Shadow of Victory - Quality of the Story / Plot?

MaxxQ wrote:Most, if not all, the speculation I read in the months leading up to the release of the eARC was focused on big showdowns, new tech, seeing Bolthole, and other stuff. With very little of that in here (one major space battle, a single new ship), it's no wonder people are unhappy. They didn't get what they wanted - socks instead of the latest shiny new toy.

I beat the e-arc to the forum by days certainly not by more than a couple of weeks. I had no expectations beyond eagerly awaiting it, and hoping the Honorverse came to some conclusion before I die. reading here, I find out the timeline is not advancing and that I have to wait more years for some sort of resolution.

Do I wait for the David Weber books? YES. I may have to re-think avoiding the anthologies.

Spoilers








It's evidently the book RFC wanted to write, it's certainly not the book I wanted to read.

It jogs along with his usual skill in making scenes interesting and has some nice titbits about various characters. As someone who has read most of his output, I wouldn't have wanted to miss it, but I am glad Amazon UK were selling the Kindle edition really cheap, and if I had been a new reader I might well not have been looking for another book by him.

All this cutting back and forward between the various liberation movements gets confusing as well as tedious, even though we are seeing many of them for a second time. All the Polish titles and words in those sections are a bad and distracting decision, even worse than the mangled Safehold names. It's very lacking in any major battle sequences, we only see one new one, and even that is a bit ho-hum. All this summarising of what the regular readers recognise as crucial battles, but which get disposed of in a page or so here must be pretty dull and potentially confusing for the new reader. The 3rd run over the same timeline is one too many.

An 883 page book and the main story has not been significantly progressed, beyond a handful of chapters. I would far rather have seen all this effort put into something that advanced the main plot significantly and had more action of some kind where the series reader wasn't aware of how things had to turn out because we have seen the situation before. Where is the suspense or excitement in that? It is now hard to see how we get from here to a satisfying finish to the current story arc in one more book. RFC may well pull it off, of course.

There is a significant surprise about one long-running character in the new material, which will have major implications for the future, but a new reader will probably misinterpret the last couple of pages because a crucial bit of information about another character is not given in this book.

There is some character development, of course, but none of it looks particularly crucial from my POV. There is a good deal of backstory, but it looks like it is just backstory at this point. With a little reworking the few chapters in this book that advance the main story could easily have been inserted near the beginning of the next book. In lots of ways SoV just feels like marking time.

I am now on my first re-read of the book and have the following observations:

I felt that certain threads in the book were either the beginnings of conclusions that had appeared in the previous books, or the beginnings and ends of threads in the previous books.

I also found the Czech and Polish names of various institutions difficult to follow.

Also in a number of cases already knowing the outcome of a thread did subtracted slightly from the enjoyment of the book, although it did not seem to be the same as knowing the outcome of a thread in a book that is being re-read. Maybe after a few more re-reads I will be able to overcome the feeling that things seem to be out of order as it were.

My feeling, from the eARC, is that it is well written and covers a lot of ground. There is a lot that I like about it. However like many on here I was expecting a significant plot advance, so am disappointed in that respect.

I have the feeling it is the story that RFC really wanted to tell in the earlier books, but that he ran out of pages, or time, to do so.

I will not be as outspoken as some have been but I do feel that expectations were raised unduly, with some self generated on this forum.

Nevertheless it has NOT put me off any of RFCs books. There are many excellent ones in his portfolio, so one that is a bit of a miss is not so disastrous as some would have us believe.

I await the next Safehold with great anticipation.

John

George J. Smith wrote:
stuff deleted for brevity

I also found the Czech and Polish names of various institutions difficult to follow.

Yeah, that was a problem for me as well. A stronger variant of the problem I have with the Safehold books.

Unfamiliar words make it harder to follow the story and keep things in context. Safehold stretched that with odd names (so do Multiverse books) but Czech and Polish are even more outside my experience.

I didnt even notice at first that one of he two planets was Polish and the other Czech, made worse by them both being slavic languages I dont speak. The scenes on each tended to be something like the following:

<unfamiliar-name> said <unfamiliar-name>, as leader of the <name or acronym I dont understand> will be trouble unless our <unfamiliar-nickname or name> can deal with them.

At this point, I cannot whether or not it's the Polish world or the Czech one.

I suppose that I took the Czech and Polish names in my stride because I've spent quite a bit of time editing translations from those languages. That pushed me into learning how to pronounce them.

Cheers,John

ericth wrote:

George J. Smith wrote:
stuff deleted for brevity

I also found the Czech and Polish names of various institutions difficult to follow.

Yeah, that was a problem for me as well. A stronger variant of the problem I have with the Safehold books.

Unfamiliar words make it harder to follow the story and keep things in context. Safehold stretched that with odd names (so do Multiverse books) but Czech and Polish are even more outside my experience.

I didnt even notice at first that one of he two planets was Polish and the other Czech, made worse by them both being slavic languages I dont speak. The scenes on each tended to be something like the following:

<unfamiliar-name> said <unfamiliar-name>, as leader of the <name or acronym I dont understand> will be trouble unless our <unfamiliar-nickname or name> can deal with them.

At this point, I cannot whether or not it's the Polish world or the Czech one.

SimonZerafa wrote:Hi HH Fans,

I've been eagerly awaiting the release of the next novel but reading the reviews on the Baen Books site for the SoV eARC it's been almost universally greeted with negative comments and reviews.

Lots of disappointment that the storyline hardly moves forward and it reads more like a weaker novel from the Wages of Sin Series than the main series.

So for those who have read it, what do you think?

Does it advance the main story arc at all? Is it worth the $15 to read the eARC?

As a long time fan of HH I would be hugely disappointed to discover that the long anticipated next chapter wasn't worth reading. Has DW literally lost the plot?

I've cancelled my order for the hard back. I see no point in spending £21 (and waiting 2 months for delivery).

Comments and thoughts, no spoilers please!

Kind Regards

Simon

Didn't really care for this book. Lot of pages fragmented into lots of minor subplots. Each subplot introduces more background/characters/storyline but at the end of the day, who cares? They all read the same (and I don't think I'm giving away anything here) - some pages of stage setting, Alignment character fans the flames of revolution, things reach a flashpoint, will the Manties show up in time and save the day?

It's all just theme and variation with hard to parse Polish and Czech names thrown in just to see if you're awake.

Well, even though my expectations were suitable lowered by the comments from people who had read the e-arc, I still found the book a bit of a slog. I only skimmed the scenes involving the various revolutions. I can appreciate seeing the beginning of Project Janus and the way it unravels because of two different coincidences a quarter of the way around the Verge from each other, but that left rather thin gruel for the rest. The one battle scene was up to snuff. I did enjoy the catwoman, even though the all-too-common misunderstanding of genetics set my teeth slightly on edge.

A couple fewer revolutions and a lot fewer Polish and Czech names would have been a great help. In a lot of places I thought scenes had been processed through Admiral Roszak's chopping board and tossed into a salad.

JohnRoth wrote:Well, even though my expectations were suitable lowered by the comments from people who had read the e-arc, I still found the book a bit of a slog. I only skimmed the scenes involving the various revolutions. I can appreciate seeing the beginning of Project Janus and the way it unravels because of two different coincidences a quarter of the way around the Verge from each other, but that left rather thin gruel for the rest. The one battle scene was up to snuff. I did enjoy the catwoman, even though the all-too-common misunderstanding of genetics set my teeth slightly on edge.

A couple fewer revolutions and a lot fewer Polish and Czech names would have been a great help. In a lot of places I thought scenes had been processed through Admiral Roszak's chopping board and tossed into a salad.

And I'm waiting ... for my copy to be shipped from Amazon. Last book I ordered from them was shipped on the release date. Bummer.

Just got my Kindle copy of it so I'll read it through before posting. From all the chatter here on the board, at least I know what to expect. Strangely enough I could buy it right now, even though I was under the impression it's release date was later, while my Kindle pre-order for "At the Sign of Triumph" is still hanging fire. Maybe I simply had my Kindle release dates messed up.

Larry