tigertoy

Today's book review is Mission of Honor by David Weber.

This is the latest episode in the ongoing Honor Harrington series, which is particularly convoluted in the last few books.  It actually resolves something at the end, rather than opening up new complications, though there is still a great deal going on.

This is definitely only a book for fans of the series, since it takes up in the middle of a situation that we've been building up for the last several books.  Even though I have read the series, and I went back and read my own reviews of the last few, I found it difficult to keep track of what was happening.  But even so, it's definitely better than the last couple.  There are too many characters, and we watch the unfolding action from too many viewpoints.  But it does have a fair bit of the snap that made the early books so popular.  And underneath a fair bit of ranting about the evils of bureaucracy, combined with villains who are rather too much to believe, we do manage to also talk about how governments can end up doing evil things even without evil intent.

7 out of 10.

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My next review is WWW: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer.

This is the second in the WWW trilogy.  It would help to read Wake first but it would probably be mostly understandable without.  The overall plot remains unresolved, though we get to end on some slight breathing space in the ongoing crises.  While not exactly a cliffhanger, it leaves off in a frustrating place because we've got hints about how the whole thing is going to come together but it hasn't happened yet.

As I've come to expect from Sawyer, this is a fairly short novel with clean, spare, easy to read prose, so it goes by quickly, but in spite of that, there's a whole lot going on.  All of the interwoven stories interest me, and we also work in a bunch of philosophical stuff that is also interesting.  There's so much of that to like that I manage to take in stride a lot of things that could have annoyed me so much they would have kicked me entirely out of the novel if it weren't so smooth and easy to read.  I can't say anything more without venturing into slightly spoilery territory, though I won't go into any specifics beyond what was set up in Wake and implied by the books' titles.

The major premise of this series is an emergent consciousness in the Web.  This starting point means that my suspension of disbelief is already gone, but while I don't believe in the idea, I'm not offended by it.  However, in trying to justify this as hard science fiction, we get into some details of how this consciousness is supposed to happen, and it becomes quite silly to me.  Now, part of the speculation is that we don't know how consciousness works, and Sawyer is trying to work in some interesting theories here.  The problem is that I know a little bit about the computer infrastructure that's supposed to be giving rise to these phenomena; not everything, but enough that an author can't make hand-waving references and let me nod and smile.  He posits "mutant" IP data packets which somehow bounce around in the net forever, which is extremely far fetched.  These magic packets somehow form the underlying medium for cellular automata.  But while I can just barely accept the idea that magic packets manage to continue to propagate around the net, Sawyer completely fails to give me a mechanism I can believe for the individual packets to exchange information with their neighbors (whatever neighbors means) -- and without some information connection between neighbors, there isn't anything to make automata out of.  The magic packets have to not only exist, which means that they somehow have to continuously mutate so that each net node they land in finds some reason in the address to forward it on, but to read other packets so that they influence each others' state.  Unfortunately, the data link layer of the Internet is not magic; it's simple digital logic, and there just isn't any place for these phenomena to exist.  Now, Sawyer is a savvy enough guy that I see a tiny outside chance that he's got some kind of an explanation for this -- but I certainly didn't find it in the text.

Fortunately, the story does not need to be plausible to be a viable framework to discuss interesting ethical concepts in society.  There's interesting stuff to talk about here, questions about the value of privacy, whether surveillance is bad, and when and how it's appropriate to intervene in other people's lives.  And interesting concepts to chew on in terms of the evolutionary value of consciousness.

This is a book that I hope my friends will read because it's going to be interesting to talk about.  As a story, it has some weaknesses, and it definitely is the middle of a trilogy rather than a solidly independent novel.  But still good, for all that.  8 out of 10.

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Today's book review is Torch of Freedom by David Weber and Eric Flint.

This is part of the ongoing Honorverse series.  You do NOT want to try to start with this book.  The episode in this book is more complete than the last couple have been.

I was having a conversation at a con recently with someone who knows Weber and that person said that Weber's family life has severely disrupted his writing career.  It really shows in this book; large parts of it really feel like it was a first draft cranked out on deadline.  There are many long passages which (despite being nominally presented as dialog) are exposition, not just of what's going on (which is complicated enough), but of what one particular set of players (with imperfect information) thinks is going on.  There are many, many references to events and characters in other books which aren't actually explained.  Some of them I can remember, but some I can't.  We do learn a little more about what's going on with the big bad guys in the Honorverse series.  We do meet some new characters for this book which are interesting.  There is some good adventure; the excitement that made the Honor Harrington series is still there in places.  But there are large parts of the text that feel rough and contrived, and when we get to the end, we realize that, while we have advanced the series a little bit, Manticore is still in the middle of a whole lot of crises and we've only partially established one part of solving one of them.

5 out of 10.

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Today's book review is The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber.

This book takes place in the "Honorverse", the world of Honor Harrington, but Lady Harrington only has a cameo appearance.  The story itself stands alone fairly well, and the universe would probably make sense without already being familiar.

This book has so much wrong with it that I'd have plenty of meat for a very detailed pan.  It's 745 pages, which is certainly a couple hundred too many.  A lot of what happens is political, and it's convoluted and contrived.  A lot of it is military, and those parts include many passages of excruciating description, explicitly listing details.  A number of details at many levels seem to be a bit off.  Mostly, the first several chapters just dragged to the point where I remembered that when this book had first come in, I'd set it aside unread, and I was thinking that I should have stuck with my decision at the time.

But somewhere, maybe a third of the way in, Weber's magic kicked in, and I became deeply engrossed in spite of all the flaws.  I complained a lot more than in the early Honor books, but I definitely had that feeling of addiction.

If you've never tried Weber, this isn't the best book to start with.  (Go find a copy of On Basilisk Station.)  If space navy battles aren't your thing, don't bother.  But if you're hooked on Honor Harrington and haven't been able to get your fix, this does have the same feel.  7 out of 10.

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I have a truly horrible stack of books I haven't written about here, and I'm going to knock off a couple before I forget them even more completely, starting with Starship: Rebel by Mike Resnick.

This is the fourth in the Starship series.  It follows Mutiny and Pirate (both of which seem to have escaped my tagging of my book reviews) and Mercenary.  The characters and situation would probably be a little hard to pick up without reading from the beginning.

As the saga of Captain Cole continues, Resnick continues to examine the problems of the decent individual people working for an out of control government.  It's more unreal than more seriously military space opera, as Resnick relatively casually offs huge numbers of people, but the real story happens with just a few people ducking and weaving through unintended consequences, trying to figure out what's right, and finding the determination to do it.  This is a little more compelling than the earlier books, but also a little more troubling with the large number of deaths that are just background description for the main story.  8 out of 10.

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Tonight's book review is Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber.

This is the first book in a new series, introducing a new world.  It ends at a reasonable stopping point in a story that clearly continues.

The starting premise of this book is a rather unpleasant one, and the central character is someone I can't truly believe in.  A short book's worth of plot, much of which is inevitable, is stretched into a very long book, in part due to many meticulously described battles.  From that, you might expect that I hated the book, but I can't say that; it is clearly written by the same David Weber that brought us the Honor Harrington books, and it's fun to read despite the flaws.  It is, however, definitely too long, and not quite as compelling as the Honorverse.

7 out of 10.

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Today's book review is Some Golden Harbor by David Drake.

This is book 5 in the Lieutenant Leary series.  The story is pretty much self contained, but it only refers briefly to things in the recurring characters' backgrounds, rather than fully explaining them.  Better to start at the beginning.

I finished this book a couple of days ago, and I find that enough of it didn't stick as it went whizzing by that I can't really explain it.  It's fairly entertaining space opera, but there are some things that are getting tiresomely repetitive.  I wouldn't go so far as to say the series has jumped the shark, but I think this is a weaker book than the earlier ones.  6 out of 10.

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Today's book review is Marsbound by Joe Haldeman.

This is a standalone novel.

The first third of the book is some straightforward, fairly tame exploration of where our civilization might be in a few decades, told through a moderately engaging story of a woman coming of age.  Then we meet the aliens, and things get very contrived and suspension of disbelief is quite difficult.  We rush headlong to an ending that makes some sense in human terms, but leaves me wondering what the larger point of it all was, if any.  It was fairly entertaining, but it ended up being more or less all whipped cream when I was expecting some pie under there.

6 out of 10.

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Today's book review is The Way to Glory by David Drake.

This is book 4 in the ongoing Lieutenant Leary series.  The characters probably make more sense if you start from the beginning, but there's not very much reference to earlier events in the series.

This book, like the rest of the series, is pure space opera, mere fluffy entertainment.  There are some scientific howlers, but in a universe where sailors climb in the rigging of the starship's sails, who's going to worry about velocity changes that would take days at the described acceleration happening in minutes?  There's a time for silly space opera.  The writing engages me.  The characters seem to be self-consistent.  Some of them have very odd personalities but they do have personalities, and they are consistent in them -- there is some slow evolution in the characters but no unexpected sudden changes.  The plot has some minor surprises but no big tangles.  Nothing profound or deep here, just fun.

8 out of 10.

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I'm starting to pile up a stack of books again.  First for today is Red Thunder by John Varley.

This is the third in the series that started with Red Thunder and continued with Red Lightning.  The main character is new, but the world carries over from the earlier books and may not be very clear.  From the way this one ended, it looks like the end, but he might either follow a hook that he hinted at and then left lying, or else follow along after major transitions.

There are cosmic events in this book, but most of the pages are devoted to the trials and tribulations of being a touring celebrity and pop star -- as far as I'm concerned a whole lot of pages with very little content.  Aside from that, we have another disaster, where we spend some time dwelling on how much disasters suck, though not as much as we did in Red Lightning, and it leads up to an ending that's pretty depressing.  There's also a consistency error with the series MacGuffin that made me feel like the writer is cheating and just doing whatever he feels like with his magic technology.

Page by page it's readable, but overall pretty disappointing.  Not recommended unless you really liked the earlier books in the series.  5 out of 10.

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