CoG ********SPOILERS*********** and review and rant...

Wow, was this book bad, it almost makes Beginnings look good.

I'm not sure who, if anyone, actually edited this book for continuity or to see if it makes sense, but it doesn't look like it.

Yana who has been following Victor and Anton, from Mesa to Parmley to Haven to Manticore and now they want her to go back to Mesa with them, so we then get this...

“It’s worth a try,” said Victor. “If we want Yana, we’ll need to send a courier to Parmley Station anyway. We can ask Steph to come back with her. For reasons unspecified, of course—"

But she's been with you, complaining of how bored she is the whole time... Did she leave her favorite gun?

Speaking of Steph, they jump through hoops to get her to return with Mesa to help them, and she disappears from the book. You spent entire chapters on people talking about how to get her return and convincing her to return and then she isn't in the book anymore? Just padding the book to make it longer?

I don't know if it's just the eBook version, but whomever set the type for the Cast of Characters needs to be fired.

For example:

Jeremy X: Secretary of War of the Kingdom
of Torch; formerly head of the
Audubon Ballroom, the ex-slave
guerrilla force considered by some people to be a terrorist organization.

and

Zilwicki, Berry: Queen of Torch; adopted daughter of Anton Zilwicki.
Zilwicki, Lars: Brother of Berry.
Snorrason, Hjálmar: Lieutenant Commander, Solarian League Navy; CO, DD SLNS Napoleon. Also CO DD Division 3029.1.

It then continues on with characters from ToF through the Zilwicki's again.

I would be really embarrassed to have my name associated with this book.

They save the three remaining people from their last visit, and they disappear from the rest of the book.

This entire book should have been a half dozen chapters in another book.

I want my SPACE OPERA back.

Thirdbase wrote:Wow, was this book bad, it almost makes Beginnings look good.

I'm not sure who, if anyone, actually edited this book for continuity or to see if it makes sense, but it doesn't look like it.

Yana who has been following Victor and Anton, from Mesa to Parmley to Haven to Manticore and now they want her to go back to Mesa with them, so we then get this...

“It’s worth a try,” said Victor. “If we want Yana, we’ll need to send a courier to Parmley Station anyway. We can ask Steph to come back with her. For reasons unspecified, of course—"

But she's been with you, complaining of how bored she is the whole time... Did she leave her favorite gun?

Speaking of Steph, they jump through hoops to get her to return with Mesa to help them, and she disappears from the book. You spent entire chapters on people talking about how to get her return and convincing her to return and then she isn't in the book anymore? Just padding the book to make it longer?

I don't know if it's just the eBook version, but whomever set the type for the Cast of Characters needs to be fired.

For example:

Jeremy X: Secretary of War of the Kingdom
of Torch; formerly head of the
Audubon Ballroom, the ex-slave
guerrilla force considered by some people to be a terrorist organization.

and

Zilwicki, Berry: Queen of Torch; adopted daughter of Anton Zilwicki.
Zilwicki, Lars: Brother of Berry.
Snorrason, Hjálmar: Lieutenant Commander, Solarian League Navy; CO, DD SLNS Napoleon. Also CO DD Division 3029.1.

It then continues on with characters from ToF through the Zilwicki's again.

I would be really embarrassed to have my name associated with this book.

They save the three remaining people from their last visit, and they disappear from the rest of the book.

This entire book should have been a half dozen chapters in another book.

I want my SPACE OPERA back.

Heh. We've been discussing this over on Eric Flint's forum, which is where snippet-by-snippet discussions happen.

As far as I know, nobody edited the book. They missed the deadline and they were shuffling chapters around almost to the last minute to try to patch up timing problems. It's a miracle their actual dead tree pub date only slipped by a week.

To be blunt about it, Eric Flint, while he's a good enough author on his own, has been a disaster for the Honorverse simply because of logistics: he and David can't coordinate their schedules well enough to get books out on time. They both have extremely heavy schedules: David has two major series plus several minor series and the Evergreen project; Eric has a half dozen collaborations on the 1632 series going at once. It's a miracle either of them find time to breathe, let alone collaborate on anything. At the same time, Baen and their parent company want pub dates for new books a year in advance.

While I found the book interesting I also found it a very tough read and very disjointed. I had trouble following the many jumps in the plots and subplots that seemed to be dropped quickly.
Alas it is the very first Honor book I have no interest in re-reading, as I have all the others several times. I am not sad I bought it however.

between David's wife's medical problems, Eric Flint's heart attack and, us fans clambering for a new Honorverse book it was not the best. But as noted better than nothing. It will be a while until the next HH book that moves the story forward .

Poker

wholf359 wrote:While I found the book interesting I also found it a very tough read and very disjointed. I had trouble following the many jumps in the plots and subplots that seemed to be dropped quickly.
Alas it is the very first Honor book I have no interest in re-reading, as I have all the others several times. I am not sad I bought it however.

I did find it disjointed and hard to follow at times. There were still some not-very-well inserted and/or too long infodumps in there as well.

I will say that the whole Operation Houdini climax was done nicely. It had perhaps too many parts to it but it got across the sheer scale and brutality of the attack and how the MA goes about dealing with those who are expendable in their eyes (i.e. almost everyone).

I would've liked to see an actual scene with Mike and Tenth Fleet with their initial reactions to what was going on instead of just the very vague implication of their arrival that we got in the novel.

The scenes between Honor and Anton were nice since I don't believe we've ever really gotten to see them interact one-on-one before; Anton's obvious concern for the people back on Mesa comes across nicely.

Yes, it's not the authors' finest hour. The set-up is too detailed and too slow, it gets a bit better when they hit Mesa, but only really takes off in the preparation for and description of the defence of the seccie towers. There are a string of characters set up and then not much used on Mesa; Steph, Andrew Artlett (cardboard references only), Yana(ditto), Lajos Irvine (who was slated for posting to Darius anyway when last seen).

I had been hoping for faster action and 10th Fleet appearing a good bit sooner. The mission has been an utter failure, so far. The idea was to get more Intel on the MA. Output amounts to "It's an onion", which I suspect they kind of knew anyway, and the fact that they had a disaster plan, ditto. Anything gleanable from what and who remains on Mesa has still to be harvested in another book, and Anton is in the wrong place to lead the effort. Depending on whether it is only field agents or all Alignment families who have the 'die if you don't get pinged' mechanism, there will be a lot of low level people to question/investigate, or a pile of excess deaths to analyse. Either way whatever remains of MA facilities will be found and picked over. I suspect they haven't been as successful at keeping everybody's DNA out of the public records as they would like either. The RMN naturally want all the companies' data banks as well. Wonder how much of them they will get?

Now that I think of it the possibility of most of another book to get the info this one should have found is just a bit dispiriting.

Well, it was not as good as Crown of Slaves (the best of the Flint-Weber collaborations IMHO), but it suffered from the same weaknesses of ART and SoF; they are 'bridge' books designed to get the separate story-lines to approximately the same time in history so the author can 'meld' them back into the overall storyline without leaving things hanging.

I mean, ART closed out the Haven Wars, which had been the focus for 12 books and multiple years and added the Beowulf storyline and brought the Sollie War to the forefront, Shadows of Freedom got the Sollie War well underway, and Cauldron of Ghosts has closed out Mesa as a major player in this drama, leaving us to await the upcoming destruction of the SL and the coming confrontation with the MAlign.

So in effect we've left the Honorverse arc (vs Haven) we've grown up on and need to move to the 'rest of the story'. And these books were written to get us there.

And like most 'bridge' stories, they were not as strong as the main arc. Hopefully the next book will better integrate all the players into the narrative.

We shall see--eventually.

The Mesans have no sense of humor. Genetic Advancement and Uplift League is like saying twice the same thing. Why couldn't they call it the Genetic Oversight and Uplift League ? No repetition ... and a nice acronym.

niethil wrote:The Mesans have no sense of humor. Genetic Advancement and Uplift League is like saying twice the same thing. Why couldn't they call it the Genetic Oversight and Uplift League ? No repetition ... and a nice acronym.

They could also have called it the Genetic Oversight and Advancement League. The Gauls then become goalkeepers or goalies.

I guess I am going to be the voice of dissent here, at least somewhat. I just finished the book and liked it.

That being said, I will admit that I would like to have had a few pages on the flag deck with Mike Henke as she discovered what was going on on Mesa.

Also, I think a couple of chapters of aftermath of what happened when 10th fleet arrived would have been welcome. What intel did Victor and Anton actually end up with? Could it be that when 10th fleet took control of Mesa they were able to confirm MA abandonment of Mesa? Could it be that they found someone who was at least partially inside the onion?

What it amounted to for me was that the book had an unfinished feel to it. One can only hope that some of the missing detail will be supplied in future books.

Don