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Frank777
Midshipman
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Nov 14, 2018 8:25 am
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Thank you for your replies! Disagreement is fine. Replies from Mr. Weber are obviously also appreciated, but I can imagine several reasons why replying may not or rarely happen.
Ok, here goes.
- An overabundance of use of a stylefigure "he would not this... not that... not such... but even then it will be such." This kind of reasoning easily takes half a page or more, and its exhausting to read when it happens a lot. Which it does, especially the latest novels.
- Too many characters, approached too little in-depth. I know there are several series happening, and the author seems to wish all characters involved everywhere. I have not read or remember all spin-offs, and personally I dont wish to keep a thesaurus to keep track of everyone. But even when using so many names is acceptable, I wish more depth in the main characters, in particular in Honor Harrington... to me, that was not the case. YMMV, obviously.
- Way too many description/build up pages. Eventually, what makes a book flow to me is about points of conflict and how they are resolved due to the characters particular strengths (or, the strength is shown by the solution). There are way too many non-resolving descriptive pages of otherwise interesting characters. Another reception? Another meeting without a conflict to sort out? Is anything new introduced, preferably in a succinct manner? I do care in a minor way, but less and less.
The above points made me skip or read diagonally many pages for 3/4 of the book.
I will put myself on even more shaky ground by the following statement:
I call this the 'too large series' syndrome. I observe in many series that the first books are generally wellpaced, succinct and fun. Editors have cut away the chaff. Later books in the series then become too long, less interesting, because there is much less good editing of books.
In all fairness, from my pov. this series suffers less from this problem than most. The last few Honor books, however, tend to shift in this direction (for me).
Then, the end of the book.
- The logic of 'we approached Mesa, they bombed themself, nobody believes us, we have a big problem' does not hold for me. For several books we see that Manticore does the right thing, experiences gigantic spinning of the news by sollies, and moves on. When bombs are not set off by Manticore, and when people claim to be part of the Mesan plot without knowing anything of the terror actions earlier experienced, it clearly means the enemy has laid more false tracks than expected. No need to panic, just tell it as it is, as done before. The despair shown is out of character. Who cares what others spin ? What does this mean, now, for us Manties? Can we find cracks in the patterns? What can we learn?
- The moment I read that many important people from Manticore are collected in a new place, the "Greyson assassination" or whatever it is called immediately comes to mind. And surprise, they die. How unexpected.
What eludes me, however, is the logic. There is evidence of very strong spying and new techniques to enslave people up to the point of immediately making them unwilling assasins. So far, only Manticore is capable, due to their allies the 'cats, to find them, and so they do on Manticore, succesfully.
So *WHY* (in capitals, italic, bold and printed in font size 100) would you ever put your important people outside this safety umbrella for a large conference? You bring the outside folks in, never the reverse. Chances are that the three huge bombs made would never have been put there on Manticore. If we can consider this kind of options nowadays with terrorism on the whole planet earth, how much more would Manticore consider such safety after decades of war and experience?
- The 'silver bullet' of Mesa to take out the new system. So no new research is done on detecting spider drives, the weakness of the new "Manty" system (Sherlock) is never considered... Mesa can think of this approach, the experienced Manticore scientists would never think up the same, even when they did this themselves (Honor when she attacked while using the Apollo missile system)? I guess this is theoretically possible, but I find it rather unlikely. The moment a new weapon system is thought up, some people are tasked to consider how to deal with it from the pov of the enemy.
- It is unimaginable for me that starfaring people would make space-capable hubs unable to evacuate quickly. If million of people would cause trouble, at least a happy few should be able to go away fast. The idea that places are allowed to exist where evacuation takes 45 minutes to get out ... no, I doubt that would be done in a society where people clearly act as smart as possible. Nobody would ever allow such death traps in space. Problems existing due to large numbers and capacity problems, yes. Not for small numbers of people.
I imagine that mr. Weber wanted to get back to a situation that few people have to get together to sort the trouble, a smart ploy in a series like this. The way chosen however feels unlogical to me. And that diminishes the book to me.
I am curious about your replies. Forgive me for any bad grammar, English is not my native language.
Kind regards,
Frank
Last edited by Frank777 on Thu Nov 15, 2018 6:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
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. Ah well. If I re-iterate old points, feel free to tell me.