More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
E-book review: Honor Harrington series (introduction)
December 31, 2010 | 2:06 pm
|
By Chris Meadows
I’m going to make a New Year’s Resolution to do more e-book reviews. They’re fun to write, and they make a good change in pace from the e-book news that fills these pages. Plus, they make a good excuse to read e-books in new programs or devices.
Lately, I’ve decided to go back and reread the entire Honor Harrington series and related works, by David Weber (and friends), in internal chronological order. A few more novels have come out since the last time I did this, with another scheduled for 2011, and it’s been long enough since I read the whole thing that if I just read the latest ones I know I’ll miss about half the story. And since I’m going to be reading them anyway, I figure I might as well review them here as I do it. (I will space them out and intersperse other reviews as well, for variety.)
The Honor Harrington series is one of the Baen Free Library’s earliest successes—in fact, before there was a Free Library, the first Honor Harrington novel, On Basilisk Station, was given away as a “free sample” for Webscriptions. (That’s how I first read it, and got hooked, and probably the same is true for many other Honor fans.) The fact that it also became Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper was all the proof that Jim Baen and Eric Flint needed to form the library and, later, start giving away every e-book in that and other series on bound-in CDROMs.
Since the complete Honor Harrington series thus far is available on one of those CDROMs (with the exception of one short story/novella anthology, due out in February), hosted publicly on-line at The Fifth Imperium, this means that any TeleRead readers who would like to follow along can read the stories as I do. The reviews will try to avoid major spoilers for the book or story being reviewed, but will almost certainly contain them for previous ones.
This is a reread I undertake with some trepidation, as my feelings about the Harrington series are marked by no small amount of ambivalence. Make no mistake: Weber is a very talented writer, and I fully enjoyed the books while reading them (for the first time, at least), but as Weber’s longest-running series (indeed, one of the longest-running recent SF series in general that I know of), it provides ample room for some of his flaws as a writer to come to the fore as well.
The Honor Harrington books are quite an accomplishment in epic world-building. Even leaving aside the hundreds-of-years-ago prequel stories, they span a period of over twenty years, following the interwoven arcs of several characters as they affect the history of their respective star nations. And if the way that starship technology is set up to force space battles to play out like naval encounters seems a little contrived, the battles are still written suspensefully—and anyway, the naval parallel makes it easier for readers to envision the encounters.
On the other hand, Weber’s tendency to paint characters largely in shades of black or white has a lot of room to play here. Characters are often either incredibly good and noble or irredeemably evil (or irredeemably incompetent, which amounts to the same thing), with very little grey area in between. (And anyone who messes with or even sneers at Honor usually gets what’s coming to him in the end.) I tried to come up with exceptions to this rule, but then realized every character that came to mind was from one of the spinoff stories or novels written by guest writers!
And of course Honor herself sometimes seems too perfect to be true. To use TVTrope speak, she has often been accused of being a Canon Sue and a Boring Invincible Hero (though ironically, Weber had originally planned to kill her off at one point and jump the story ahead to the next generation). On the other hand, those are just the flip side of being a Determinator.
When combined with the way Weber is often very hard on his characters in their personal and professional lives (Honor goes through about seven different kinds of hell in just the first few books, let alone the rest of the series) and the somewhat heavy-handed politics, this can tend to make the series as a whole read very melodramatically. This is not bad in small doses, but it is one of the reasons I am a little hesitant to approach the entire series again.
But as I said, despite all this Weber is a very good and engaging writer. And it’s a measure of that engagement that he makes me care about the characters enough to want to experience their lives again, even knowing what awaits them. That I’m willing to go through the whole thing so I can find out what eventually happens next is ample proof of that.
So, despite my trepidation, once again I turn to life among the treecats.
Coming Up: Honor Harrington Prequel Stories
|
Related Posts:
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
One of things Weber does “indulge” in (which is big plus to the series) is that he really fleshes out the supporting cast and antagonists. Most of the stories have multiple chapters devoted to the “lower decks” crew, making you feel it if and when some of the become casualties or they manage to survive. Some end off as proteges or acolytes of the Great Heroine or as major forces in their own right, especially in the more recent volumes where the narrative action spreads far beyond Honor’s reach.
The main antagonists, by the way, may be evil through and thorugh *by our standards* but by their own points of view most see themselves as good guys or just “playing the game” as required by their time and place. Most are aggressively ambitious but given the millieu and the genre those are *exactly* the kind of people that would be playing the roles they are filling.
The (amusingly) scary thing is that many of those character types are readily visible around us as major players in world and national politics. Webers heroes are all-too familiar examples of what our species can and does produce. What our era *doesn’t* have are Weber-class heroes. (It *is* fiction, after all.)
The initial books are quite entertaining. I enjoyed them immensely, and I’ve subsequently read everything in the series, but haven’t really enjoyed the later ones that much. (Exception, “Crown of Slaves”, but Weber had a very good co-author, Eric Flint.)
My personal advice to new readers (and maybe rereaders) is to stop after number 6 (Honor Among Enemies). No’s 7 & 8 are not really independent novels, and are roughly where (IMO) the whole thing jumps the shark.
Happy Reading,
Jack Tingle
I’ve read the first six books years ago from the free cd. I doubt I’ll ever finish the rest. Just like every other series I’ve ever read, it all starts to peter out by book four or five. And without any exceptions coming to mind, all series have fallen into a rut by book six in my opinion. Of course some readers see what I call rut as stability, consistency, or something. But the first few Honor books were good, however, Weber should have killed her off (or otherwise close out her story) around book four and gone on with other characters with other motives and goals.
There is no question that the arc encompassing the first Havenite War is more accessible than the books that follow.
But in many ways they are just a prologue to the larger story Weber is dealing with. Not sure if he can pull it off but the rest of the series is really one mega novel, on the order of the Lensman Cycle. I’m not sure I can even identify another “series” of comparable scope. For all that Honor is the core character, she is hardly the sole protagonist of the story. The series is becoming very much an ensemble piece and I suspect that for the next 6 or so novels Honor is going to be offstage very often.
My only peeve with him is how long he’s taking to launch the Third “act” of the mega novel.