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.