SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

I got done with the earc last night, and after a day or so of thinking about my reaction to it here are my thoughts:

1- I was at first extremely disappointed at the lack of 'forward' (in time) progress made. At most, the book appears to move a few hours past the end of Cauldron.
2- After taking time to think, I'm definitely of more mixed emotions.

I think the best way to describe how I feel now is I wish I could throw the past 3-4 books into a giant blender and have 1 single book, in chronological order, emerge. Or, in another way of putting it: I think the first half or so of this book could of been put into previous ones, with the endings of some of the previous books being moved into this one. Maybe its just my own preferences to have things laid out more temporally.


All of the back stories told were interesting - and would have been fascinating had they come before I knew how they would end (generally speaking). Same with the activation of Houdini - had that been slotted into Cauldron of Ghosts in order so we had a 'deeper view' of every side it would have been outstanding.

3- Overall, I enjoyed reading it and look forward to the hard copy (something about having the physical book is just way better than any e-reader to me) being added to the bookshelf with every other Honorverse book/anthology/etc.

I just got done reading 11+ pages of comments. Many by RFC. First, thank you for that.

Second. I think I will like this book more the second time I read it. The first time I kept waiting for the story to start. Having said that the second half of this book was great fun even though I was still waiting for the timeline to advance.

If I had gone into this book with the knowledge that it ended in October 1922 about a day after Cauldron and did not advance most of the stories from ART, SoF and Cauldron I believe I would have loved the whole thing right from the beginning. As it was my expectation that "surely we will get up to the present by the NEXT chapter" impeded my enjoyment for the first half of the book.

In other words, better description going in from the Baen writing staff would have made a huge difference here. At least to me.

Trevin wrote:I just got done reading 11+ pages of comments. Many by RFC. First, thank you for that.

Second. I think I will like this book more the second time I read it. The first time I kept waiting for the story to start. Having said that the second half of this book was great fun even though I was still waiting for the timeline to advance.

If I had gone into this book with the knowledge that it ended in October 1922 about a day after Cauldron and did not advance most of the stories from ART, SoF and Cauldron I believe I would have loved the whole thing right from the beginning. As it was my expectation that "surely we will get up to the present by the NEXT chapter" impeded my enjoyment for the first half of the book.

In other words, better description going in from the Baen writing staff would have made a huge difference here. At least to me.

To be completely honest, I don't know what Baen had up about the book. I do know that we'd discussed it and I think they probably did expect it to move beyond the point at which it stopped. The problem is that I did, too, when I started, but I discovered that it can't (and I mean that literally) move past that point before I can get back to Honor's direct participation, and the events that got structured into Cauldron (and which there was no time to unstructure) mean that it (literally) can't get everyone else into the positions they need to be in to do that.

The story is spread over a vast distance, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Cauldron threw a huge spanner into the works. Don't get me wrong. I think Cauldron turned into a very strong book and I like it a lot, but there simply wasn't time on the writing side to work out a way to avoid the chronology issues before the book had to go to press.

That problem got put on steroids when I hit the schedule glitch from hell this year. I actually finished the initial draft of SOV in February, but it had some issues (mostly not the ones it's being castigated for at this point) that meant it wasn't the final rough, if you take my meaning. Unfortunately, I then had to let it sit while I did an all-hands-on-deck assault on Safehold. That meant that when I got back to SOV, there really wasn't time for Baen to change whatever description they'd written to reflect the differences between that and the book they got.

I, personally, like this book a lot although I do rather resent the comparison to self indulging in a guitar solo at a concert. I wrote the story I thought --- and think --- needed writing within the in-universe time constraints that were set in stone. Now, i could have just waved my hands and said "The hell with the timing; it turns out they can get people back and forth five times as rapidly as the streak drive. Just take my word for it." But I don't do that. My characters have to live with the constraints of the technology and the transit times I gave them in the beginning. Obviously, a lot of people wish I'd done just that, and to those who do feel that way, all I can say is it's not going to happen.

This book is what I wanted it to be from the time I started actually writing on it. It may not be what I would have wanted --- and written --- if my characters' constraints had been different, but they weren't, and one reason the series as a whole works is because I refuse to just slide around those constraints. i did not "phone it in" (and, BTW, I resent the hell out of that particular implication), I did not decide to "indulge" myself (in fact, I worked my butt off to get it done, including 14-hour days. Trust me, you are not "indulging" yourself), and there was not a single scene in the book that I had cut from an earlier book and decided to just shove in to make up word count.

Bottom line, it is what it is, and if the disappointment is too severe for some of my readers, I'm sorry but not at all apologeitc for the story or for the quality of the storytelling.

runsforcelery wrote:
The story is spread over a vast distance, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Cauldron threw a huge spanner into the works. Don't get me wrong. I think Cauldron turned into a very strong book and I like it a lot, but there simply wasn't time on the writing side to work out a way to avoid the chronology issues before the book had to go to press.

That problem got put on steroids when I hit the schedule glitch from hell this year. I actually finished the initial draft of SOV in February, but it had some issues (mostly not the ones it's being castigated for at this point) that meant it wasn't the final rough, if you take my meaning. Unfortunately, I then had to let it sit while I did an all-hands-on-deck assault on Safehold. That meant that when I got back to SOV, there really wasn't time for Baen to change whatever description they'd written to reflect the differences between that and the book they got.

This is really what I was getting at.

By itself, I love the book. And in time I'll probably grow to appreciate it more once I physically have it and can 'slot' its chapters into the other books to read them in a more chronological format on re-reads.

I guess my main complaint is that I wish I had gotten A LOT of this book in prior ones, with the ending parts of prior books pushed into this one.

Then again - I really shouldn't complain too much. My other current favorite other (George Martin) has faced similar distance/time issues and ended up taking 3 times as long to get things in print. I'd much rather have the story in a format different than what I prefer over not getting it for years!!

And to those who say you phoned it in... Psh. Their expectations for this book were likely so high a combination of the best parts of Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and Tolkein combined in one couldn't satisfy them.

Really enjoying the book and the little nuanced details so far. I'm much more the technical/battle scene junkie but seeing this backstory fleshed out is incredibly interesting. As some have said, having some of these details in earlier books would have made the storytelling a bit smoother at that point IMO but we've got it now so I'm not complaining.

Thank you very much David for working so hard on this book and continuing to tell your story to us.

runsforcelery wrote:
This book is what I wanted it to be from the time I started actually writing on it. It may not be what I would have wanted --- and written --- if my characters' constraints had been different, but they weren't, and one reason the series as a whole works is because I refuse to just slide around those constraints. i did not "phone it in" (and, BTW, I resent the hell out of that particular implication), I did not decide to "indulge" myself (in fact, I worked my butt off to get it done, including 14-hour days. Trust me, you are not "indulging" yourself), and there was not a single scene in the book that I had cut from an earlier book and decided to just shove in to make up word count.

I think the "phone it in" post was a poor choice of words. I think that particular poster was just trying to say things got hurried up a bit too much; which is probably true, but also pretty much unavoidable when there's already a tight schedule and all kinds of things crop up to make things worse. Murphy's Law, after all, plus O'toole's corollary: "Murphy was an optimist".

As for distances, implied or stated travel times, etc, none of that seemed "strange" to me. If anything, it seemed consistent. It was obvious locations were separated in spacial terms, and, of course it takes time to travel between them; unless you have the teleportation arches from the Dahak series. Also, I wouldn't say I found any "indulging" in the book, either.

A lot of folks aren't authors, though, and often don't pick the best words to convey what they're trying to say, and I think that's part and parcel of some of the posts.

That said, even if you *didn't* use "cuts" from previous works, on reading the book from beginning to end (and with memory of the parts of the whole story in the prior books as well) that's what a lot of the story line about the various worlds in rebellion *looks* like. It's a perception, and, yes, it can be completely wrong as to what actually happened while you were writing, but, realistically, that's the way it seems to a lot of readers, even me.

I'm not going to fault the writing, it was very good as usual, but the various individual "tales" seem just a bit too "disjointed" to form a smooth "whole".

No matter what reasons you might have had to put the parts you did into *this* particular book, IMHO, (and it's only my opinion) the overall story "flow" would have been much, much smoother and enjoyable had the various parts been in the prior books in "proper" chronological sequence with the events already written about. Again, my opinion. If, as others noted, that meant other things "shifted forward" into this volume, it wouldn't have been a big thing.

I understand the problems inherent in synchronizing with CoG. After all, that work wasn't just all your own, and, realistically, that story flowed quite nicely chronologically. Perhaps it could have included a little bit of some of the Alignment "tidbits" found in SoV, but, in all, it really didn't *have* to. After all, CoG is basically a chronicle of Mesa; SoV really isn't; though obviously happenings on Mesa have an impact on what is going on elsewhere, which is primarily SoV's story balliwick.

runsforcelery wrote:Bottom line, it is what it is, and if the disappointment is too severe for some of my readers, I'm sorry but not at all apologetic for the story or for the quality of the storytelling.

It's here, it's done, and obviously at least some of us have already bought it. So the basics are all in your favor. What do you want, your cake and eat it too?

runsforcelery wrote:\
...i did not "phone it in" (and, BTW, I resent the hell out of that particular implication), I did not decide to "indulge" myself (in fact, I worked my butt off to get it done, including 14-hour days. Trust me, you are not "indulging" yourself), and there was not a single scene in the book that I had cut from an earlier book and decided to just shove in to make up word count.

Bottom line, it is what it is, and if the disappointment is too severe for some of my readers, I'm sorry but not at all apologeitc for the story or for the quality of the storytelling.

No one with a brain thinks you "phoned" anything in. There is nothing to apologize for.

That said, many expected the plot to advance. I know I did. For example, I think probably 100% of your readers expected Beowulf to burn, the Mandarins to do a few more silly things, Cachat and Zilwicki plus wife to at least make an appearance at a party or something, Queen Berry to put in an appearance, the Malignment infiltrators into the SN to plant a few more information bombs, maybe an additional programmed virus assassination somewhere, Honor to do something, treecats continuing to integrate as linguistic members of society (though this is partially covered with Tourville), etc. as these would have advanced the plot lines already in place. Even within the book as is, advancing the plot with Harahap's end would have been interesting. Instead readers got something else they were not expecting. This takes a bit of getting used to. But on a reread maybe many of us will get there!

Anyway, in the end, I suspect 99.5% of your loyal fans will buy the eARC of the next Honorverse book when it comes. I know I will. And the .05% who do not will probably miss a great read.

runsforcelery wrote:

Trevin wrote:I just got done reading 11+ pages of comments. Many by RFC. First, thank you for that.

Second. I think I will like this book more the second time I read it. The first time I kept waiting for the story to start. Having said that the second half of this book was great fun even though I was still waiting for the timeline to advance.

If I had gone into this book with the knowledge that it ended in October 1922 about a day after Cauldron and did not advance most of the stories from ART, SoF and Cauldron I believe I would have loved the whole thing right from the beginning. As it was my expectation that "surely we will get up to the present by the NEXT chapter" impeded my enjoyment for the first half of the book.

In other words, better description going in from the Baen writing staff would have made a huge difference here. At least to me.

To be completely honest, I don't know what Baen had up about the book. I do know that we'd discussed it and I think they probably did expect it to move beyond the point at which it stopped. The problem is that I did, too, when I started, but I discovered that it can't (and I mean that literally) move past that point before I can get back to Honor's direct participation, and the events that got structured into Cauldron (and which there was no time to unstructure) mean that it (literally) can't get everyone else into the positions they need to be in to do that.

The story is spread over a vast distance, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Cauldron threw a huge spanner into the works. Don't get me wrong. I think Cauldron turned into a very strong book and I like it a lot, but there simply wasn't time on the writing side to work out a way to avoid the chronology issues before the book had to go to press.

That problem got put on steroids when I hit the schedule glitch from hell this year. I actually finished the initial draft of SOV in February, but it had some issues (mostly not the ones it's being castigated for at this point) that meant it wasn't the final rough, if you take my meaning. Unfortunately, I then had to let it sit while I did an all-hands-on-deck assault on Safehold. That meant that when I got back to SOV, there really wasn't time for Baen to change whatever description they'd written to reflect the differences between that and the book they got.

I, personally, like this book a lot although I do rather resent the comparison to self indulging in a guitar solo at a concert. I wrote the story I thought --- and think --- needed writing within the in-universe time constraints that were set in stone. Now, i could have just waved my hands and said "The hell with the timing; it turns out they can get people back and forth five times as rapidly as the streak drive. Just take my word for it." But I don't do that. My characters have to live with the constraints of the technology and the transit times I gave them in the beginning. Obviously, a lot of people wish I'd done just that, and to those who do feel that way, all I can say is it's not going to happen.

This book is what I wanted it to be from the time I started actually writing on it. It may not be what I would have wanted --- and written --- if my characters' constraints had been different, but they weren't, and one reason the series as a whole works is because I refuse to just slide around those constraints. i did not "phone it in" (and, BTW, I resent the hell out of that particular implication), I did not decide to "indulge" myself (in fact, I worked my butt off to get it done, including 14-hour days. Trust me, you are not "indulging" yourself), and there was not a single scene in the book that I had cut from an earlier book and decided to just shove in to make up word count.

Bottom line, it is what it is, and if the disappointment is too severe for some of my readers, I'm sorry but not at all apologeitc for the story or for the quality of the storytelling.

I think it's worth noting that authors and publishers don't have a lot of historical practice for this kind of storytelling. Novels have been around for awhile and so has extended serial storytelling but this kind of epic, five-or-ten-plus-novel story hasn't been. So no-one knows how to do it right. The consequences of decisions that worked at the time end up derailing the series four or five books later.

I do appreciate the explanation for why this books does what it does.

runsforcelery wrote:
At any rate, I think to see him as a much "flatter" character than I have throughout, although I'm not sure if that's because I didn't do my job correctly or because his cause is so repugnant to you (as it should be) that it's overshadowed the clues I thought I was planting about his character.

Actually, the *sad* thing is that his cause *isn't* all that repugnant to me, even if it *should* be. The eventual *target* may be, but the idea of generally improving the gene pool and "culling" defectives to keep the genes that made them that way from being perpetuated is something that I actually find myself often in agreement with. Especially when I have to put up with some of the things my co-workers and other acquaintances do or suggest.

The problem, however, is defining what is really to be considered "defective" or "undesirable". Inheritable predilliction to some disease? Some lower IQ threshold? What we call "birth defects"? Different people, organizations, and groups would no doubt have different thoughts on that. Getting a consensus would likely be impossible; and imposing a standard without a consensus would be problematical. Unless, of course, you didn't *care* how many you "culled" - whether defective by some standard or not.

We saw where that can go about 75 years ago. And on a somewhat lesser scale off and on since then.

I'm not prepared to say the "end justifies the means".

OrlandoNative wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
At any rate, I think to see him as a much "flatter" character than I have throughout, although I'm not sure if that's because I didn't do my job correctly or because his cause is so repugnant to you (as it should be) that it's overshadowed the clues I thought I was planting about his character.

Actually, the *sad* thing is that his cause *isn't* all that repugnant to me, even if it *should* be. The eventual *target* may be, but the idea of generally improving the gene pool and "culling" defectives to keep the genes that made them that way from being perpetuated is something that I actually find myself often in agreement with. Especially when I have to put up with some of the things my co-workers and other acquaintances do or suggest.

The problem, however, is defining what is really to be considered "defective" or "undesirable". Inheritable predilliction to some disease? Some lower IQ threshold? What we call "birth defects"? Different people, organizations, and groups would no doubt have different thoughts on that. Getting a consensus would likely be impossible; and imposing a standard without a consensus would be problematical. Unless, of course, you didn't *care* how many you "culled" - whether defective by some standard or not.

We saw where that can go about 75 years ago. And on a somewhat lesser scale off and on since then.

I'm not prepared to say the "end justifies the means".

The problem in the end with the Malignment is not its IQ, it's its SQ or sociopathy quotient. Civil war era Japan is almost benevolent comparatively. I'm not an historian, but I certainly know of no viable analogue cultural group in history that practiced an equivalent level of sociopathy and survived long in contact with other cultures as an intact entity. They always fracture as the sociopathy gets directed within as well as without.