An out of order snippet for Rose

Star Knight wrote:

There seems to be a lot of filling in the blanks in this book.

I'm not sure we need those fillings.


In fact i really wish we would get some more liniar storytelling at last. All this jumping around really hurts the narrative flow of pretty much all books since MoH.

I am not sure you can ask for linear storytelling while reading explicitly out of order snippets ! We'll see if there is progress on the main story (which I hope) when the eARC comes out, errh soon ?

Braudel26 wrote:

In fact i really wish we would get some more liniar storytelling at last. All this jumping around really hurts the narrative flow of pretty much all books since MoH.

I am not sure you can ask for linear storytelling while reading explicitly out of order snippets ! We'll see if there is progress on the main story (which I hope) when the eARC comes out, errh soon ?

I fail to see why you think i'm criticizing 'out of order snippets'. This is not about posting a random snippets, i have some issues with the storytelling as a hole.

All this retelling, backtracking and filling in the blanks are actually only symptoms of larger problems with the narrative structure of most of the later books.

The earlier Honorverse books used to tell selfcontained stories. Sure, there was the larger plot and all but every book actually was about something.

Honor foils a Havenite attempt to conquer Basilisk
Honor defends Yeltsin and secures the Alliance
The war finally happens and Honor fights gallantry.
Honor settles the score with Young and pays for it
The war drags on and Honor has to save Grayson yet again

All those books work, not only as a part of a greater hole but as mostly independent books as well.
I can legitimately pick up any of the older books and enjoy them as independently as high quality military sicfi. Some backstory is useful of course, but those books work even without the larger context.

The new ones not so much. The story got too big, there is so much stuff going on and somehow we need to see all of it and no detail is irrelevant.

Remember the old days? We never saw stuff like the Third Battler of Yeltsin (only the biggest space battle in human history until this point) in any detail. We only get two or three pages of Parnell facing the consequences.
The conquest of Trevors Star (only the main objective of the RMN and build up for at least three books) happened of screen as well. Just like Pritcharts and Theismans stabilization and reconciliation of the Republic.
There is so much (excellent) stuff we never got to see and most likely never will.

But now? Somehow the books need to cover everything now. Preferable from multiple angles. Why? I dont get it.
Just a random example, why do we need Cachats and Zilwickis return voyage to Haven in SoF when we already seen the result in MoH?

How much backtracking do we see in the older books? How often did we visit the aftermath of something like Operation Thunderbolt ?
Or the Battle of Manticore?
Why do we have to see Terekhovs reaction at OysterBay when there is nothing new or significant to tell us?

IMO you dont need to show the scene if the reader can infer from Sometimes its peferctly fine to leave stuff to the imagination of the reader.

Nowadays we get everything, in every book. Sometimes its even the same stuff copypasted into multiple books. This hurts the narrative structure of each work immensely IMO.
Why do we need to 'check in' with Zilwicki and Cachat in MoH, ART and SoF when they have their own series with ToF and CoG?
What even happens in MoH? What in ART and SoF? What are those books even about besides the overall plot?
Can you tell me offhand without checking the narrative beginning and ending of each book?

Dont get me wrong, i like Webers work immensly, the universe he created is fantastic and its fun to argue about it.
But i also feel like the narrative structure has gone straight to hell in the later books and so far it doesnt look like it will change much with SoV.
Doesnt mean its bad necessarily, just different and not what i personally prefer.

After you have put us through the wringer with Helen's reaction to the news of the loss of the Kitty is there going to be a scene where she finds out her father is alive just to balance things up?

Star Knight wrote:..snip..
Nowadays we get everything, in every book. Sometimes its even the same stuff copypasted into multiple books. This hurts the narrative structure of each work immensely IMO.
Why do we need to 'check in' with Zilwicki and Cachat in MoH, ART and SoF when they have their own series with ToF and CoG?
What even happens in MoH? What in ART and SoF? What are those books even about besides the overall plot?
Can you tell me offhand without checking the narrative beginning and ending of each book?

Dont get me wrong, i like Webers work immensely, the universe he created is fantastic and its fun to argue about it.
But i also feel like the narrative structure has gone straight to hell in the later books and so far it doesnt look like it will change much with SoV.
Doesnt mean its bad necessarily, just different and not what i personally prefer.

I think it's a function of the different story arcs being merged into one, there has to be some overlap even though it means some redundant text will appear. It's a tad annoying yes, but I can live with it.

Star Knight wrote:

There seems to be a lot of filling in the blanks in this book.

I'm not sure we need those fillings.

I mean, what does this scene add to the story?
We already knew Hexapuma was lost with all hands during OysterBay.
We already know about the total number of casulties.

It tells us nothing new, there is no suprise development, the characters behave pretty much like we had to expect.

Its not a but scene (far from it actually), but IMO something like this belongs in Shadow of Freedom, not Shadow of Victory.

The story of /Terekhov has already moved far beyond the shock of OysterBay.
One of the last scenes in SoF is Terekhovs command liberating the Mobius System.

Going back to something that happend way before that only works well, if there is something significant we dont know yet.
This is not impossible but so far i dont see it.

In fact i really wish we would get some more liniar storytelling at last. All this jumping around really hurts the narrative flow of pretty much all books since MoH.

I suspect it serves several purposes. First, how war affects human beings (David is on record as stating that stories where only the bad guys die or are injured are war porn, not war fiction). Second it makes the characters human, not robots, if they have feelings making us care about them (and the story).

That last is extremely important in order to avoid the Eight Deadly Words, which are death to a story (in any format--oral, book, movie, etc.).

More on the Eight Deadly Words:
The Eight Deadly Words
The Eight Worst Words You Can Hear

Star Knight wrote:

There seems to be a lot of filling in the blanks in this book.

I'm not sure we need those fillings.

I mean, what does this scene add to the story?
We already knew Hexapuma was lost with all hands during OysterBay.
We already know about the total number of casulties.

It tells us nothing new, there is no suprise development, the characters behave pretty much like we had to expect.

Its not a but scene (far from it actually), but IMO something like this belongs in Shadow of Freedom, not Shadow of Victory.

The story of /Terekhov has already moved far beyond the shock of OysterBay.
One of the last scenes in SoF is Terekhovs command liberating the Mobius System.

Going back to something that happend way before that only works well, if there is something significant we dont know yet.
This is not impossible but so far i dont see it.

In fact i really wish we would get some more liniar storytelling at last. All this jumping around really hurts the narrative flow of pretty much all books since MoH.

Yes, but we've been Weber fans since whenever. Consider a new reader for whom this is the very first Honorverse book they've picked up. They know nothing about Oyster Bay, or the Nasty Kitty, or the relationships between Terehkov and his crew, etc. I don't know exactly how much effect Oyster Bay is going to have on this story, but it's clearly something.

The other reason is that it's a synchronizing point. The later books have indicated what months something happened in, but beyond that there's a lot of slop. Three different books have had Albrecht Detweiller's "oh, shit" moment, in exactly the same words. Anton and Victor's journey from Torch to Haven at least show different pieces of the trip.

Star Knight wrote:

There seems to be a lot of filling in the blanks in this book.

I'm not sure we need those fillings.

I mean, what does this scene add to the story?
We already knew Hexapuma was lost with all hands during OysterBay.
We already know about the total number of casulties.

It tells us nothing new, there is no suprise development, the characters behave pretty much like we had to expect.

Its not a but scene (far from it actually), but IMO something like this belongs in Shadow of Freedom, not Shadow of Victory.

The story of /Terekhov has already moved far beyond the shock of OysterBay.
One of the last scenes in SoF is Terekhovs command liberating the Mobius System.

Going back to something that happend way before that only works well, if there is something significant we dont know yet.
This is not impossible but so far i dont see it.

In fact i really wish we would get some more liniar storytelling at last. All this jumping around really hurts the narrative flow of pretty much all books since MoH.

Another thing to consider from the storyteller's point of view, is that this scene may be setting up the motivation for a character's actions later in the story--or even in the next book. (I see this is alluded to by Rincewind, and possibly others. I fast-scan threads a lot, much to my occasional embarrassment.)

You don't know if a scene is "filler" until you have the complete story.

(And granted, putting on my amateur editor hat, our beloved RFC's works could just possibly benefit from a slightly more rigorous editing than has been the norm recently. Not that I will not slavishly acquire them at the very first opportunity, you understand--I have the hardcover on order, and have bought the bundle. Heaven help me, I'm gonna buy the earc too . . .)

- sorry about hijacking this thread -

Your reasonings just underscore the main issue I’m trying to point out here.
The narrative structure of the later books just doesn’t work.

Too much is happening all at once and for some reason, we all need to read about every detail imaginable. Preferably from multiple angles.
And to make it worse, the different books not only cover different areas and characters, they need to cover stuff from other subseries as well.

But the thing is, you cant have it both ways. You either write books in different, semi-independent subseries clearly focusing on this or that part of the plot with each book having a distinct story of it own, or you write a consecutive story by regularly rotating between character viewpoints.
GRRM does the later with his Ice and Fire series for example.
With the later Honorverse books we have neither. One major storyline about the havenite wars and Honor Harrington produced two subseries and – IMHO – RFC never came up for a good solution on how to handle the storylines intersecting each other.
This resulted in the whole madness of duplicated chapters and multiple retelling of events we already knew more than enough about.
Unfortunately I didn’t get any better when he tried to merge it all into one storyarc again. This is not a bad idea, but the (current) implementation kills the narrative structure of individual books.

Shadow of Freedom should have been the book to really merge it again, move the plot forward and leave this entire structural mess behind us.
Instead the plot barely moved forward at all and bogged down somewehere between Mobius, Shallow, Seraphim and Saltash (yes I had to look those up, how many godforsaken system in the backyard of nowhere do we need to read about?)
Just a crazy thought on this one: We actually didn’t need to read about most of the stuff Henke and 10th fleet does at Mesa. Just have her show up at Mesa when C&Z need her and let the reader fill in the blanks with some breadcrums of information and subtle hints you drop later.
It would work great, we’ve seen this already in the earlier books.

We don’t need to read about every plot detail from multiple angles. Focus on characters instead. I’d love to read more about what Helen and Terekhov do all day when they not all about blowing up skyscrapers. Those earlier Saganami subseries books were great. But it has to fit to the story and to the overall narrative structure.

Tell us about something when it really impacts us too. I don’t know how you guys feel about it, but to me OysterBay is something that happens 3 or 4 books (I actually don’t know, would have to look it up) ago.
Its done, the story has already moved on. We are in the middle of the solarian war now, backtracking and reading again on how terrible something was I first read in 2010 (yeah ok, I looked it up) about does very little for me.
There is nothing wrong with this scene other than its just too late for me.

And that’s why I think SoV will have very similar problems to what described above. I mean, some of this stuff we apparently go back in time to when Manticore became the Star Empire. That’s At All Cost and Storm from the Shadows territory. How crazy is that? At this point I need a flowchart to properly arrange all those different chapters from half a dozen books in a coherent structure.

I shudder at the thought on what would it be like for a new reader at this point.

The slow advance of the series timeline is also causing problems in depicting the crisis of the Solarian League. Things are spinning out of the Mandarins' control. But with such a long real life delay between the onset of the crisis and some irrevocable tipping point, it's hard to get a sense of how slow-footed and clumsy their responses are. At this point, more time has elapsed in the real world than the League likely has left as a unified polity.

Star Knight wrote:- sorry about hijacking this thread -

Your reasonings just underscore the main issue I’m trying to point out here.
The narrative structure of the later books just doesn’t work.

Too much is happening all at once and for some reason, we all need to read about every detail imaginable. Preferably from multiple angles.
And to make it worse, the different books not only cover different areas and characters, they need to cover stuff from other subseries as well.

But the thing is, you cant have it both ways. You either write books in different, semi-independent subseries clearly focusing on this or that part of the plot with each book having a distinct story of it own, or you write a consecutive story by regularly rotating between character viewpoints.
GRRM does the later with his Ice and Fire series for example.
With the later Honorverse books we have neither. One major storyline about the havenite wars and Honor Harrington produced two subseries and – IMHO – RFC never came up for a good solution on how to handle the storylines intersecting each other.
This resulted in the whole madness of duplicated chapters and multiple retelling of events we already knew more than enough about.
Unfortunately I didn’t get any better when he tried to merge it all into one storyarc again. This is not a bad idea, but the (current) implementation kills the narrative structure of individual books.

Shadow of Freedom should have been the book to really merge it again, move the plot forward and leave this entire structural mess behind us.
Instead the plot barely moved forward at all and bogged down somewehere between Mobius, Shallow, Seraphim and Saltash (yes I had to look those up, how many godforsaken system in the backyard of nowhere do we need to read about?)
Just a crazy thought on this one: We actually didn’t need to read about most of the stuff Henke and 10th fleet does at Mesa. Just have her show up at Mesa when C&Z need her and let the reader fill in the blanks with some breadcrums of information and subtle hints you drop later.
It would work great, we’ve seen this already in the earlier books.

We don’t need to read about every plot detail from multiple angles. Focus on characters instead. I’d love to read more about what Helen and Terekhov do all day when they not all about blowing up skyscrapers. Those earlier Saganami subseries books were great. But it has to fit to the story and to the overall narrative structure.

Tell us about something when it really impacts us too. I don’t know how you guys feel about it, but to me OysterBay is something that happens 3 or 4 books (I actually don’t know, would have to look it up) ago.
Its done, the story has already moved on. We are in the middle of the solarian war now, backtracking and reading again on how terrible something was I first read in 2010 (yeah ok, I looked it up) about does very little for me.
There is nothing wrong with this scene other than its just too late for me.

And that’s why I think SoV will have very similar problems to what described above. I mean, some of this stuff we apparently go back in time to when Manticore became the Star Empire. That’s At All Cost and Storm from the Shadows territory. How crazy is that? At this point I need a flowchart to properly arrange all those different chapters from half a dozen books in a coherent structure.

I shudder at the thought on what would it be like for a new reader at this point.

You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion. In fact, as a reader, yours is the only opinion that matters when it comes to the decisions you make and the places you invest your interest and your reading time. There are books which have been highly recommended to me that simply don’t work for me as a reader, and there are books readers I respect have slammed that worked very well for me. Writing — and reading — is probably about the most subjective form of communication ever invented.

It’s also true that anyone — and writers are no different from anyone else in this regard — learns more from criticism than from praise. Praise comes from people who already think you’re doing a pretty good job; criticism comes from people who think you could be doing a better one.

Having said that, I’m telling the story the way I think it needs to be told. That may not be the story that you want to read, and that’s a totally appropriate decision for you to make. I do disagree with you that the narrative has “gone to hell,” but that may reflect our different viewpoints on what the story is and what it’s about at this point.

To me, it’s primarily about the people — the characters — within the story. The macro events of the war with the Solarian League, the political unrest on Wloclawek, what’s happening in Maya, what’s going on inside Operation Janus and Operation Houdini, the latest hardware and technological developments — all of that stuff — is meaningless except inasmuch as it relates to the characters dealing with them. I’m not saying that it isn’t important, and that it doesn’t matter, because it does. It’s literally the stuff of life or death for the people unfortunate enough to live in the “interesting times” I’ve created for them. But at the end of the day, the story’s about those people, and what truly matters to me are their responses: how Helen reacts to actually hearing about Hexapuma’s destruction, how Aivars Terekhov is going to deal with finding himself serving under Havenite admirals, how the people with in the onion react to the “collateral damage Albrecht Detweiler is prepared to accept to cover Houdini.

I write military science fiction, but it’s science fiction about human beings, and it’s the fashion in which those human beings react and respond to the forces in play that I believe is the heart of good storytelling. I’ve heard criticisms much like the ones you raise here for two or three books now in the Honorverse, and as I’ve said to most people who have presented them, I don’t think they’re invalid. I think that the readers who focus on those issues clearly have a different focus from mine as the writer, and that’s perfectly natural, because we’re different people. At the end of the day, though, I need to be guided by my own sense of where my story is going and how it needs to get there.

In structuring this particular book, there were some semi-external constraints that were imposed by what the next book needs to do and the amount of in-universe time available. There are story elements which I feel have to be dealt with, but the time window available is very tight. There are also story elements which I feel are important, if not quite so vital as the “have to” elements, which extend both backward and forward in time from where Shadow of Freedom ended. And there’s the need to set context for newer readers, which means touching upon things that have already happened.

At the end of the day, I’m quite satisfied with how it came together, the characters in its pages, and where it leaves the overriding storyline at the end of the book. You may disagree. In fact, based on your comments to date, I’m quite certain that you will disagree. The part of me which would just love to be universally admired by all I meet would prefer for you to agree with me, instead, but the part of me which is telling the story and creating this universe regrets your disagreement but accepts it and keeps on going. I hope you’ll continue to travel along with me, but the choice of the route to the story’s ultimate destination is mine.