*SPOILERS*War Of Honor: Has Weber Jumped the Shark?

Cafe Society
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This thread will involve spoilers for War of Honor, you have been warned.

So, I recently finished reading Weber’s War of Honor (WoH), and it involved a whole lot of slogging through infodumps, pointless sidetracks, and boring, irrelvant politcs for only a tiny bit of actually interesting stuff at the end. For reference, I thought all of the books up to and includingField of Dishonor were great (I read all of On Basilisk Station through a web browser, which is not exactly easy reading) and that the rest up to Ashes of Victory were good, though AoV got on my nerves.

The first 2/3-3/4 of the book should have simply been put out of its misery, and a short sampling of newspaper headlines or a meeting of the good guys should have summarized it. Hell, I’d much rather read about Theisman’s struggles in recreating the Republic of Haven than that mess. Part of the problem is not just that the political maneuvering is boring, but Weber’s habit of having the bad guys wear way too much black. I can buy that the coalition groups are bad, but it gets annoying when every single one of them has no redeeming qualities, no principles (aside from short-sighted self-aggrandizement), and no clue (no one in the government thought that cutting the military was a bad idea?) while the good guys (centrists & crown royalists) are squeekey clean, only doing shady stuff for the greater good and never making pork projects for their home district. Sure, having Haven be the good guys and the Manties the bad guys in this one was an interesting change, but he spent most of the book rolling around in the details of just how eeeevil the people with politics he doesn’t like are.

I’m also getting damn tired of the treecats and the whole thing with honor being the special treecat focus, I liked them when they were an interesting sidenote in the earlier books. And what’s the deal with White Haven being virtually an honorary treecat? I also should warn my diabetic friends to take a preemptive insulin shot before taking a stab at this book, because the scenes about romance between White Haven and Honor could kill them without it. I’m not a big romance fan anyway (people who like books about military officers triumphing over overwhelming odds in spaceships tend not to be), and I found those scenes to be painfully written and pretty unbelievable, worse than the romance in Attack of the Clones (apparently, people who write books about military officers triumphing over overwhelming odds in spaceships tend not to be good at writing romance). FYI, I did like the romance bit with Paul Tannerskly in the earlier books, if nothing else it was more believable. The infodumps were also grating, more for length than lack of integration, though I mostly glossed over those.

Because of all the wasted space on saccharine, treecats, and Weber’s dislike of certain politicians, the space battle scenes were too short and definately not worth slogging through the rest of the book to get to. Honor doesn’t even have an interesting battle this time, which should be required by law in these books (her fleet is absurdly better than the one she faces, and nothing whatsoever of interest happens in the battle). With the mass of space Weber wastes on showing how bad the Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever-the-other-one-is are, one would expect some space to be devoted to the political maneuverings that change one of the fundamental ‘rules’ in the world, the shift from Star Kingdom of Manticore to Star Empire of Manticore. Yet this major change is an afterthought, mentioned in passing towards the end of the book. That’s right, what’s probably the most significant world event in the series to date gets less ink than the second most significant (Haven’s conversion to a real republic) and together they don’t even come close to the reams of paper dedicated to showing just how terrible the politicians Weber dislikes are (and, by analogy, how much he dislikes their modern-day counterparts).

Ugh. Overall I give the book two stars out of five, though I don’t regret buying it because of the CD.

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I agree with your assessment 100%. I’m a huge fan of the HH series, but this one sucked big time.

I slogged through that damn thing thinking, man, there’d better be some damn good space battles coming up to make up for this. But there weren’t. In fact, there was nothing besides a couple second-hand accounts of minor cruiser skirmishes for the first 750+ frickin’ pages!

And that ending scene where Mrs. White Haven basically gives permission for her husband to get it on with Honor made me want to retch. Almost literally. It was completely unbelievable.

My admiration for Weber’s works took a major hit with the lifeless suckfest that was The Shiva Option, and I was so hoping this latest Honor Harrington book would redeem it. It so didn’t. I honestly doubt I will be bothering with any more of his books.

Two out of five stars? That’s generous, in my opinion.

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That’s the worst part, isn’t it? You don’t read this kind of book to hear Weber rant about politicians he doesn’t like (his politicians have some pretty obvious analogies to modern day ones), you want to read about the heros overcoming impossible odds while fighting, preferably in space battles (though some of the non-space stuff, like the duel, has been good). I’m still pissed that I read through all of that junk and the only payoff were some brief, one-sided battles. Yeah, the ‘you two get it on’ bit was pretty irritating, though I suspect the next book will see them married on polygamous Grayson to tie off that end. I’m worried that the Ghost of Heinlein is going to help Weber write the next one, though, and we’re going to have Lazarus Long pop up and convince all of the major good characters to intermarry into one big happy family.

Oh, and I was thinking of one star as the lowest rating, really my rating should be one star (with zero reserved for stuff I couldn’t finish).