new Honorverse book coming in 2024 - Yay!

tlb wrote:Toll of Honor has been discussed recently in this forum as being contemporary with Field of Dishonor and features Lieutenant Brandy Bolgeo after the Battle of Hancock (That is also what the Amazon blurb says).

Therefore it is hard to see it having anything to do with the Malign, which was not known at that time. Instead it might be more about the politics around Pavel Young. So I am guessing backstory, without necessarily any relevance; unless she is a character that will be added going forward.

She might be a character that shows up again in future books or short stories; but I'd bet on Toll of Honor extending no further than maybe overlapping Flag In Exile.

Give us an external view on the Pavel Young court martial and maybe some more details on exactly what the RMN counter attacks were while that was holding up the formal declaration of war, or what was going on on Manticore while Honor was in Grayson. But I agree that it's unlikely a book starting that far back in the timeline would have anything on Mesa or the Detweilers.

Clearly there will be books 19A and 20A to bring matters back into line.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

larrydaniels wrote:So excited to wait for these two new books. In what month will these two books be released?

Hello Larry. Welcome to the forum!

Toll of Honor is going to be published on April 2, 2024. It's billed as "Honor Harrington Book 20" (the numbering doesn't add up; every other book is supposed to have "Honor" in the title, but book 19 was Uncompromising Honor). It's unclear whether this will advance the plot against the MAlign, fill some backstory we'll need for the future books, or both.

To Challenge Heaven is not an HH book. It's the third in the Out of the Dark series, co-written with Chris Kennedy, with publication date January 16, 2024. They also have "The Other Guys" but in that universe no one knows who those may be (yet). See the sub-forum.

larrydaniels wrote:So excited to wait for these two new books. In what month will these two books be released?

phillies wrote:Clearly there will be books 19A and 20A to bring matters back into line.

We certainly hope for more books set after To End in Fire, but that does not seem be either described in this thread: one starts at about the time of Field of Dishonor and the other is not set in the Honorverse.

tlb wrote:
Therefore it is hard to see it having anything to do with the Malign, which was not known at that time. Instead it might be more about the politics around Pavel Young. So I am guessing backstory, without necessarily any relevance; unless she is a character that will be added going forward.

The Amazon blurb talks about the CA's (and possibly others) maneuvers to keep Pavel Young from out in front of a firing squad, and the adverse impact it has on the RMN's ability to prosecute the war against Haven during the period when St. Just was shooting Naval officers willy-nilly.

I am quite excited too.

At the same time I wonder if DW considers more colabs like with Zahn for the, for lack of a better term, main arc of the story.

At this point, any continuation might as well be handled like a separater arc anyway. I would like to see the Malign situation being solved in books eventually. It could be done in one with one even bigger and bloodier battle than ever, but it might also be done in another long term arc. I wonder what DW's own idea is or if a concrete idea how to conclude this even exists.

stardust7 wrote:I am quite excited too.

At the same time I wonder if DW considers more colabs like with Zahn for the, for lack of a better term, main arc of the story.

At this point, any continuation might as well be handled like a separater arc anyway. I would like to see the Malign situation being solved in books eventually. It could be done in one with one even bigger and bloodier battle than ever, but it might also be done in another long term arc. I wonder what DW's own idea is or if a concrete idea how to conclude this even exists.

Hello stardust

Welcome to the forum!

Given what we've learned about David's writing style, it's likely he knows the broad strokes and major stepping stones for what he wants to accomplish. He probably won't decided on all details and how exactly things will unfold. I think in an interview he's said that sometimes he's had to strike out some ideas because it turned out that they were unfeasible (mark of a good author: he's willing to rewrite instead of insisting on a bad idea, and this includes for tech reasons).

It will necessarily be different than what he had planned originally because a) Honor is alive and b) the timeline has compressed after Eric wrote finding the Alignment sooner. Plus there's a question of whether Galton is a retcon and, if so, why. So the characters have probably changed from that original plan from 20 years ago, and some other details will have too. But I doubt it has changed how the Alignment is going to be found and is going down.

He has said he's looking for collaborators for all his book series, including the HV. This allows him to deliver books faster, plus it's a way to pay forward by giving us a new generation of writers. There also appears to be health concerns: he had already had to reduce his writing time after his fall a few years ago and it looks like this accelerated further after COVID-19 (it looks like he caught it before vaccines). We all wish him a long, healthy and productive life, of course.

PS: as I said in another post, I don't think the battle will big and bloody. None of them in the HV have: they're always won by superior strategy, tactics, and technology. Another reason is Honor's retirement: she was too senior to go out and command battles, and her retirement allows him to focus on smaller but tactically more interesting ones.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:PS: as I said in another post, I don't think the battle will big and bloody. None of them in the HV have: they're always won by superior strategy, tactics, and technology. Another reason is Honor's retirement: she was too senior to go out and command battles, and her retirement allows him to focus on smaller but tactically more interesting ones.

I have no idea what he is planning, but in terms of death count there have been three very bloody events in the series: the Battle of Manticore, Oyster Bay and the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals. Note that the last two were at the hands of the Malign.

As ThinksMarkedly pointed out, Honor is much too senior to be leading battles. And since RFC's original plan to have one of her children lead the charge has been closed due to the compressed timeline, I think Lt. Bolgeo is being set up as the officer to lead the final campaign against the Malign. I've also seen posts suggesting that Michelle Henke could fill that role, but others have argued against that. So instead maybe Lt. Bolgeo, now an Admiral, will be the officer in command when the Malign meets it's final test.

Admittedly we haven't seen anything of Lt. Bolgeo in between to indicate she would be a candidate for such a mission. But I've always suspected that the discovery of Darius will be a surprise and Admiral Bolgeo will happen to be the senior officer in the right place at the needed time to be put in command.

At least that's what occurred to me as an explanation for going back in time for the next book.

tlb wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:PS: as I said in another post, I don't think the battle will big and bloody. None of them in the HV have: they're always won by superior strategy, tactics, and technology. Another reason is Honor's retirement: she was too senior to go out and command battles, and her retirement allows him to focus on smaller but tactically more interesting ones.

I have no idea what he is planning, but in terms of death count there have been three very bloody events in the series: the Battle of Manticore, Oyster Bay and the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals. Note that the last two were at the hands of the Malign.

There have been at least FOUR multi-million death events in the series. The Malign was responsible for 3 of them (Oyster Bay, the destruction of Filareta's fleet, and the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals) and had a hand in the Battle of Manticore (in _At All Costs_) because they did the assassinations that caused Elizabeth to resume operations.

tlb wrote:I have no idea what he is planning, but in terms of death count there have been three very bloody events in the series: the Battle of Manticore, Oyster Bay and the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals. Note that the last two were at the hands of the Malign.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:There have been at least FOUR multi-million death events in the series. The Malign was responsible for 3 of them (Oyster Bay, the destruction of Filareta's fleet, and the destruction of the Beowulf orbitals) and had a hand in the Battle of Manticore (in _At All Costs_) because they did the assassinations that caused Elizabeth to resume operations.

You are correct that I should have included Filareta's fleet destruction, which can be attributed the Malign.

However I think the the responsibility for the first Battle of Manticore is too tenuous to assign it to the Malign. Yes, they did restart the hostilities by erasing the chance for a meeting between the heads of state; but it still requires a lot of decisions and circumstances that they had no influence over.

You can with more justification say that they are responsible for the entire Manticore - Haven War since they sent Haven on the road to conquest.