Echoes of Honor

I remembered this book as being the perfect place to end the series. I was wrong, dammit. Too much is left hanging, but the ending is awesome. The basic story is awesome, but Weber's writing is beginning to get on my nerves. <br /><br />Info dumps - there are too many of them &amp; he's expanding beyond the necessary - an ugly trend - adding in details &amp; back story that I don't much care for. I just don't see where it helps the story beyond padding it. This includes drawn 'plans' for weapons in the front of the book instead of a star map. Please! <br /><br />Inconsistent rules - People are known by their names &amp; their titles. Why mention 2 people by name &amp; the third by his title? He does similar things with ship &amp; missile accelerations. Why should I have to mentally convert back &amp; forth? It's like telling me two cars are driving down the road, one at 66 mph &amp; the other at 100 Kph in the same sentence. That's about the same speed, but it doesn't help the story to jump from one to another. It's just annoying.<br /><br />This was a 2 star book because of all the annoyances, but I'm giving it 3 because the basic story is excellent as is the ending. More, I'm going on to the next book, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/77742.Ashes_of_Victory__Honor_Harrington___9_" title="Ashes of Victory (Honor Harrington, #9) by David Weber" rel="noopener">Ashes of Victory</a>

Good, really good, but Weber crammed about 300 pages of story into 650 pages of book. The rest? Techno-babble and sermonizing. I like both, but it's the same stuff we read in the six or seven previous installments of the Harrington saga.<br /><br />Six <i>or</i> seven? Yeah, by accident I skipped the previous volume. And, again, I didn't miss all that much because Weber recapiculates pretty much the whole previous story--plus large gobs of the books before that--in the first half of this tome.<br /><br />C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying there wasn't a cup of tea or a book large enough to please him. Normally I agree, but not when there's so much overlap and repetition that you suspect you're reading the same book again. It begins to feel like something by Kafka or Poe.

He's done it to me again! I finished <i>Echoes of Honor</i>, panting to know what's gonna happen next.<br /><br />Weber creates larger-than-life major characters which tend to play out the stereotypes. What takes them beyond is how he distributes the good and the bad on both sides of the war. You don't want the bad guys to win...but...you don't want this nice enemy to die!<br /><br />The battle tactics, the chemistry, the military technology is amazingly in-depth. I kept wanting to skip chunks of text because I just had to know what happened next...and I knew I hate myself if I did that. So the race was on tearing through only to come up short at the end...dang it!

And <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/10517.David_Weber" title="David Weber" rel="noopener">David Weber</a>'s Honor Harrington universe marches on with <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/77741.Echoes_of_Honor__Honor_Harrington___8_" title="Echoes of Honor (Honor Harrington, #8) by David Weber" rel="noopener">Echoes of Honor</a>, like an army of undead, unstoppable and thirsting for brains. This time, we get to follow several distinct story segments as Honor and her team struggle to take over Hades and ultimately escape. The action this time around is almost unrelenting, and probably more importantly, relevant to the current story and future engagements.<br /><br />Weber has a thing for political intrigue, and of course it's no stranger here. Haven's Admiral Esther McQueen is finally sticking it to Manticore and simultaneously juggling her new role as an official member of The Committee of Public Safety. It's her strategies and tactics which ultimately confound Manticore's military, and make her just indispensable enough to be dangerous to the Committee itself. To start the propaganda war with a bang, the new head of Public Information releases a video of Honor being hanged.<br /><br />This, to me, is the weakest point of the novel, though it comes at the very beginning. Anyone who knew our Honor, would have balked at the reluctant and fearful wretch Haven magicked up; they should have expected the cold defiance she'd likely display at the results of a mock trial, just as she did in her duals. Sadly, everyone in both Manticore and Grayson accept the execution without question, and thus begins Honor's two year escape plan while Haven launches a four-pronged attack at Manticore's outer systems and the holding that started it all: Basilisk Station.<br /><br />And though the copious battles that follow are as one-sided as expected due to Haven's surprise offensive, the unexpected aid of the new long-range missiles; the missile-pod carriers; and the LAC-carriers that tote around massively improved Shrike-class attack craft, reverse the fortune of at least two of those engagements. There's hundreds of pages describing this attack in various aspects, from setup to execution, and the end result is spectacular: stuff gets blowed up real good.<br /><br />For all that, all we really know about Grayson is that they, unlike Manticore, dove right in to manufacturing the new prototype designs Honor helped draft in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/77740.In_Enemy_Hands__Honor_Harrington___7_" title="In Enemy Hands (Honor Harrington, #7) by David Weber" rel="noopener">In Enemy Hands</a>. There's also the sticky situation of Honor's "death" causing problems with the inheritance of her titles, and the involvement of her parents in that particular solution is as amusing as it is creative. Her work as a geneticist also unveils just why the Graysons survived on such an inhospitable planet, and just why the male/female birth ratio is so unbalanced. This last has been an unanswered question for at least six novels, so it's great that Weber has finally gotten around to answering it.<br /><br />Manticore seems only able to revel in its ability to allow its nobility to usurp common sense, and let its adherence to existing methodology threaten to derail research into their new prototype weapons. We see another aspect of Manticore here that has already appeared occasionally, and it's an unfortunate extension of their society. In this novel, we learn that our favorite star kingdom is a year behind Grayson in building the new classes of LAC and missile carriers. We continue to watch as political ties and family connections lead to promotions of complete imbeciles who would rather die in a blaze of vainglory, than escape an unwinnable situation. We watch impotently as one idiotic decision after another puts them at a continuing disadvantage in the war.<br /><br />And none of this even approaches the effort Honor puts into securing the escape from Haven of not just her crew, but nearly half a million refugees stranded there over the course of last few decades of Haven's offensives. It's a very near thing, and the suspense in these areas was just as enticing as the space battles and political machinations. It's probably one of the strongest novels in the series thus far, because it sits at the crux of what is almost a perfect storm of opportunity as the focus of the war shifts. This is a very long read, and very little is wasted in irrelevant details; everything drives the plot forward, and there's a <i>lot</i> of plot to drive.<br /><br />That this is technically merely an interim novel while we wait for Honor to enter the fray again, makes its strengths even more unexpected and refreshing. This could have been "Honor escapes valiantly from Hades, and blows stuff up as she goes!" What we got instead were several different layers of simultaneous and decisive events critical to drive the universe forward, not just Honor's character. It's easy to see why Weber's creation has so many fans even at such a ponderous length.<br />

Way too long. *sighs* The action sequences are mostly very good, the space battles are excellent as always, but the longwinded discussions and arguments just drag on and on.<br /><br />Don't be afraid to skim, but DO make sure you skim. Some bits of the wind are important. °͜°

This is still a good book, just not quite as good as I remembered. Unlike the other entries in this series, #8 is broken into "books" which follow different storylines, one for Honor Harrington on Hades, one for Peep stories, and one for everywhere else. All of these storylines are pretty heavy-hitting; this is the entry in the Honorverse that kicks off a whole new kind of war and the body count, momentum change, and POW/escape story line are all emotionally loaded, although never sluggish. Weber's characteristic info-dumping and numbers heavy dialogue are still in evidence; however, this entry has some serious page turning tension.<br /><br />Having read all but the latest two entries, this is also the book that settles Honor Harrington into a slightly less larger-than-life role. Not that her storyline is any less incredible and odds-defying than before (fans of the series know how this book's conflict will end but it is a heck of a ride). Weber does a better job of letting the story pull back to the larger war effort and lets other characters grow in the available space (the continued growth of Alistair McKeon and Alice Truman are particularly notable).<br /><br />The major change in re-reading this entry was my impression of Alexander Hamish's character; he comes off as much less noble than when I first read this book years ago. His grief bleeding over from the events of book 7 is overdone for something he didn't have in the first place <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="27b763b9-738f-489c-b955-20cbd134d19f" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="27b763b9-738f-489c-b955-20cbd134d19f">and his willingness to engage in affairs despite his wife's pain is immature</label>.<br /><br />Overall, definitely a great entry in the Honor Harrington series with an ending that is still perhaps her finest hour. More than worth it for fans of the rest of the series.

This series is a long slog. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to read the entire series to properly appreciate it. Weber is great at inserting technical details that sound plausible. He's also good at thinking through the political milieu of the Honor Harrington universe in great detail. The only problem with this is that the reader is subject to many long pages containing conversations about the politics between various characters. This makes from some very dry and tedious chapters. The action sequences are what the reader is waiting for, but these are few and far between and we wade through hundreds of pages of exposition that sets up the final short action sequences. It's like eating a bowl of Lucky Charms that contains only three small marshmallows.

As this series goes on, the lack of an editor or any kind gets more and more obvious. Most of the later books could easily be cut by 1/3 in verbiage with no cost to the storyline. <br />Worse, the plotting gets more and more improbable. The leaders of two star nations commit to killing off 2 million of their citizens in a fit of pique is not exactly reasonable plotting.

Dve trcine knjige skoro bespotrebno i dosadno sa gomilom flesbekova i unutrasnjih razmisljanja koje idu i po nekoliko strana. Jedino je kraj donekle izgladio situaciju.<br /><br />Predugacko i dosadno tako da cak i ako ste fan serijala mozda da preskocite ovu knjigu.

Echoes of Honor picks up right about where In Enemy Hands finishes... With the aftermath of Honor Harrington's capture. <br /><br />This book takes a bit of a different tack with its internal organisation with different viewpoints alternating "books" within itself. External People's Republic, Grayson, and Manticore actions all appear together in books while Honor and her fellow Hades planet inhabitants form the other books. From memory it is an even split of three books a piece, but it worked quite well either way.<br /><br />As always my preference leans towards the Honor Harrington chapters but there were quite a few interesting Grayson and Manticore segments as well. The People's Republic interests me less because it is fairly political in large sections but there were good bits too. I enjoy Tourville and Theismen possibly because they appear to be men trying to fight for their "country" even though they know that the people running it aren't fighting for the same ideals as they are.<br /><br />The ending is quite possibly one of my favourite so far. It is Honor at her brilliant best.<br /><br />Edit: I've re-read this book a few times now, and while I stick by my previous comments, I have to make the addition that despite the size of this novel unlike the previous book in the series I didn't feel as if it was bogged down in unneeded waffle. Except, one bit on Grayson, and I think that anyone that reads the story will know the bit I mean. Though, the first time through, that was a pretty important revelation. The third and fourth? Not so much. <br /><br />The Honor sections remain one of my favourite Honor-central bits from the entire series.