SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

jgnfld wrote:
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.

They won't necessarily miss it, they might just wait for the less costly paperback or ebook format.

noblehunter wrote: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.

Mmmm... you must be fairly young, or new to the science fiction genre.

E. E "doc" Smith's Lensman series is an epic of 7 books (1948-1954). His "Skylark" series was 4 books (1946-1949 with the 4th coming out in 1966). So I'd say "epic story telling" has been around for quite a while. While none of these were 300k words each, they were still quite respectable sized books for their time. The books that eventually made up Asimov's Foundation epic (not just the Trilogy) were each good sized for their time as well.

In all fairness, however, *one* of the books in the Foundation epic *did* have some eccentricities versus the rest, but it was a prequel (in chronological story line time, not in time of writing) to the actual Trilogy, and the differences were explained away as being something that originally existed but slowly over time ceased to do so (originally stable wormholes going unstable).

So multi-novel "epic" story lines are not in any way new.

jgnfld wrote:
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.

Germany might have if it's "sociopathy" had just remained within its own borders, and it didn't try to spread it throughout Europe via conquest.

In the end, the ultimate cause of the Alignment's demise is going to be the same - trying to "export" their idea of the perfect culture via force. People tend to resist that. The real way to "conquer" with a chance of lasting results is to subvert people's ideas until they tend to agree with yours. If they think it's their idea, then they won't resist it.

Sharp Claw wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:I fully agree with the main critique of this book:

I fail to see where this is a "Honor Harrington" mainline book. Because it totally isn't, and I'm really really disappointed that it isn't. Imho it was being advertised as one, yet the main plot was literally untouched. Just like another reader here I kinda regret getting the eARC, because what's in there is totally not the information I was looking for.

I really am wondering what MWW and Bean were thinking when they created this. I mean, they are reading the forums. They absolutely knew what we were expecting (a mainline novel), just as they absolutely knew what we were not expecting (another glorious side-show with almost no chronological progression).

Tl;dr:
I really feel a bit cheated here... :/

Okay, guys.

I'm sorry that so many of you clearly feel that the book failed to advance the plot. I obviously disagree with that point, but I'm only the author. And, BTW, that last sentence is not a snit at people expressing their opinions. There are time an author feels a story has to go one place, cover one set of events and set things in line, when his readers don't agree, and that's legitimate.

I always try to give fair value for the time my readers invest. Clearly, for some people, that doesn't always happen. There are reasons this books is where it is and does what it does, including the fact that I've been asked --- repeatedly and often --- for exactly the additional time with the characters which some of you are complaining about. That's probably a case of different strokes and readers who want different things. but it was one of many factors which went into the way in which I structured the book.

Any writer --- or any other sort of craftsman --- is obviously disappointed when his readers/fans/supporters are anything short of ecstatic over his latest work. Most of us get used to that, since we don't get to hit every ball out of the park. I personally like this book --- a lot --- or I wouldn't have turned it loose and turned it in, but if you feel disappointed in it, that's certainly your right. I do take a certain umbrage at verbs like "cheated," but that's probably because I'm human and because to me, at least, that implies that someone "phoned it in," which, I assure you, was not the case here. Whether the book works for you as a reader or not, there was a lot pf thought behind the scene selections I made and I always try to give you guys the best I've got.

There's no point doing this if I don't.

Extremely disappointing book. Cheated or phoned it in is a bit over the top for me, but I would say self indulgent, like a guitar solo at a live concert that goes on far too long, becomes repetitive instead of creative and you wish it was over well before it ends.

The plot does not advance at all and I think trying to wrap the series up in one more book would be a serious mistake in the opposite direction.

The parts of the book I enjoyed were the character development of Ginger, Sinead and Aivars and Lester. I also enjoyed the story of Indy and Mackenzie. The continuing romance between Paulo and Helen could have been given a bit more space.

A better title for the book would have been "The Adventures of Damien Harahap" and that is the real source of my earlier comments about self indulgent and repetitive. Introducing more revolutionary movements, all with the same cookie cutter plot lines also seemed like unnecessary padding.

Important stories from previous books were just left hanging unresolved, especially Beowulf. What happened with the planned SLN attack? Did other star nations leave the SL? What was the result of the SLN commerce raiding strategy? How did Manticores seizure of the wormholes effect the SL? A little was said about the Maya sector but that advanced the plot very little from previous books and there was no conflict with the SL or the results of that conflict. A little was also said about the internal SL investigation of a possible Mesan Alignment infiltration but, like the Maya sector, that story was not really advanced much.

I really hope the next "Honor" book is much better and published soon, like RFC, I am not young and my health is not good. I usually buy the e-ARC, then the kindle and hard copy editions, but for this one the e-ARC is more than enough.[/quote]

Also would have liked to see a bit of what is going on at bolt hole with, Simoes, Forraker and Hemphill. There is one really good space battle involving Capt. Tremaine that I also enjoyed reading, but other than that...

I'm a little bit confused here. I see complains about book not moving main line forward, questions about new book.

I assumed, that what you get is just half of the book:

http://www.baen.com/w201611-november-20 ... undle.html

So, you already got whole book?

noblehunter wrote:I'm in the weird position of seeing what the author tried to do, acknowledging that the thing was well done, and believing that the author shouldn't have done it.

I'll have to read it later when I can do it without fighting the lurking dread that the book was a bad idea. It got in the way of all the emotional beats.

Actually, rather than shouldn't have done it, I'd rather he had more versatility in doing it.

But then I also suspect that there are one or two, incidents, that will be important later on.

Sent from my SM-G920I using Tapatalk

I'm thinking about getting the eARC, but from the comments in here it seems like the book is a bit "meh" compared to the others in the series (it doesn't even focus on established characters?)-is this an accurate assessment?

Sharp Claw wrote:Also would have liked to see a bit of what is going on at bolt hole with, Simoes, Forraker and Hemphill. There is one really good space battle involving Capt. Tremaine that I also enjoyed reading, but other than that...

Aye, that was well put together. I particularly enjoyed how hard the Solarian Admiral was patting his own back for figuring out two missile drives allowed him a ballistic flight component. Which none of the Damned Manties had yet demonstrated.

Very nice to see Captain Sir Prescott Tremaine excel in his first independent command too. He's been through quite a lot since the day he shipped out to Basilisk Station.

I was somewhat surprised he appears to have used Apollo pods. I thought due to their scarcity, all had been recalled to Manticore. Granted, that was before the peace treaty with Haven and obviously the CW brought them back.

All said, Harkness put it best. "The Old Lady would've loved this one, Sir,"

19chickens wrote:I'm thinking about getting the eARC, but from the comments in here it seems like the book is a bit "meh" compared to the others in the series (it doesn't even focus on established characters?)-is this an accurate assessment?

That depends about the status you're ready to give, say ... Helen Zilwicki, Admiral Gold Peak, Governor Oravil Barregos and others. There are a whole lot of new characters, with really big "on-screen"-time, true - but there are a lot of known characters on screen, too. Even if they are, at most, in a supporting role - that's right.

And - as someone else already said - that's a book that thickens the plot, not a book that put the timeline very much forward.

Eagleeye wrote:
That depends about the status you're ready to give, say ... Helen Zilwicki, Admiral Gold Peak, Governor Oravil Barregos and others. There are a whole lot of new characters, with really big "on-screen"-time, true - but there are a lot of known characters on screen, too. Even if they are, at most, in a supporting role - that's right.

And - as someone else already said - that's a book that thickens the plot, not a book that put the timeline very much forward.

I think I like this assessment the best. I bought the e-ARC yesterday morning and finished it after midnight. Overall, the craftmanship was what I expect from a Weber book including the odd little e-ARC continuity errors here and there but the book did not move much.

Now if the goal is to reset the universe to illustrate the fundamentally porous foundations of the Solarian League and the tentacle webs of how the Alignment controls the League, then this was a great example of show not tell. I wish I had seen a bit more of the Maya Sector plot(s) as that was a great piece of storytelling that really hammered home the scope and audacity of JANUS besides the focus on the Greater Talbott Area.

My complaint this is the third book that terminates at roughly the same point. Yes, we know this is a major nexus/focal point but the back story could have been compressed/choices made to allow for more progression.

I know MWW has a vision for the termination of this series but I think that vision needs kicked in the pants to get it moving forward again.