Help me read Honor Harrington

[kennyc]

Yep, maybe a bit like Burroughs Mars books or Bradbury's.... lots that is unbelievable but wonderful reads. Of course that is true of much if not most SF.

[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by Nyssa

They are all in omnibuses and I believe most if not all are either $5 or free.

I have the entire series (short stories and all) up to book 13 (I think) in ebook format, and it was not a spendy undertaking.

There is also a Baen/Weber approved site that uploaded the free content that came on the discs with the hardcovers.... iA link was posted on MR somewhere. If I can find it I will post the link here, unless someone else knows it of the top of their heads.

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Might as well post some free book links in case anyone reading this thread wants to give the series a try.

On Basilisk Station Baen | Amazon | Sony
The Honor of the Queen Baen | Amazon | Sony


Mission of Honor CD @ The Fifth Imperium
ISO.zip (317,657,584 bytes) | CD.zip (318,343,861 bytes)

Contains (among other things)...
The Honor Harrington series:
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonor
Flag in Exile
Honor Among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs
Mission of Honor

The Honor Harrington Universe novels:
Crown of Slaves
Torch of Freedom

The Honor Harrington anthologies:
More Than Honor
Worlds of Honor
Changer of Worlds
Service of the Sword

Saganami Island Series:
The Shadow of Saganami
Storm From the Shadows

Well geesh! How did I not see that this was already posted earlier in the thread!

The The Fifth Imperium was the site to which I was referring in my post.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

It's not Art.

Well, now...
True, you won't find any "coming of age", "life in a dysfunctional family", or "finding yourself through promiscuity," stories.
But if you don't mind yourself some political metaphors, historical allegories, and the odd examination of the price of social conformity and statist dependency, you might find a few ideas worth debating with friends. (Which I've done.)

The Honorverse is unabashedly space opera but it isn't *just* space opera.
Part of what sets the series apart from other genres is that, much like Drake's RCN series, he has something to say about humanity, what drives people, and the choices people make, in between the space battles. Even the blackest of mustachio-twirling villains (of which there are a few) are driven by specific motivations, be they spite, greed, or ego. There may be larger than life figures and archetypes in there, but their motives should be recognizable to most; we see their like daily in both private and public life. Especially the villains, alas.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yep, maybe a bit like Burroughs Mars books or Bradbury's.... lots that is unbelievable but wonderful reads. Of course that is true of much if not most SF.

A lot of other fiction genres can be unbelievable too.
Apache

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Apache

A lot of other fiction genres can be unbelievable too.
Apache

Oh true.....not intending to exclude them.....I mean really.....Romance? Believable?

I was just making a comparison within the genre.

[BaenSidhe]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

Anyone know what David Weber is working on for publication in 2014?

As others have said, there's the two co-author novels in the Honorverse and the Safehold novel. I think that's all that will be published next year. Below is a link to a Q&A session at HonorCon where Weber describes what he'll be working on for the next year or so. Some time in the next few years there will be a fantasy novel, an Empire of Man novel, and a probable Honor movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm2e0...AEZUD7&index=4

[Apache]

I really wish he would drop everything else and write another Empire of Man Novel.................or two.
Apache

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Apache

I really wish he would drop everything else and write another Empire of Man Novel.................or two.
Apache

Not everything...
...but Safehold would be a good place to start...or stop...

In the Honor series he really needs to get back to the Talbot cluster ASAP... That was one nasty cliffhanger he dropped on us.

[Xanthe]

I second the dropping of Safehold for the Empire of Man...

[Lemurion]

Personally, I want more Dahak, though not another Heirs of Empire, I liked the huge-scale space opera of the first two.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Personally, I want more Dahak, though not another Heirs of Empire, I liked the huge-scale space opera of the first two.

+1
There are two logical sequels: liberating the Achuultani, and dealing with whatever drove the Achuultani from their native realm. Then we could pretend Heirs of Empire isn't part of the series.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

+1
There are two logical sequels: liberating the Achuultani, and dealing with whatever drove the Achuultani from their native realm. Then we could pretend Heirs of Empire isn't part of the series.

It wasn't a bad book, it just didn't scratch the same itch as the other two. In fact, it felt very much like a dry run for Safehold.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

It wasn't a bad book, it just didn't scratch the same itch as the other two. In fact, it felt very much like a dry run for Safehold.

Same underlying themes, yes.
Underwhelming then, even more now.
Obviously it's a theme that is important to him but developing it over ten volumes is simply diluting the (reader's) fun 10 times. And he is nowhere near making good on the promise of the first Safehold book.
Safehold needed to be a generational saga, not an epochal war.
It's turned into a slog.

HEIRS isn't a bad book in itself; it is just the wrong story in the wrong series.
The problem with HEIRS is that it takes a series that ran at breakneck pace and brings it to a total halt. For two volumes he'd been working off the Doc Smith playbook of exponential escalation and then he... stopped... halfway. The framework he established called for one thing and he went against it. It might have been workable if he'd kept on writing in the Imperium millieau and eventually gotten back on track but as is he might have been better off leaving well-enough alone.
I think of it as Weber's VORTEX BLASTERS, a spinoff more than a core piece of the saga. And, unlike Smith, he's not finished the core saga.

[morriss003]

Originally Posted by mewmartigan

In fact, Weber (with help) has also started offshoot novels about origins of the treecat/human relationship with a Harrington character. First book is "A Beautiful Friendship". I haven't read it but I do like Nimitz and his fellow treecats in the Honor Harrington books.

Fire Season was a good book too. The more written about the tree cats the more interested I become.

[morriss003]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Oh true.....not intending to exclude them.....I mean really.....Romance? Believable?

I was just making a comparison within the genre.

Hey, Kenny, have you read any of the Jayne Ann Krentz novels? You get a new appreciation for Romance.