Mission of Honor

ralphkern

ralphkern

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Is anyone else really struggling with the later HH books? I want to love them, and I'm affording David Weber a hell of a lot more slack than I would any other author... but MOH is just like reading like the minutes of a set of meetings. (200 pages in and, quite literally it has all been in conference rooms)

I'm going to hold out as I've read that a 'game changer' occurs in this book, and I'm hoping it's used to bring back the sense of peril that the earlier ones had but sheesh! No more meetings!!! PLEASE!
 
This is something we've discussed before. They do change character as HH moves up in rank. In my opinion they have moved from action military SF to military SF to big politics SF. So long as my expectation is right I can and do still enjoy them as such but without a doubt their style and atmosphere has changed quite radically. I'm worried that the same will happen with his Safehold books where I would be less tolerant of such a shift, and it did start to, for me, in A Mighty Fortress but he managed to recapture the adventure somewhat in the following book How Firm a Foundation.

I'm afraid if you move on to A Rising Thunder then it really does become big politics and I wouldn't even say that HH takes centre stage in it.
 
This book and the two before are some of the hardest to read; or at least were for me.

I recently reread them all to find what I liked and didn't like about them and these there were the hardest to get through both times.

I think that as a reader if you are not persuaded by Davids writing at this point it might be a good time to quit. Overall since they are so massive there is a story in there that can be salvaged.

I'm of the opinion that this has always been the way David writes but there were probably massive edits to keep it all down to a minimum the first three books but even by then they were letting him start to get out of hand.

David is a sort of SFF and boardroom suspense thriller author all rolled into one genre that hovers on military SF.

The novels after this start focusing more on Michelle Henke.

But this is the book where Hamish sees the Salamander at work for the first time and it's the strangest of love tomes.
 
Possibly my expectations have been skewed by swinging back to the first two on free download prior to getting MOH and ART. I have read them all prior but a little disjointed now.

I don't actually mind that HH isn't center stage. Ironically Theisman, Tourville and Catchet have always been my fave characters anyway and for me its the Honorverse rather than Honor herself that is the draw. I would like him to drill back down into the nitty gritty though rather than unending chatter.
 
I know how your feel; I have commented before with regard to the later books on the interminable conversations filled with multiple paragraph speeches however this was one of my notes about the next book - A Rising Thunder - which you might find encouraging.

I was actually very pleased and encouraged by this book. I felt Weber had regained his knack for wrapping most of his info-dumping up in good little action scenes.
Click to expand...

So I seemed to feel he had got out of the meeting room a bit more in that one.
 
I find none of this bothers me. When the action is slowed I tend to speed up my reading and when the action arrives I tend to slow down and savor. It is all good! Weber's pacing always works for me.
 
It would be just fine with me; if someone were to come around every so often to make sure I'm still awake.

Timba said:
I find none of this bothers me. When the action is slowed I tend to speed up my reading and when the action arrives I tend to slow down and savor. It is all good! Weber's pacing always works for me.
Click to expand...
 
I would hate to see Adm Harrington's outlook calender.

0800 - 1000: meeting re: Sol league
1005 - 1200: briefing re: performance figures of ships
1200 - 1300: lunch with queenie
1300 - 1500: training briefing, 'hyperbands & you! Why they're important (please ensure you do the e-learning package
1500 - 1800: meeting re: peeps
1800 - 2000: gym and martial arts
2000 - 2200: Nimitz time & dinner
 
Actually I thought Mission of Honor was a book in which Weber was beginning to find his stride again. But you are so right that the last books feel immensely bloated next to the first 4-6. I've just finished re-reading the first 4 books and I was surprised by how fast they moved. I guess I had gotten used to the pace of the later books. I've always suspected that he was not forced to do massive editing as his fame grew, but I don't have any information to back that up. Does anyone? Or is this just a pet theory that makes sense?

Ralph Kern: That's rich!
 
Well, I can tell you for sure that they didn't bother as much with copy editing as the series grew. I've been rereading them steadily since the Basilisk freebie announcement (thanks, Brian -- oh, wait, that was me, too), and I'm up to War of Honor, which is by far the worst for typos. There's a bit of back-and-forth on some of the names throughout the series (Baroness Morncreek/Mourncreek, for one), but this one has typos of all kinds, every chapter. And I suspect strongly that they didn't bother making him cut the books as much as it progressed, either.

I *think* I have read Mission of Honor, although it's one that I got at the library rather than buying. My series stops at Ashes of Victory. And I have not managed to read past Mission of Honor, but I plan to remedy that in this read-through of the series.
 
When it gets going, it gets going... then they have a meeting about it getting going...
 
I cheat. I do text2speach and listen to MP3s. I doubt that I could read it.

But I have gone back and listened to Flag in Exile. It wasn't as good as I remember it

I guess Harrington's melodramatic guilt trips didn't annoy me as much 20 years ago as they do now. Or maybe I have just read the character too much since then.

The series seemed to go down hill after that book or just kept being more of the same. The new enemy raises the interest level for me. But I don't think I could sit and read it. Listening is tolerable since I can brush my teath at the same time.

psik
 
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