Mainline vs 'Side Stories'

I just love the Death Rides.

If its on a ship thats awesome, if its on the ground thats awesome too.

I've felt for awhile that the balance between board room exposition/info dump, and action sequence/Death ride has been scewed lately. Scewed towards providing us info on why the SL and Alignment is the way it is and how that will all break apart. Which is difficult because RFC was expecting to take 20 + years to have everything happen thats hapened in the last 2. I think that groundwork has mostly been set up now. New characters have been developed, situations explained, now its time to tighten our seat belts because the rides about to get deadly again.

At least thats my hope.

I can see one way that Honor can be part of the battle: she is, after all, supreme commander of the Grand Alliance Fleet. She won't be doing death rides but she will see them happening to her troops in spite of everything she planned to prevent that. The reason I think that she will be there, in person, isn't because we want her there. No, the Graysons, Havenites, and Manties want the Salamander with them just because they know that if there is a way she will pull them out of the fire.

Reader Bob wrote:I can see one way that Honor can be part of the battle: she is, after all, supreme commander of the Grand Alliance Fleet. She won't be doing death rides but she will see them happening to her troops in spite of everything she planned to prevent that. The reason I think that she will be there, in person, isn't because we want her there. No, the Graysons, Havenites, and Manties want the Salamander with them just because they know that if there is a way she will pull them out of the fire.

Unlikely. It's hard to find a way for even a lot of canoes full of spear armed tribesmen to threaten the USS Iowa.

While the mainline books are what hooked me on the series, my enjoyment had begun to wane before At All Costs. A Rising Thunder was enjoyable, but like the rest of the series at this point it feels like the wheels are spinning a bit.

Shadow of Saganami kick-started my interest in the side stories, with some interesting characters and a refreshing return to small-scale operations, and it remains in my top-three from Weber. but the same pacing problems are starting to leech into that series as well, and I'm hoping the next book in the series picks things up from Shadow of Freedom.

Despite my best efforts, I can't say I really got into the Cachat/Zilwicki spinoff. Even more so, that story feels like its going nowhere fast, and lately feels like more of an attempt to crowbar in the villains than a compelling story in its own right. Cauldron of Ghosts had its moments, but right now it's the best example of what the series is beginning to do wrong.

SWM wrote:Actually, there are 6 anthologies. Does that mean you are in the lucky position of having more new Honorverse to read? I could be jealous about that.

Meh, for some reason i just count the first 4 of them.

I can see one way that Honor can be part of the battle: she is, after all, supreme commander of the Grand Alliance Fleet. She won't be doing death rides but she will see them happening to her troops in spite of everything she planned to prevent that. The reason I think that she will be there, in person, isn't because we want her there. No, the Graysons, Havenites, and Manties want the Salamander with them just because they know that if there is a way she will pull them out of the fire.

And because she´s one of very few that all sides of the alliance will easily accept as a combined force commander.

Hellmer wrote:Despite my best efforts, I can't say I really got into the Cachat/Zilwicki spinoff. Even more so, that story feels like its going nowhere fast, and lately feels like more of an attempt to crowbar in the villains than a compelling story in its own right. Cauldron of Ghosts had its moments, but right now it's the best example of what the series is beginning to do wrong.

There are some really irritating elements in those books. The most recent book has enormous continuity errors and long meandering passages to nowhere, but even the first book was really kind of annoying.

kzt wrote:There are some really irritating elements in those books. The most recent book has enormous continuity errors and long meandering passages to nowhere, but even the first book was really kind of annoying.

Agreed. That, and it's just so detached from the larger story being told. It's theoretically interesting, but the characters aren't really interesting enough to drive it on their own.

I've always preferred the straight Honor storylines, but can deal with her being put on 'the sidelines' due to her stratospheric position within both the RMN and GSN. (I just hope RFC doesn't take a page from another sci-fi universe and demote her from an admiral back to a captain so she could explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and go where no one has gone before. That would be soooo wrong.)

But, to get back on the subject... Initially the Shadow arc didn't 'grab' me. It sort of had to grow on me before I came to like it. It wasn't the characters, Terekhov, Helen, Abigail, etc. were all interesting and engaging, it was how the story keeps jumping around. It almost reminds me a bit of Robert Jordan where the main characters go off in different directions and you spend 3 chapters on one character, 3 more on the second, etc. By the time you get finished with the 8th character you have a 400 page book and only 1 month of 'story' has progressed. It came across as very disjointed.

Now, Shadows doesn't go quite to that extreme, but there are a few places that left me saying to myself, "Alright, who are these people, where the heck are the at, and just what are they doing and why?" There are quite a few characters that appear out of nowhere (Commodore Zavala), that I end up liking but it takes a little time to get past the "Where did he come from?"

So, in regards to the Shadow arc, it took several re-readings to put everyone and everything in their proper place which probably explains why the sub-arc eventually grew on me. Kudos to my faith in RFC for my desire to get to that point and I've now reread all 3 several times now. My only question is how would a first-time reader look at it. They don't have the background to realize how everything eventually ties together.

As to the Torch arc, I've only read each of the 3 one time each, and to be honest have no desire to read any of them again. I can't exactly state why, but undoubtedly due to the collaboration between RFC and Flint the flavor of the Honorverse doesn't feel the same. For that reason the characters just don't engage me. Zilwicki and Cachat are interesting characters, but the situations they find themselves in just don't impress me. (It doesn't help that CoG turned out the way it did, but that subject is already covered in a separate thread.) Berry makes absolutely no sense to me as a character and no one else in the series is worth mentioning. Don't get me wrong, I will read them when they become available, but it makes me glad I have a delete option on my Nook.

I now consider the "side story" novels to be part of the mainline, and really wish David would revert back to a single line of books like it was with the early ones. True, Honor herself can't be the main character anymore and should become a side player like Hamish Alexander was in OBS, but that's ok with me. I really want the internal timeline to jump forward some years, preferably to where the SL has broken up, and characters like Abigail Hearns and Helen Zilwicki are commanding their own ships and having old Honor-like missions.

The early novels were great in that they kept jumping forward in time with each new one (mostly). However, the month-by-month approach of the recent novels has slowed the story to a crawl or even to a dead stop. I don't care about all of the politcal machination of the SL and MALign, can't we just get to where the RF and Successor Sstates and the GA are all fighting one another?

I would always welcome a mainline Honor Harrington novel, but side novels will only serve to flesh out more of the other characters. Who among us didn't enjoy seeing Michelle Henke rolling pods. There is so much momentum with the Honorverse novels to keep it rolling uphill as long as RFC puts pen to paper.