May
23,
2007
While I was waiting for more Honor Harrington books to be delivered, so I could read them, I had the following thought: If Honor Harrington is just Horatio Hornblower in space, then why don’t I read Horatio Hornblower not in space? So I picked up C. S. Forester’s Beat to Quarters
and in quick succession
Ship of the Line and Flying Colours
— because it turns out that, whether in space or at sea, Horatio Hornblower is a fun read.
Which isn’t to say that Hornblower really is Harrington at sea; as obvious as the similarities are, Forester’s works are very different from Weber’s. For one thing, Hornblower is not actually a demigod superhero. He’s competent, sure, but he’s a flawed human being. He’s very insecure; he has to work hard to overcome his natural tendencies and act the stern, capable captain; he’s socially awkward and occasionally a bit of a prick; and he’s prone to depressive fits of brooding. But fundamentally, he’s a sympathetic character who can sail a ship like nobody’s business, which he does to good result in these three books.
As period works of the Napoleonic Wars, these are more successful for me than Patrick O‘Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, if solely because they’re more comprehensible. This isn’t a time period I know much about, and sailing is neither a special area of expertise for me, and Forester seems to make fewer assumptions about what I already know. In one sense, these might be good books to read as an introduction to O’Brian — by the time I finish the dozen or so Hornblower books, I’ll be able to take on tales of nautical adventure with a lot more comprehension, I expect.
But these aren’t just books to read while waiting for something else to arrive, or to prepare for something else. These are legitimately good books in their own right, and recommended highly to anyone who might be interested in broadsides and topsails.
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May
9,
2007
The hardcover edition of David Weber’s At All Costs
includes a CD-ROM containing the full text of all the previous Honor
Harrington novels (and a bunch of other stuff Weber wrote), which is
pretty nifty. But when I first put it in the computer and read
Weber’s intro, the thing that popped out at me was where he claimed
that At All Costs was the best Harrington book since In
Enemy Hands. That’s not exactly the same as him saying, “Yeah,
you’re right, the last couple of books were kind of padded,
weren’t they?” but it has a sort of implication to it.
It’s also right. This is a rip-cracking book that moves along with
startling pace, and — like the early Harrington novels — makes every
other aspect of your life seem somehow less important than finding out
what Honor’s up to next. How much sleep do you really need
anyway, I found myself asking more than once.
At this point, I’ve lost all critical distance from this series. I
can sort of remember that there was once a time when I found elements
of the books to be kind of bad, but I can’t bring myself to care about
that any more. All I know is that I want to read these books, and I
want there to be more of them to feed my insatiable appetite.
All that to the side, I will note that this isn’t the eleventh book of the series, it’s the twelfth. The series listings pretend that The Shadow of Saganami is a separate series existing off to the side, but they lie. The events in that book take place chronologically before this one and are referenced frequently. It didn’t make this book incomprehensible or anything, but I suspect it will diminish my enjoyment of the other book. Alas!
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May
6,
2007
By all rights, David Weber’s War of Honor
should be terrible, as the bloated 1000-page tenth volume of the Honor Harrington series. And it very nearly is. The first 300 pages of the book, for instance, involve a bunch of people fucking around and wasting time to no reasonable end (and many unreasonable ones, involving the world’s most shudder-worthy love triangle and those goddamn treecats). It’s perhaps the longest prologue in history, and I was afraid that there would be no story at all in the book.
But there is. It takes a while to get going, and it’s padded even when it does, but the core story in this book is just as compelling as it is in any of the previous (much shorter) volumes. Yeah, you could strip 600 pages out and improve the book, but the 400 pages that are left contain all the virtues that I’ve raved about in the previous volumes of this weirdly compelling series; and by the time I got to the end, I was in my by-now familiar mindset where everything in my life that wasn’t Honor Harrington was a distraction from reading more Harringtonian fiction.
If you’ve read this far in the series, you might as well keep reading, even if you do have to skim a bit, because it’s worth it in the end.
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