrington series has never been all that great in terms of accuracy to the series. They get the look of treecats wrong, for one thing, and they don’t seem to pay much attention to the description of the actual starships. Take the one shown in the background (and foreground) in the picture above. (Click on it for a closer view.) It looks like a standard science-fictiony starship—and nothing at all like the cylindrical spindle shape that Weber’s ships are described as having. Sheesh.

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. A Beautiful Friendship
4. Young Honor and Elizabeth
5. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
6. On Basilisk Station
7. The Honor of the Queen
8. The Short Victorious War
9. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
10. Field of Dishonor

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• Flag in Exile by David Weber

And here comes the second part of the one-two angst punch that can make it hard for some readers to get past the first few Honor Harrington books.

After having caused a political scandal at the end of Field of Dishonor with her Roaring Rampage of Revenge for the death of her lover Paul Tankersley, Honor retires to her steading on Grayson to lick her wounds—and at the same time, see what improvements she can make in the lives of the people who have been placed under her rule, and help whip Grayson’s fledgling space navy into shape.

Her stay does not begin auspiciously—some of the more conservative of Grayson’s religious community take umbrage at having a steadholder who is not only a woman, but also an unbeliever (and, thanks to her relationship with Paul Tankersley, an adulterer as well). And behind the scenes, some of these conservatives are planning to get rid of her once and for all.

Honor Harrington’s plans for improving her steading include creating domed cities and farms to keep out the planet’s hostile environment. When an act of sabotage leads to tragic loss of life, Honor is put through yet another emotional wringer—followed by yet another, a little later. How much guilt can one woman take? Coming on the heels of Paul Tankersley’s murder, this doesn’t give Honor (or the readers) a lot of time to catch their breath. There are also more deaths of sympathetic characters—not at all unusual for Weber, of course.

But again we get catharsis, in one of the more memorable scenes of the series, when Honor confronts the guilty party and treats him to Grayson’s own harsh brand of justice. And before we can turn around, Honor is out in space defending the system against a Haven sneak attack.

In some ways, this book is a little hard to read. We just witnessed Honor having a near-total breakdown after her lover died in Field of Dishonor. Now she gets to have another one when she thinks her improvements are responsible for killing innocent people. It seems as though the shocks are piling up a little quickly.

And the central villains are more of those scenery-chewing caricatures of vileness—perhaps all the worse because their internal dialogue shows how firmly convinced they are that God is on their side and they are Fighting The Forces Of Evil. But as I’ve mentioned before, the fact that the rest of Grayson’s inhabitants are depicted as more temperate fundamentalists helps to salvage the book from seeming like unrestrained fundie-bashing.

And there is a lot to like about Flag in Exile, too. In this book we spend the most time on Grayson that we do in any book before or since, and as a result learn a lot more about the culture. We see Honor applying her own unique brand of integrity to the conflict between her own religion and Grayson’s—even if she doesn’t subscribe to the Grayson religion, she clearly respects it enough to have learned all about it. And there’s an interesting bit where Honor discusses just how many religions can be represented on a single ship in the Manticoran navy:

"I was saying Manticoran ships don’t have official chaplains. Of course, we’ve got so many religions and denominations that providing a chaplain for each of them would be the next best thing to impossible even if we tried." She smiled suddenly. "On the first SD I ever served in, the captain was a Roman Catholic—Second Reformation, I think; not the Old Earth denomination—the exec was an Orthodox Jew, the astrogator was a Buddhist, and the com officer was a Scientologist Agnostic. If I remember correctly, the tac officer—my direct superior—was a Mithran, and Chief O’Brien, my tracking yeoman, was a Shinto priest. All of that, mind you, just on the command deck! We had another six thousand odd people in the ship’s company, and God only knows how many different religions they represented."

That certainly makes for a great contrast to the religious situation I mentioned in my review of the Lost Fleet novels.

We meet a number of interesting characters, including Honor’s maid Miranda LaFollett. On the Haven side of things, we get to catch up with Tom Theisman again, and meet a few new characters who will become increasingly important as time goes by: Esther McQueen, Warner Caslet, the adorkable Shannon Foraker, Dennis LePic. We learn about the rather charming Grayson traditional sword fighting style, based on a long-lost samurai movie. And Honor’s reaction to seeing her first baseball team is absolutely hilarious.

After being largely missing from the last book, the Havenite war returns with a vengeance. Indeed, it seems that the war with Haven will eventually follow Honor wherever she goes, as a significant portion of the book is devoted to setting up a military confrontation that, naturally, puts Honor at center stage.

We also get a chapter from Rob S. Pierre’s perspective, in which it turns out he has found being the ruler of Haven is not all it was cracked up to be: in fact, it’s more like riding a tiger, It seems that, no matter the revolutionaries’ good intentions, there’s just too much inertia in the system for it to be reformed easily, and they’ve ended up in essentially the same position as the administration they displaced.

And the revolution perpetuates its own evils, in the form of political officers who have been assigned to every Havenite navy ship to make sure the naval officers toe the line. Some Naval officers work better with their political officer leash holders than others, as we will see over the course of the next few books.

As I rediscovered when I read Field of Dishonor during my first re-read, and again just now, for all the angst that comes Honor’s way, the book really isn’t that hard to reread. Though it’s more than a little melodramatic in places, the good overall outweighs the annoying.

However, the first book in the series, Dun Lady’s Jess, is no longer available through Baen—this can happen if the book has been taken to another publisher so Baen no longer has the rights. (Actually, the other books may not be available for new purchase, either; I just know that since I’ve already bought them they’re in my Baen catalog for downloading.) And I’m sad to say I neglected to purchase this first book when it was available. (I think I read it as a library paperback at the time.)

When I emailed Ms. Durgin about the book back in March, she explained it was currently in a reversion dispute, but would be republished when available as a DRM-free e-book via the Backlist eBooks project that Durgin has been doing in collaboration with an author friend. (She already has quite a number of books listed there.)

Now more details have come to light about the reversion dispute. Durgin explains on her blog that a few years ago she was invited to republish Dun Lady’s Jess with Canadian publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside. It was published with a contract clause, added by Durgin and her agent to the standard rights-reversion boilerplate, requiring the publisher to keep the book in print through regular trade channels or else the publication rights revert to the author.

Since it was originally published, the book has gone out of availability—but when Durgin and her agent contacted Fitzhenry & Whiteside to request reversion of rights, the publisher said that it still has 1,600 copies sitting in a warehouse, and Durgin needs to buy them back in order for the rights to revert. The publisher then stopped replying to Durgin at all.

After another nudge—which included the reminder that the publisher could continue to sell warehoused copies in their usual fashion, as well as a reminder of the boilerplate changes–we were finally told: “This book is in stock, on sale on our website, it continues to sell albeit in lesser quantities. [my note: yes, a handful of copies a year] We have some 1,600 in stock with no reason to revert rights. ”

How about because it’s a contractual obligation?

Finally Durgin went to the SFWA’s GriefCom, or grievance committee, a committee that mediates disputes privately so no dirty laundry is aired. However, not only did the publisher continue to refuse to discuss matters beyond a promise that proof of distribution was forthcoming (except that the proof never ended up coming forth), the contact eventually led to a bizarre, anonymous phone call to the chair of the grievance committee “claiming harassment, declaring there would be no reversion on the title, and warning that she would ‘report’ us to [prominent Canadian SF writer #1] and [prominent Canadian SF writer #2]—all before hanging up on him.”

After one more attempt to contact the publisher and request the reversion, Durgin has posted the story publicly, and it’s getting a good deal of attention—I found out about it via BoingBoing, so you know the tale is spreading far and wide.

As Durgin points out, in this age of perpetual print via e-books and print-on-demand, contract language tying rights reversion to more specific conditions is very important—both for inclusion by the agent and author in the original contract, and for publishers honoring it when the conditions come to pass. When a publisher refuses to honor the terms of the contract it signed with an author, writers who are considering signing on need to take a serious look at that publisher and determine whether they still want to trust it.

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. Young Honor and Elizabeth
4. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
5. On Basilisk Station
6. The Honor of the Queen
7. The Short Victorious War
8. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
9. Field of Dishonor

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber

For this book, we actually jump back to the beginning of the chronology, because this novel is an expanded version of the novella of the same name, which I reviewed as part of the “Treecat Trilogy”. In fact, it also serves as a partial sequel to the second story in that group, “The Stray”, as well. Unlike most books in the Honor Harrington series, A Beautiful Friendship is not free to read—yet. I expect it will be bundled on the CD that will probably accompany A Rising Thunder next year.

The first third or so of the novel is a slightly expanded version of the novella. It is mostly the same, but has a few infodumps added—mostly in the form of Stephanie’s or the treecat Climbs Quickly’s internal monologues.

The second part picks up where that story left off, with Stephanie Harrington and her family fighting for treecats to be accorded the respect they deserve as the autochthonous sentient race of Sphinx. The problem is that Sphinx developing sentient inhabitants would cause a great deal of political trouble, particularly to land speculators whose options would suddenly become worthless.

This second part also incorporates Dr. Scott MacDallan and the other main characters from “The Stray”, as Stephanie seeks them out in the hope that they might prove allies in her quest for treecat recognition. In the meantime, she has to deal with well-meaning anthropologists who might potentially harm treecats’ cause in the name of studying them—and with one individual who turns out not to be so well-meaning after all.

The story is kind of what we’ve come to expect from Honorverse stories: heroic character must contend with well-meaning but naïve supporters, outright idiots, and a villain with nastier motivations. People who find the Honor Harrington books a bit repetitive in that regard will probably find this one about the same, but those who enjoy the formula in general will enjoy it here too. There’s a rather blatant tuckerization in the latter half of the book that I find just a wee bit too twee, but Weber will be Weber.

The book’s biggest problem has to do with “The Stray”. The story is heavily referenced, and its events are of direct consequence to what happens in the last part of the novel. The fact that the story itself is not actually there can leave new readers scratching their heads and wondering how they missed something. Ideally the story should have been reprinted within the book between the first and second parts, but since it was written by another author that would undoubtedly have led to complications.

With that being said, I’m not so sure how well the story works as a jumping-on point for new readers. It will be a treat for existing Honorverse fans who might have wondered what happened to the characters in “A Beautiful Friendship” and “The Stray”, but I’d suggest even those fans might want to revisit the free-to-read “The Stray” in between the two parts of the book.

A Beautiful Friendship is ostensibly a young-adult novel, but it’s one of those novels that gains the label simply because its protagonist is a teenager. There’s nothing about it that should turn off any adults, especially any adult Honorverse fans.

Perhaps the worst thing about the story is that we know that, no matter what Stephanie and friends do, treecats won’t get the true respect she wants for them until “What Price Dreams?” 170 years later, well after Stephanie is dead. I would rather like to see a novel expanding that story.

Coming Up: Getting back to the chronological reviews with Flag in Exile.

WHAT WE DO WANT TO SEE:
Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure.
WHAT WE DON’T WANT TO SEE:
Stories that show technology or space travel as evil or bad, Star Wars type galactic empires, paranormal elements, UFO abductions.

Entries will be judged by Baen editors Hank David and Jim Minz and Baen writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. The grand prize winner will be published on Baen’s website and paid at professional rates for the story, as well as receiving a number of other prizes.

Complete rules and information can be found here.