Echoes of Honor

Extensive stream of consciousness, political pontification, and trivial details about his “treecats” detract from the author’s usual storytelling craftsmanship. It’s still highly readable; but I found myself skipping multiple pages of story-padding.
Also, as a former nuclear engineer, I was annoyed by his occasional comments about a various peripheral systems “quickly burning through fusion fuel mass,” or a fission reactor going longer between refuelings. I don’t think he fully appreciates the amount of energy released in hydrogen fusionto the tune of about three times the energy per unit mass of a fission reaction. It’s not that I expect every writer to know this; but I do expect them to refrain from “explaining” physics if they’re not going to do the research.

I do hate funerals; I cry and my nose gets stopped up. Honor’s was no exception. Even knowing the Havenites had faked her death, I still got caught up in the emotion of it all. I suppose that is why I rooted for Honor and her intrepid band of escapees so hard. There had been so much loss, I didn’t want them to lose more people.

Watching the Manticore/Grayson/Haven side of things in the alternating books (the six books alternate among the political/military aspects off the prison planet Hell and what is going on with Honor and her people) made for interesting reading as the different reactions to Honor’s supposed death hit each group differently. The political fallout from Cordelia Ransom’s death (and for her, I exulted at the death of an evil woman) might well be the salvation of the war for Haven, especially as Manticore debates itself endlessly, it seems. Grayson, on the other hand, I cheered for as they decided to use Honor’s death to aim higher. Go Grayson!

To understand this book, you must have read the earlier ones in the series. If you like military science fiction and want to understand the reasoning behind the battles, this series is for you. If the background military aspects (what weapons function in detail, for example) get too technical, you can skim through them without missing anything in the story. Well done! And yes, I have the sequel already.

I have given this book 5 stars for several reasons. I have been reading Science Fiction for at least 50 years and their are very few I have read more than once. I have hard copies of all the Harrington novels, about half of them and the rest in hardback.
It got to the point that I couldn’t wait for the next book to come out in paperback. I also have all the books as epub files for my Nook.
Unfortunately they only work on my computer, which for me is very hard to sit and read at, but they don’t work my Nook. My daughter just got me a Kindle which I really do like and I have been working on purchasing and reading the entire series again, in order of course.
This is at least my third time through the series. I just wish I didn’t have to purchase it over again. It is worth it though.
This is military space opera at it’s best and the character development is very detailed.

I am a huge fan of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series and this book is, as always, painting a very thorough picture of his “Honorverse!” My only complaint is that it is too thorough a picture. I really don’t want to be in on every conversation the “Peeps” have, nor am I terribly interested in the strife and political maneuvering behind the scenes, both in Haven and in Manticore. One has to admire David Weber for being able to create such a detailed picture of his worlds because it makes them very believable, especially since there are such close parallels in our own history. The drawback, for me, is that I don’t get enough of Honor. This seems to be getting worse as each volume in this fascinating series keeps expanding. I don’t like Dame Lady Harrington to be relegated to almost a footnote. History buffs will probably love these developments but I miss Honor the warrior, therefore 4 stars for being very well written and for all the scenes that detail Honor’s role in her breathtaking break-out from Hades, Also four stars rather than five because Weber forced me to buy the next book in the series just to see her return with all the escaped prisoners to home and her loved ones. I wasn’t going to because (see ever expanding books with less and less room for Honor) I was determined to make this the last book in this series since Admiral Harrington in a mostly administrative role is not as attractive as the Honor of Obelisk.

This is a good series and this volume certainly has an exciting core, i.e. a massive prison break by 600,000 prisoners from a prison planet. However, there is too much superfluous dialogue and several side-plots which detract from the action. Among other problems, the author seems to be writing several stories at the same time:

1. The story of Honor Harrington
2. A strategic and operational history of an inter-stellar war, and
3. A political history of a couple of planets.

The three do have a bearing on the Harrington story, but those aspects could have been handled more crisply and much shortly. The dialogues in all story lines are much too simplistic and give the impression of having been written by an undergraduate (which the author is not). This series needs a good editor to reduce the superfluous dialogue and create another edition of this series, perhaps half as long, but closer to the C.S, Forester style.

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