Ashes of Victory

I hung in there for a good long while, but I’m stopping my read through this series here. (I started on Book 10 and put it down about 1/4 of the way through.) When this series is firing on all cylinders, it’s a fun ride. Terrific space battles, meaningful happenings with significant impact on the world, characters you care about. Unfortunately, the series has started to get bogged down in the last couple books, and by now I see that it’s not going to turn around enough to make me interested again. I read that Weber had planned to kill Harrington off in Book 5. I realize now that would have been the wiser course (and much more realistic, given the number and severity of the conflicts she has been engaged in!). I was willing to overlook the Mary Sue-ism of Harrington while her story was rocketing along. Now that the pace has slowed to a crawl (vivid detail of treecats using sign language; pages and pages of inner monologue between spoken dialogue that doesn’t really make sense without it), Honor’s infallibility has gorwn a tad tiresome. Really glad I read the first few books, and I’d recommend those to anyone. Time to move onto greener fields.

This is the Honorverse book I put down never to return. After checking with others whose opinions I value I learned that the pacing, infodumps, and endless mustache twirling in drawing rooms only gets worse and worse from here on out. This book was clearly going nowhere SLOWLY and I do not see the point in wasting my time. This is a shame as while Mr. Weber’s tendency to indulge in such literary diarrhea was somewhat present earlier it was overshadowed by outstanding action and characters. With this book it is nothing but circles of meaningless dialogue among interchangeable characters on subjects of no importance. Mr. Weber clearly needs an editor to whip him into shape but it is apparent that has never happened so I am done.

I truly loved this book, in part because I got to see more of what happened behind the scenes of the war. Honor’s relationship with her mother shone through, laced with love, affection, and friendship. In some ways, the book can be summed up in this quotation: Everything in the universe demanded its own price . . . and the greater a gift, the higher the price it carried.

Another theme was the price of fanaticism can be quite high. Watching someone get played because of his fanaticism, was painful, especially as the evil became more apparent. It saddens me when someone is blinded by hatred.

The final theme is this one as expressed by Honor: “But that will be the third thing that supports you in battle, Ladies and Gentlemen: the knowledge that your people will die uselessly if you screw up. It’s not your job to keep them alive at all costs. It’s your job to be certain they don’t die for nothing.” Keeping faith with those who have died is important in this book. I hope it will be in the next one as well.

This is not the place to start reading the series. If you like military SF, start with On Basilisk Station. Be aware that by this point, there are a lot of political undercurrents.

If you’re interested in the series for the combat. that only takes place in the last 25% of this book; the rest of it is politics. Weber likes to spend pages introducing people and all their thoughts on this or that, only to have them killed in combat a short while later.

To be fair, there was a lot of nuance in the first 3/4 of the book, but it was nearly all political, and what was missed on a strategic interest was recounted in the last quarter. Much of this could have been spun off in its own series set in the same universe. For those of us who wanted more Honor got barely ten percent of the novel. It’s not a bad novel, but all the intrigue and planning and recapitulating and speculating made for a slow read. Sometimes very slow. And meandering at times. A lot happens in the last 25%, but if this had been a first novel instead of book 9, there would not have been a book 2 for me. Baen books should thinned this puppy by half, and added more action at the end. I imagine most of the sales are from diehard fans.

After the last two books (7 & 8)in which I was skipping quite a bit of the pages due to Mr. Weber providing excruciating detail on some of the characters and how they would handle themselves. – No one goes through that kind of mental discussion or evaluation… Well Mr. Weber obviously wants to immerse his readers as such. But there is a limit, and beyond that limit it gets to be a drudgery. Which is why I was skipping large portions of the dialog. I know it is his book, and a lot of you may enjoy that much detail. And honestly I do read through the detail / most of the dialog. But the last two books just seemed to be just too much for me. To each his own right. I will say book 9, did get me back on track. Yes I skipped some pages but compared to the last two books I am completely satisfied………. I really do love the series… I will be purchasing the next book. I would recommend this series to anyone. But I sure hope that the amount of skipping I felt was necessary in book 7 & 8, do not come back in book 10……….

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