tigertoy

Today's book review is A Mighty Fortress by David Weber.

This is book 4 of the Safehold series.  It will make more sense to start at the beginning, but it probably provides enough recap to pretty much make sense on its own.  It tells a complete episode, but still leaves the larger story in a very tense position.

This is a David Weber book.  In the unlikely event that anyone reading this hasn't read any Weber, go dig up a copy of On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington book 1); the Honor Harrington series is his best work.  Like most of Weber's books, this is highly military, spending a lot of time examining the politics, intrigue, and human relationships that lead to wars and a fair bit of time in describing actual battles in fairly gruesome detail.  It's too long, switching between too many viewpoint characters, and it gets uncomfortably graphic.  It's also based on a rather hard to swallow initial premise and skates along on some fairly shaky ground to keep the world as premised from collapsing.  People who don't like Weber, or who don't like this series, can make very long lists of bad things about this book, this series, or Weber's writing in general, and they're right in all the particulars.  But there is still something about the stories as he presents them that makes them hard to put down, and this book has that quality.  There's a lot of background infodump about how sailing ships, cannon, and naval strategy work, but it's actually less extreme than the last couple of books in the series.  And, amid all the bluster and excitement, it manages to have something to say about the human condition.

8 out of 10.

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Today's book review is Storm from the Shadows by David Weber.

This is the latest in the Honor Harrington universe, a fairly direct sequel to The Shadow of Saganami, but it would probably be fairly understandable to anyone generally familiar with the universe.  It ends in a sadistic multiple cliffhanger (that is, rather than bringing the multiple plot lines together for a conclusion, Weber winds each one up to a dramatically tense moment, and we hit the last page).

This book should serve as a real test of whether you're an addict or not.  The overall story arc has clearly jumped the shark.  The scope of the main villain's plot is mostly revealed, and it strains credibility badly.  Further, the effectiveness of the villain's Machiavellian maneuvering completely shatters believability.  Many, many people who have risen to positions of real authority end up doing just what the villain's script says, in a way that makes it clear that it's only happening because it's what the author's script said.  The good guys, who are supposed to be smart, start putting the pieces together more because the story says it's time than because it's clear that they should understand now.  There are far too many new technological twists for such a well established universe, they seem too pat, and we the readers are just led around by the nose as the author tells us just how the different bits of tech will interact in battles, and the actual details feel like they're being massaged to fit where the story is supposed to go, instead of driving the story there.  And then there's the point where the book stops, which as I mentioned in my opening paragraph is about as completely the polar opposite of an ending as anyone could ever manage to write.

However, the metaphysical literary opiates that infuse the series are still present; despite all the above complaints (and the fact that I was warned about the ending before I picked it up), I couldn't keep myself from starting it, I couldn't keep myself from reading it, and only my crummy memory and inability to stay focused on anything will keep me from exploding from frustration as I wait to see how the mess shakes out.

6 out of 10.  If you're not already addicted, it's almost certainly too weak to hook you.  But if you are already addicted, you know you have to read it anyway.  And the next couple, too.

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The next book review on my pile is By Schism Rent Asunder by David Weber.

This is the direct sequel to Off Armageddon Reef, which you should definitely read first.  This volume advances the overall story arc and ends at an only slightly frustrating place.

I could find a lot of reasons to say this is a poor book.  The whole world is very contrived to create the setting Weber wanted to play in and call it science fiction, and in this book some new details about the history are revealed that border on deus ex machina.  The level of gratuitous detail about the workings of sailing ships, cannon, naval battles, and such is down from the first book but still pretty high.  Several major plot points, while emotionally satisfying, are just too pat; things shouldn't work out quite so perfectly except at the end of a fairy tale.  It is the measure of Weber's writing that, in spite of being aware of all this, I just couldn't put this book down.

While most of the wider story (beyond the interactions of the individual characters) is pretty whimsical, this book reaches for the profound in its examination of religion.  In explaining why the bad guy's version of the world religion is evil, but the good guys really are good guys and really are motivated by genuine faith, it comes pretty close to articulating how I feel about organized religion.

A lot of people will probably argue that this book doesn't deserve to be called great.  It does have real weaknesses.  But it grabbed me so hard that I can't give it less than a 9 out of 10.

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Today's book review is At All Costs by David Weber.

This is the latest in the Honor Harrington series.  In the unlikely event that anyone who's unaware of one of the most talked about SF series in the last 15 years crawled out from under their rock just for this review, I'll explain that this series is very military, with lots of detailed battle scenes and people dying, it is said to be very derivative of the Horatio Hornblower series (though I haven't actually read them), and while it's not to everyone's taste, it is extremely engaging to the people who appreciate it.  Through the 90's, Weber was cranking these books out at a pretty good rate until he suffered a hand injury which left him unable to write for a couple of years.  When he came out of this hiatus, most of his fans were disappointed with War of Honor, which spent a lot of time on politics and just didn't have the zing that the series had had up to that point.  I approached this volume with some trepidation; if he didn't return to his earlier standards, I might well give up reading the series.

I'm pleased to report that the series is interesting again.  This is a massive tome, over 800 pages, and an ambitious project that takes on a lot of things.  It doesn't handle all of them perfectly, but it doesn't completely fail at any of them.  It doesn't ultimately resolve any major issues for the series, and it does bring in more long-term issues.  But important things happen, interesting things happen, surprising things happen which I won't talk about even if the cover of the book totally lets the treecat out of the bag on one of them, and most important, the zing is back.  There are problems.  A strong theme of the stupidity and pointlessness of war in the bloodiest book in a bloody series only partly works -- but Weber sort of wrote himself into a corner, and I think he handled it pretty well.  In a few of the battles, supposedly brilliant commanders make what seems to me like painfully bad decisions to drive the plot.  The alternate villain is over the top.  But except for a few pages in a couple of places, it's never boring, and the story sucks me in and the world grabs me, maybe not quite as much as the early books, but very nearly so if not.

If you quit the series after War of Honor, it's safe to come back.  I don't think this one is quite great, but it's definitely good.  8 out of 10.