Ashes of Victory & War of Honor
David Weber
Kindle editions
published in 2000 and 2002
Bear with me because this is relevant. This January, about a year or so after everybody else, I finally broke down and got myself a smart phone on a not too onerous subscription plan. The phone I got was a HTC Wildfire, a dear little thing with some annoyances, but nothing major and because it was an Android phone, it had a version of Amazon's Kindle available for it. Earlier this month I got this, then was looking around for some free books to put on it. Got the usual set of the Classics from Project Gutenberg of course, but I also wanted something more modern, something light and preferably science fiction, something I could read on the tram without having to pay too much attention to it.
Enter David Weber and his Honor Harrington series. Back in the nineties I devoured those books, but even then I knew they were not by any measure good books: wish fulfillment war porn with a severe case of hero worship and occasional dodgy politics and more than occasional dodgy science. Even on a sentence and paragraph level Weber is often just not very good: awkward dialogue, oodles of infodumps just as the spacewars heat up and in general too much verbiage with stock phrases repeated over and over again. Yet for all that I kept reading. I was going to just read a bit of Ashes of Victory just to test Kindle on my phone, yet here I am having read both that and War of Honor. Weber must be doing something right.
I got these novels, along with a shedload of others from the crack factory that's The Fifth Imperium, a Baen Books fansite that hosts images of all the various cds/dvds Baen has given away with its books, with permission of Baen and its authors of course. Just got some .mobi files of the novels I wanted, hooked my phone up via USB, dropped them in the Kindle folder and there they were, ready to read. With a screen diagonal of only 3.2 inch (8 cms), I was curious to see if reading any book would be at all possible, but it turned out to work quite well, the text being adapted to the screen size automatically -- it meant a lot of thumbing though, flipping through the screens, especially at the length of these books.
Despite this, reading them on the Kindle worked well. I read Ashes of Victory in a couple of big chunks, including a couple of long train journeys, while War of Honor was done in bite size chunks whenever I had a few seconds to spare, e.g. waiting in line at the supermarket. Both ways of reading worked well, though sitting on the train just staring at a tiny screen motionless but for tiny thumb movements every few seconds or so does make you look like a berk.
On to the novels themselves. Ashes of Victory and War of Honor are the ninth and tenth novels respectively in the Honor Harrington series, so assume a fairly deep knowledge of what went before; luckily I had read all previous novels way back when. For the purpose of the review, all you need to know is that the series is basically the Napoleonic Wars in Spaaace, that Honro does have some resemblance to one Horatio Hornblower, though not so much anymore this late in the series, that the bad guys are the People's Republic of Haven and the good guys are the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its allies. In Ashes of Victory Honor herself has just returned from a prisoner of war planet, having liberated it and taken over the fleet guarding it, leading out tens of thousands of p.o.ws from dozens of planets once taken over by Haven, at the cost of one of her eyes and one of her arms.
Meanwhile the war grinds on, with Haven on the offensive but Manticore working hard to get its new generation of battleships and weapons online in sufficient numbers to take back the initiative. Because of her wounds and need to recover and get artificial replacements, Honor is kept away from the fighting, but is still involved in the political and strategic side of the war. On the Haven side of the war, things are not going well either, the Committee for Public Safety's paranoia and especially that of its leaders Rob S. Pierre (get it?) and Oscar St. Just against its own military handicapping the latter in its fight with Manticore. In the end Manticore does launch its offensive with the new weapons and completely slaughters anything put in its way. As various plots and subplots come to a conclusion, Haven sues for a ceasefire and the new Manticore government agrees.
War of Honor is the story of the political maneuvering during the ceasefire, as the new regimes on both sides come to grip with their situation. On the Haven side, it means frantic rebuild of their navy and upgrade of weapon systems and tactics, while the foolish coalition government in Manticore, consisting of peacenik liberals and grasping aristocrats only interested in safeguarding their own position, is busy drawing on the peace dividend by cutting back its navy, stopping the buildup of new ships and investing the freed money in their own pet projects. Honor, not the new government's favourite person, is sent with a taskforce to Silensia, where tensions with a third star empire, the Andermani are rising. Needless to say the war does break out again, but it takes most of the book to do so.
Which is why I call these books warporn: not to be dismissive of them, but because Weber structures them as oldfashioned porn. you have to wade through an awful lot of clutter before you get to the good stuff; the climax so to speak. Much of these novels are about politics and showing the preperations for the interstellar battles you're reading them for and even during the battles, there's more infodump than action. It all makes for a very flabby reading experience, with a lot of repetition and a lot of slack and scenes that could've been cut and lots of people telling each other things they should already know.
Which made it ideal to read while partially distracted by whatever I was really doing when finding myself with a few seconds to spare...