Currently Reading - 22-11-18

[davidgillon]

I succumbed and bought the Weber. It turns out I was wrong, for once there isn't a couple of hunded pages of dramatis personae, it's 900 pages of solid text.

Uncompromising Honor (Honor Harrington 19), David Weber

Content warning for the Kill off Your Gays and Kill off Your Crips tropes; and the blurb pretty explicitly gives away the climax and its drivers, so I'm not going to worry too much about spoilers here.  

 

The Star Empire (ex-Kingdom) of Manticore is at war with the corrupt Solarian League, the 90 stone gorilla of interstellar politics. There's no hope of Manticore (until recently a single star system) taking on the Solarian League Navy on the basis of numbers, the SLN has literally thousands of superdreadnoughts, but the Manticorans have been at war with the Republic of Haven for 20 years, and their naval technology comprehensively outstrips that of the SLN, rendering that fleet of superdreadnoughts hopelessly obsolete. Manticore does have allies, but Grayson and Beowulf are also single system polities, even if Beowulf, like Manticore, is one of the richest of star nations (and in the process of seceding from the League - there are probably ACW tropes I'm not noticing). Only Haven, now siding with Manticore, is an established multi-system interstellar state. So basically it's the invading Russia in winter problem. If you try and occupy the Solarian League you'll be swallowed up and vanish in the snowy interstellar wastes.

Complicating this is that both sides (as with Manticore and Haven before them) have been manipulated into the war by the secret Mesan Alignment, a centuries-old conspiracy of eugenicist supermen who've been running the League based interstellar trade in genetic slaves as cover for their actual plan (destroy the League and become the biggest fish in a sea of tiny ponds) pretty much as long as there has been a Solarian League. Manticore now knows what is going on, thanks to the sidetrack into interstellar spy fiction in several semi-series books, but the League is still in denial, and is run by bureaucrats in the pockets of their corporate sponsors, half of whom are fronts for the Mesans. Worse, the League can't change its policies, because its government is funded not by taxation, but by exploiting the 'protectorate' systems around its fringe, which are increasingly restive as they see the Manticoran Grand Alliance repeatedly destroy SLN fleets sent against it.

Manticore's solution, or Honor's solution given she's now second ranking admiral in the RMN, and her boss's boss is her husband Hamish, and the PM her brother-in-law, is to strangle the Solarian League economically by seizing control of the wormholes which greatly shorten interstellar travel time. At the start of the book there's an extended segment where a Manticoran squadron engaged in this finds itself up against a much larger and more powerful SLN squadron that's about the League's counter-strategy - devastating the orbital infrastructure of any star nation that behaves even remotely friendly towards Manticore. Every advantage is with the SLN, and they're literally slaughtered, with probably significantly less than 1% of the force surviving. This was the point that I realised Weber is telling the same story he's been telling for a couple of decades across multiple different series, most noticeably the Safehold series:- set up a fan-service underdog, threatened by an irredeemably corrupt and venal superior power that dwarves them, then give them a technological advantage that renders the other side's numbers irrelevant and let them kill the enemy in droves. It's basically the idea of SFF repeatedly creating an acceptably killable minority that was being discussed in various places a few months ago.

Things escalate. One SLN commander decides not to let their target system have sufficient time to evacuate the civilian population of his targets (numbered in millions) because he's scared a Manticoran force is about to arrive. They'd actually arrived before he did, but with a fraction of his numbers, and they are wiped out stopping him (though noticeably all the principal Manticorans survive - Weber likes killing off characters, but has a clear reluctance to kill off ones who are his favourites, even if it requires unlikely authorial fiat. And having escalated that far, and having been misinformed by Mesan agents that the Grand Alliance has a temporary vulnerability, the League escalates still further by attacking Beowulf in the same way, and while their attack fails, it still triggers a Mesan terrorist attack on the primary Beowulfan orbital habitats, using nuclear weapons, while Honor's husband Hamish and pretty much all of the senior background naval characters are aboard one of them.

This is where I got seriously annoyed with Weber. Hamish survives, though it takes days for anyone to realise this, because he was late and far enough from the blast when it went off, but Honor was in a poly marriage with Hamish and his original wife, Emily, who is very disabled, and when Honor tells Emily that Hamish has been killed she drops dead on the spot from a stroke and/or heart attack. So he saves Honor's husband, and gets her back into a nice, traditional marriage while killing off her rival/inconveniently same sex marital partner in a simultaneous Kill Off Your Gays and Kill Off Your Crips trope. He'd been signalling that Emily wasn't long for the world, and teasing that Hamish would be on Beowulf when things came to fruition for practically the whole book, and found the worst possible way to pull it off.

Meanwhile, Honor, convinced that both her husband and wife have just been killed by the League, takes the whole of the Grand Alliance Fleet direct to Sol, and proceeds to blow the entire systems' infrastructure to kingdom come, while demanding the utter surrender of the SLN, the destruction of its ships and that the League completely rewrite its Constitution while handing over the existing leadership for trial, which she gets. There's an artificial crisis that Honor will progress to war crimes, but Weber's been there before and long since established that Honor's staff won't let her do that. Besides which, the chances of the Manticoran leadership letting Honor loose with their entire fleet when she's lost all moral balance from grief and all of the senior leadership have been provided with telempathic treecat bodyguards (some of whom are in fact the treecat versions of psychiatrists) who can literally see she's not currently in her right mind and tell them that has to be about zero. And of course Hamish arrives just in time to stop her so that they can press the button together and destroy Sol's entire industrial infrastructure in an act of interstellar vandalism that doesn't for a moment consider what it might mean to individual Solarian citizens, many of whom are losing not just their jobs, but their homes. 

And Honor and Hamish go home, with Honor retiring to raise babies.

This left a very sour taste in my mouth. Part of the problem is I've realised how Weber keeps telling the same story over and over, and how it involves a technological, fan-service elite killing off the enemy by the score and the million; but a large part is just how blatant his authorial manipulation of who lives and who dies was in this book. He blatantly weighted the dice to save several characters he'd decided he liked, threw away a dozen he'd developed over nearly 20 books, killed the head of the Mesan Alignment offstage in order to justify even more terror attacks from his deputies/children/clones, and then to cap all that he killed off the inconvenient crip so that his heroine could finish the book in a nice straight marriage with her beloved without the inconvenient menage a trois/polycule/is Honor gay?/can Emily have sex? issues.

Beyond that, I think it's fairly obvious that Weber had decided he needed a way out of Honor Harrington. It's five years since the last book, and she outgrew her role as bold starship commander at least 5 books ago (at the point when his original series plan had her dying as a Nelson at Trafalgar expy). The war with Haven took him about 15 books to finish, the war with the Solarian League could conceivably have gone on longer, and the League were only proxies for the hidden Mesan Alignment. There's a ton of story arcs he's spent book after book developing that are just left hanging. His characters well understood the hazards of invading Russia in winter, so he had to force the issue, and forcing the issue so hard left his authorial fingerprints all over the story. I'm not clear whether he had become bored with her, or whether he just thought there was no way he could finish the story he had started to tell. I incline to the former because he's produced another Manticoran trilogy during that time, set in an unrelated time period, when he could presumably have pumped out at least a couple of Honor Harrington books.

 

ETA: I've just realised the Manticoran strategy for winning the peace is actually Donald Rumsfeld's strategy for running Iraq once we'd kicked Saddam out. And that worked so well.

 

Definitely not the book to start the series on!

The Lost Plot, Genevieve Cogman

Having killed off (or at least seriously singed) series bad guy Alberich in the last book, Library agent Irene Winters can be forgiven for hoping things will be a little quieter (at least once she's escaped the houseful of vampires with the lost book that is her latest assignment), but she's no sooner soggily vampire free than she's approached by Jin Zhi, a dragon in human form, who wants her to work for her. Four books in the audience knows the multiverse exists in an ongoing conflict between the Dragons as forces of order, and the Fae as forces of chaos, with the Invisible Library attempting to maintain a policy of strict neutrality within its own mission of saving the multiverse by saving lost books. So going to work for a dragon is strictly out of bounds (even if Irene's apprentice Kai is technically speaking a dragon), which makes the job offer even more worrying when Jin Zhi explains her rival in a challenge (retrieve a variant text of Journey to the West) set by their queen already has a librarian working for them. And as the loser won't survive the challenge, which has barely a week to run, stakes are high. Being a good little librarian (for once) Irene immediately reports the approach to the Library, and is assigned to chase down the other Librarian and protect the Library's reputation, at any cost.

Hunting him down takes Irene and Kai (regular series ally and great detective Vale doesn't really feature in this one) to a world stuck in the Prohibition Era, leading to all kinds of confusion as Irene is taken for a notorious British bootlegger (helped by no one in NYPD or the New York press actually checking sources to see if said notorious bootlegger actually exists), and swept up by variously the police, the mob, and the other faction. It's the usual rapid fire action of Cogman's series, and this time the bad guys quite literally have tommy guns. In the end it's it's up to Irene, Kai, the cops, the mobster, and the mobster's Fae moll/hitwoman to stop the two dragons from destroying the world in the pursuit of their goal.  The ending is effective, but it's a little too Orientalist for my liking. It doesn't quite dip into yellow peril, but the cliche quotient is higher than usual.

Up Next

Not sure fictionwise, I still haven't touched any of the possibilities I raised last time, most probably K B Spangler's Spanish Mission as I could do with something relatively light. I'm almost certainly about to buy several heavyweight military history texts, helped by the two volume Rikugun on the Japanese Army's organisation and equipment being available for £3+£7 as ebooks, which is a fraction of what I'd expect to pay for it.

Currently Playing

Ark Extinction is proving unexpectedly compelling. It's still having several post-release issues, though apparently they now have the giant beaver population explosion under control, and I want to take advantage of at least one of them before they nerf it back to what they probably meant it to be. I'm not quite at the point I can do that, though I might get there later this evening. Favourite moment so far, standing on the roof of my base, thinking "I should probably log off now -- holy shit that's an argentavis* outside!"

* Think giant eagle, an extremely useful mid-late game mount that isn't supposed to spawn anywhere near my base, but which is now mine**!

** Pity I can't make the saddle for it yet.

Comments

[sovay]

Hamish survives, though it takes days for anyone to realise this, because he was late and far enough from the blast when it went off, but Honor was in a poly marriage with Hamish and his original wife, Emily, who is very disabled, and when Honor tells Emily that Hamish has been killed she drops dead on the spot from a stroke and/or heart attack.

Wha.

I am sorry Weber could not find a more graceful way out of his own series, because that wasn't.

[cesy]

He killed off Emily?! Oh no, and I thought his treatment of her couldn't get worse after the initial assumption that disabled people can't have sex and PIV is the only thing that exists. Ugh.