What's your biggest regret in the Honorverse?

kzt wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
For me the biggest regret is that overblown series done for the OTHER company. Instead of more than a half dozen books that are decent but not thrilling (not to mention filled with names of people most of whom we never see again), we could have had another half dozen Honor books.

My understanding is that he has lots of reasons for that. They are green and have pictures of dead presidents on them and you can use them to pay your bills. And while you might say “but royalties!”, I don’t think I can say more.

Safehold is a story he wanted to tell and one I and lots of others enjoyed reading. I can't understand this monomania some people have about Honor. Frankly, I am glad we have Safehold rather than a whole bunch more Honor. Especially since Honor has become self-limiting. She is now so senior that it's gets hard to think of much she can reasonably do away from the Admiralty. Especially after tum-te-tum-te-tum (to coin a phrase) in UH.

Besides you have to think about the mechanics of the publishing industry; because of how it and Baen are set up Baen can only publish one or two new Big Author hardbacks each month. RFC already takes up a fair chunk of that. Baen have to leave room for other authors or lose them and you can't run a successful publishing company on just a few Stars. At least that's what I took from some extended posts on the subject a while ago.

ldwechsler wrote:For me the biggest regret is that overblown series done for the OTHER company. Instead of more than a half dozen books that are decent but not thrilling (not to mention filled with names of people most of whom we never see again), we could have had another half dozen Honor books.

kzt wrote:My understanding is that he has lots of reasons for that. They are green and have pictures of dead presidents on them and you can use them to pay your bills. And while you might say “but royalties!”, I don’t think I can say more.

Randomiser wrote:Safehold is a story he wanted to tell and one I and lots of others enjoyed reading. I can't understand this monomania some people have about Honor. Frankly, I am glad we have Safehold rather than a whole bunch more Honor. Especially since Honor has become self-limiting. She is now so senior that it's gets hard to think of much she can reasonably do away from the Admiralty. Especially after tum-te-tum-te-tum (to coin a phrase) in UH.

Besides you have to think about the mechanics of the publishing industry; because of how it and Baen are set up Baen can only publish one or two new Big Author hardbacks each month. RFC already takes up a fair chunk of that. Baen have to leave room for other authors or lose them and you can't run a successful publishing company on just a few Stars. At least that's what I took from some extended posts on the subject a while ago.

Books with Honor as the main character have become self-limiting, it is true; but there are many more stories that could be told in the Honorverse (and I am not talking about Manticore Ascendant). I have not read Safehold, so cannot comment on the relative value; but I do not want an argument about whether he should shift his interest between series - I hope everyone can be satisfied.

I regret we haven't seen Nimitz's and Sam's kittens grow up among humans, nor have we seen a second litter. The first litter is already ten years old!

Maybe they'll consider it when Nimitz is home full time and Sam won't have to leave the kittens with surrogates.

Galactic Sapper wrote:Without UH spoilers, suffice it to say regardless of what happens to 5th Fleet 8th Fleet would have been mauled pretty severely. Not to mention all the fire they'd have also been taking from 2nd fleet.

Well sure. But Haven MDMs are not really a serious danger to modern units at mid-range for Apollo. And since she hadn’t recently taken up smoking crack she’d have been firing at 2nd as soon as she exited hyper. Since we know a quad Apollo pattern will kill a RHN SD and she has the fire control to launch every missile in every pod at once I predict the engagement with 2nd won’t last very long or be very damaging to 8th.

Goodby RHN, we barely knew you.

kzt wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
For me the biggest regret is that overblown series done for the OTHER company. Instead of more than a half dozen books that are decent but not thrilling (not to mention filled with names of people most of whom we never see again), we could have had another half dozen Honor books.

My understanding is that he has lots of reasons for that. They are green and have pictures of dead presidents on them and you can use them to pay your bills. And while you might say “but royalties!”, I don’t think I can say more.

Randomiser wrote:Safehold is a story he wanted to tell and one I and lots of others enjoyed reading. I can't understand this monomania some people have about Honor. Frankly, I am glad we have Safehold rather than a whole bunch more Honor. Especially since Honor has become self-limiting. She is now so senior that it's gets hard to think of much she can reasonably do away from the Admiralty. Especially after tum-te-tum-te-tum (to coin a phrase) in UH.

Besides you have to think about the mechanics of the publishing industry; because of how it and Baen are set up Baen can only publish one or two new Big Author hardbacks each month. RFC already takes up a fair chunk of that. Baen have to leave room for other authors or lose them and you can't run a successful publishing company on just a few Stars. At least that's what I took from some extended posts on the subject a while ago.

Well let me explain it to all of you who have a screw loose on this matter. A major screw, a few cogs and sprockets too! As far as I am concerned.

My particular "monomania" with Honor and the fact that I don't want her retired is contained inside the exact same ball of wax as I don't want her killed off by the author . . .

Brief detour: I just can't imagine our heroine surviving everything the Peeps, Cordelia Ransom, Pavel Young, Hauptman, her own government and that damn Demon Murphy threw at her, only to be knifed in the back by her own creator.

Anyway, BOTH reasons are because THIS IS THE HONORVERSE. There is NO Honorverse without Honor. Without Honor, it's only the Verse, as far as I am concerned. And if she had been killed off by the author, would have been two birds with one stone as he'd have taken me out as a reader as well.

I wish you people would stop speaking for everyone else. I can't get enough of Honor and I'm darn proud of it. The woman has prolong and you all want to retire her before she's even managed to burn through all of her preprolong years! Gees! There are many series with much longer running main characters. Go pick on them! You ever heard the phrase "If it ain't broke don't fix it?" Well guess what . . .

IT AIN'T BROKE!

The Honorverse without Honor is like Cornflakes without the milk. Sick of Honor? Read Safehold. But for goodness sakes, stop pissing on my parade!

cthia wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
For me the biggest regret is that overblown series done for the OTHER company. Instead of more than a half dozen books that are decent but not thrilling (not to mention filled with names of people most of whom we never see again), we could have had another half dozen Honor books.

My understanding is that he has lots of reasons for that. They are green and have pictures of dead presidents on them and you can use them to pay your bills. And while you might say “but royalties!”, I don’t think I can say more.

Randomiser wrote:Safehold is a story he wanted to tell and one I and lots of others enjoyed reading. I can't understand this monomania some people have about Honor. Frankly, I am glad we have Safehold rather than a whole bunch more Honor. Especially since Honor has become self-limiting. She is now so senior that it's gets hard to think of much she can reasonably do away from the Admiralty. Especially after tum-te-tum-te-tum (to coin a phrase) in UH.

Besides you have to think about the mechanics of the publishing industry; because of how it and Baen are set up Baen can only publish one or two new Big Author hardbacks each month. RFC already takes up a fair chunk of that. Baen have to leave room for other authors or lose them and you can't run a successful publishing company on just a few Stars. At least that's what I took from some extended posts on the subject a while ago.

Well let me explain it to all of you who have a screw loose on this matter. A major screw, a few cogs and sprockets too! As far as I am concerned.

My particular "monomania" with Honor and the fact that I don't want her retired is contained inside the exact same ball of wax as I don't want her killed off by the author . . .

Brief detour: I just can't imagine our heroine surviving everything the Peeps, Cordelia Ransom, Pavel Young, Hauptman, her own government and that damn Demon Murphy threw at her, only to be knifed in the back by her own creator.

Anyway, BOTH reasons are because THIS IS THE HONORVERSE. There is NO Honorverse without Honor. Without Honor, it's only the Verse, as far as I am concerned. And if she had been killed off by the author, would have been two birds with one stone as he'd have taken me out as a reader as well.

I wish you people would stop speaking for everyone else. I can't get enough of Honor and I'm darn proud of it. The woman has prolong and you all want to retire her before she's even managed to burn through all of her preprolong years! Gees! There are many series with much longer running main characters. Go pick on them! You ever heard the phrase "If it ain't broke don't fix it?" Well guess what . . .

IT AIN'T BROKE!

The Honorverse without Honor is like Cornflakes without the milk. Sick of Honor? Read Safehold. But for goodness sakes, stop pissing on my parade![/quote]

Actually, Crown of Slaves, etc. had very little of Honor and worked very well.

Also, as top admiral there won't be all that much for her to do.

But she can be a doting mom, giving advice to her kids as they serve on vessels.

Randomiser wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:
For me the biggest regret is that overblown series done for the OTHER company. Instead of more than a half dozen books that are decent but not thrilling (not to mention filled with names of people most of whom we never see again), we could have had another half dozen Honor books.

My understanding is that he has lots of reasons for that. They are green and have pictures of dead presidents on them and you can use them to pay your bills. And while you might say “but royalties!”, I don’t think I can say more.

Safehold is a story he wanted to tell and one I and lots of others enjoyed reading. I can't understand this monomania some people have about Honor. Frankly, I am glad we have Safehold rather than a whole bunch more Honor. Especially since Honor has become self-limiting. She is now so senior that it's gets hard to think of much she can reasonably do away from the Admiralty. Especially after tum-te-tum-te-tum (to coin a phrase) in UH.

Besides you have to think about the mechanics of the publishing industry; because of how it and Baen are set up Baen can only publish one or two new Big Author hardbacks each month. RFC already takes up a fair chunk of that. Baen have to leave room for other authors or lose them and you can't run a successful publishing company on just a few Stars. At least that's what I took from some extended posts on the subject a while ago.[/quote]

[quote="ldwechsler]

I understand WHY DW (can't use RFC here) wrote the series but there is what in economics is called opportunity cost. He COULD have been writing in the Honorverse and wrote a whole series of other long books. We might have had an extra dozen books about Honor. But didn't get them.

ldwechsler wrote:I understand WHY DW (can't use RFC here) wrote the series but there is what in economics is called opportunity cost. He COULD have been writing in the Honorverse and wrote a whole series of other long books. We might have had an extra dozen books about Honor. But didn't get them.

Ahem ... you seem to have forgotten a few other items, like War God, Dahlak and Hell's Gate. Now if you want a real worry, how about these 5 active series without a conclusion amongst any of them? I was really worried when he had that rather lengthy health scare recently and then he just did a face-plant only weeks ago. Perhaps we should whistle up a cadre of Tree Cats, some orbiting planetoids, Wencit, Bahzell, Leeana, and a couple of PICAs to guard his house & family and of course him as well!

If you think you could persuade him to devote all his writing to the Honorverse, go ahead and try but rest assured, without conclusions in these other fictons (ref: RAH "Number of the Beast), you will have more than a few aggravated at you!

Just to be clear, I like the Honorverse stories and will happily buy more of them. BUT I also like Safehold, War God and, to a lesser extent, Multiverse stories. Manticore Ascendant isn't too shabby either. I would be disappointed if DW concentrated on any one of them to the exclusion of the rest. YMMV, of course. I was just reacting to ldwechsler's dissing of Safehold.

However the reality of the Honorverse is that it gets increasingly difficult to see how DW can write action oriented stories around Honor. The only kinds of command she can reasonably be given at this stage in her career are something like Grand Fleet or Home Fleet. And actions requiring those fleets are cataclysmic and can't happen too often. (Really she's due for a spell on the Staff or as a Space Lord under the usual rotation rules, anyway.) So we can get Honorverse stories with Honor as a bit player, and lots of those have worked out fine, or we can get 'untold' stories of her earlier career, and DW doesn't seem to have a whole lot of appetite for that, or we could get stories of Honor as a political player in Manticore or Grayson, but those would be a different genre. But more of the mainline 'Honor saves the day' stuff is really difficult to see. Of course, DW is much more inventive than I am ...

Randomiser wrote:Just to be clear, I like the Honorverse stories and will happily buy more of them. BUT I also like Safehold, War God and, to a lesser extent, Multiverse stories. Manticore Ascendant isn't too shabby either. I would be disappointed if DW concentrated on any one of them to the exclusion of the rest. YMMV, of course. I was just reacting to ldwechsler's dissing of Safehold.

However the reality of the Honorverse is that it gets increasingly difficult to see how DW can write action oriented stories around Honor. The only kinds of command she can reasonably be given at this stage in her career are something like Grand Fleet or Home Fleet. And actions requiring those fleets are cataclysmic and can't happen too often. (Really she's due for a spell on the Staff or as a Space Lord under the usual rotation rules, anyway.) So we can get Honorverse stories with Honor as a bit player, and lots of those have worked out fine, or we can get 'untold' stories of her earlier career, and DW doesn't seem to have a whole lot of appetite for that, or we could get stories of Honor as a political player in Manticore or Grayson, but those would be a different genre. But more of the mainline 'Honor saves the day' stuff is really difficult to see. Of course, DW is much more inventive than I am ...

The author can always give her a decade or two of a vacation off-screen until she's begging to get back in space.* Then she can repel invasions, malignant invasions of the Home system . . .

The Battle of Manticore 3, 4 and 5.

And does anyone really think Honor won't want to go on a road trip when Darius is found?

Really?

Swampland! 1M credits per square inch. Don't worry. That's a bargain. Trust me.

I really don't think continuing to write Honor as lead is difficult at all, Randomiser. Readers don't know what they want until the author gives it to them. I can think of a million and one onscreen uses for Honor without missing a beat.

Isn't the Honorverse Weber's biggest bread winner anyway? The vacation that's needed is probably the author. He may need a break from writing about Honor. But Honor don't need no stinking break. The only break Honor ever needed was Pavel Young's fricking neck. The author didn't give that to her, so I vote to leave her be.

Am I selfish for my own reading appetite? Damn straight I am!

*Weber put a few things off-screen that I wish he hadn't. Can we say Trevor's Star? So, if Honor needs a vacation, give it to her. Offscreen! I won't complain about missing her vacuuming, doing laundry, screaming at the kids, picking up behind Hamish, lounging around the house in a T-shirt that says "Oh the joys of life w/o Pavel Young". Chasing and screaming at miscreant 'Cats on Grayson and their ongoing pranks. Watching HD. Drinking beer with Stacey and getting bored as hell until she screams . . .

"SOMEBODY GIVE ME A FUCKING SHIP!"

Honor never swears. I think she means it. LOL

See? Everybody happy and Honor is sane.