Reviews for War of Honor (Honor Harrington Series #10)

The average rating for War of Honor (Honor Harrington Series #10) based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-02 00:00:00 Jack Fritz David Weber writes the Honor Harrington series, and the early books (those that I've read) were actually pretty good. It's high-quality space opera, starring a starship captain in the far-future version of the Royal Navy. The books are -- somewhat sketchily -- drawn from the same Napoleonic-era sources as the Aubrey-Maturin series, or the Hornblower series. (The lead bad guy in Nouveau Paris in the early books is named "Rob S. Pierre", get it?) Honor Harrington is a character in the Hornblower tradition of audacity, competence, and awkwardness, and when Weber writes about her, it's done with brio and panache. Harrington's a natural leader, with the guts and energy needed for high command, along with an incapacity to suffer fools that gets her into frequent feuds with those selfsame fools. I am reading the series somewhat out of sequence -- blame my service -- and wasn't a bit surprised that War of Honor was a letdown. The ninth or tenth volumes of any sci-fi or fantasy saga tend to be potboilers at best, unreadable at worst. I wasn't expecting anything really good or outstanding from War of Honor, just a quick read and then move on to the next target, er, book. I regret to have to tell you that War of Honor is almost laughably bad. It is the sort of book that cries out for an editor, or maybe even an author. It is overstuffed, padded, and upholstered, but somehow not comfortable. There are basically two problems with War of Honor, either of which could be fixed in about fifteen minutes with the editing features in Microsoft Word. It is not that the novel is too long. I would welcome -- I suppose -- a really long Honor Harrington novel if it were a novel about Honor Harrington. This is not that. Instead, War of Honor is about politics, and not in a good way. Weber falls into the common trap of being overly interested in his fantasy world, which is about as bad as being overly interested in your fantasy baseball team. It's important for me to know that I have Grady Sizemore and Hideki Matsui and Jason Bay in my fantasy outfield, but you could care less, and I wouldn't think to bore you about it. So there's pages -- chapters -- whole sections of discussions of the political situation in the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven. There were similar chapters in previous books, mind you, but those chapters usually were pretty skinny, and they usually featured the politicians b!tching about poor Honor. Now, there's more stuff in the book -- by a factor of about eleven -- about the "High Ridge Government" and its nefarious deeds than there is about starships blowing up. This is unforgivable, and mean-spirited to boot. Basically, all one would have to do would be to highlight the e-text of War of Honor, delete all the chapters about political matters, and stick to the story. However, that gets us into the second problem. The plot of War of Honor is recycled - hell, not even that. It's like it's been passed down through the generations like some heirloom, and brought out for special occasions. Yet again, the political operatives have stuck poor Honor out on the sharp end of the spear, putting her in an impossible position against superior enemy fire -- and she manages to fight her way through yet again, burnishing her reputation in the process. But even with high-tech editing solutions, there really isn't much to be done with War of Honor. This is because Weber has lost sight of what made the prior books so fun -- not just space battles, but the character of Honor herself. So much of what happens in War of Honor has nothing to do with its title character, which is a mistake as large as the Manticore Junction. When she appears at the end of the book to save the day, it's almost an afterthought, and that's a shame. The trick to writing long series (the O'Brian books are exemplia gratia) is to make the books about the characters. War of Honor is not about Honor Harrington, at least not for large chunks of text, and that's why it fails.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-14 00:00:00 Jose Pujol This series is beginning to get tedious. this volume contains about 75% more words than anybody could reasonably use, mostly to tell us tedious detail of the politics of Manticore. I know it's not really unbelievable that corrupt politicians could bend and break laws to their own benefit, and actually believe their own lies. after all, politicians fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and somehow managed to believe those lies too, but just because truth is stranger than fiction doesn't mean that such fiction is interesting to read. But even some of the smarter characters act in ways that are at best odd, but at worst stupid. people contradict themselves, act against both their best interests and those of their nation, and just basically make themselves as unsympathetic as possible.