Unraveling the Honorverse

[selenite0]

I just finished reading David Weber's At All Costs. Sigh. I've been liking this series less as Honor moves up in rank. The last one I'll go back and re-read is Honor Among Enemies, where she was busted back to being a ship captain. But what I really hate about AAC is watching Weber trash the assumptions the entire series was built on.

We've had lots of books where the plot was driven by the need to capture such-and-such star to improve strategic positions for a later offensive. But AAC made it clear that there's no point at all to holding minor star systems. You don't need them for logistical support since your ships can go all the way across the PRH without stopping. You can't defend your borders with them because the enemy can just waft past with no fear of detection. So establishing an outpost just means putting a few of your units out where they can be wiped out by a larger enemy unit. Why bother?

Once you start following that logic chain the only sensible move is to keep your fleet concentrated and fight a great decisive battle with the enemy before he starts raiding your valuable worlds. Any defensive diversion is just asking an enemy who does take the offensive to defeat you in detail. So let's go back to Short Victorious War. There was no point in the Peeps trying to take Hancock Station or for the Manties to defend it. There's only two worthwhile targets—Manticore and the Manticoran fleet. Knowing that the Manties should've stayed concentrated.

If the Peeps are going to have a war they need to strike the main fleet or they're just wasting time. The traditional solution is the massive surprise attack, but this could leave a few Mantie ships scattered about wanting revenge. They might just want to have their ambassador deliver an invitation to the palace:

The People's Republic of Haven invites
the Royal Manticoran Navy
to a battle for control of the system
at the Manticore Junction
April 20th, 1982 PD

Surrenders only
The SVW fleet strength data gives the two sides a rough balance in "Ships of the Wall". Of course, this doesn't count those 400+ "useless" battleships the Havenites have been collecting. If they come along--and there's no point to using them for defending rear areas--it triples the PRH's capital ship strength. The BBs aren't useful in the "wall of battle" but let's think what they could do. They're faster than any dreadnought so they can spread out to surround the Mantie wall, forming a "dome of battle." The Mantie battlecruisers would try to block that, but they're 1/5th the size of a BB, so it'd just be "try." BB flotillas would form wall formations perpendicular to the main walls and maneuver to the edges of the Mantie wall of battle. Once the dome formed whichever way the Mantie wall turned it would have a bunch of BBs in position for throat and kilt shots. That's going to be a decisive battle, especially by the standards of 1982 PD.

So now whenever I reread any of the Honor books that touch on the strategy of the war I'm going to remember how AAC shows that both sides are completely wasting their time by dinking around with systems that have no value to the war.

Comments

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

I, too, weep for what was once Honor Harrington. A great, ripping yarn turned into an RPG manual -- that's what I took away from ASHES OF VICTORY. I'm done with the series. Why?

1. Too much furry treecat nonsense. It's like reading fanfic from Furrycon. Sign language? WTF?

2. Honor has become Supergirl. She's a Countess, an Admiral, a Steadholder, a Treecat Selectee, tall, good-looking, and a genius. She even owns her own baseball team. I mean, nigga PLEASE.

3. Aforementioned baseball team. Too cute.

4. Napoleonic-era battles between ships of the line/wall (= exciting) have become modern-era contests to see which side can put more missiles in the air/space (=dull). Plus they have space fighters now. I HATE space fighters.

5. Dopey love story. I love romance as much as the next guy, but the whole Honor/White Haven thing is just tired.

6. Grayson politics. Like, who cares?

7. "Klingon Syndrome". The "evil" PRH characters have become more interesting than the "good" Manties. Why? Because they're fallible humans, not genetic superbeings. BORING.

8. Data dumps. Weber has forgotten how to write narative. Instead, we get inerminable Ayn-Rand-like speeches, "Suddenly, Honor/Nimitz/Whomever realized the truth: that...", historical overviews, and other lengthy visits to Exposition City. Newsflash to Mr. W: H. Beam Piper built a whole universe in one 128-page book (SPACE VIKING) without ANY EXPOSITORY HISTORICAL BACKGROUND WHATSOEVER -- and it's still fun to read fortysomeodd years later. Somebody quick, get an editor and a red pencil!

9. Historical pastiche: sure, I smiled at Rob S. Pierre along with everyone else, but for the love of Mike can we have Napoleon already?

10. Treecats. Again. What was once an amusing side aspect of the HH series has become a cutesified monstrosity. KILL ALL TREECATS -- or at least put 'em back they way they were.

I'll check AAO out from the library and skim it, but the books have become essentially unreadable in my opinion, so I doubt I'll do more than that.

[dbroussa.livejournal.com]

1. Definately!
2. My biggest beef with the series honestly is that Honor in effect never makes a mistake. Early in the series she won battles against overwhleming odds because she was too tenacious to admit defeat and stayed the course no matter the cost. Then it became a combo of that and some new ways to use old tech (pods, which makes one wonder why NO ONE every thought of that idea), and then it because all new tech. Even when Honor is cought dead to rights and fully flat footed, she manages to escape (unless of course it was to further the metaplot a la In Enemy Hands). When what made Honor amazing was her tenacity she was an interesting character...when it became that she was an empathic geenie who was smarter then 99.999% of all the Humans in the Galaxy...she is much less interesting.
4. Ugh, if I have to read one more battle that goes like...17,000 missles raced towards their targets, counter missles intercepted half of them, and the laser clusters destroyed another 50% of the remaining. 4,000 of the missles were fooled by the insanely brilliant Mantie ECM so vastly superior to the backwards Peeps who had to counter the Mantie brilliance with quantity, but that still left 45 HUNDRED missles that reached detonation range and even though most of them wasted their bomb pumped X-rays on the impentetrable wedges of the Mantie fleet hundred did not and those blasted into the Mantie fleet only to encounter the newest Mantie technology...the ship warper that actually blinked the Manticoran Superdreadnaughts into a pocket universe where the lasers did them no harm, and in fact regenerated them so that they returned more powerful then before!
5. I liked it more after this book then before. Although it seemed that love was one place where Honor was not a genius.
6. Why are they so important? They are one small star system...yet they produce almost as much military force as Manticore? huh?
7. Dude, the Peeps are so much more enjoyable then the Manties. I root for them now in almost every enagement.
8. Ugh.
9. I think he has abandoned that line now...but I might be wrong.
10. One case where I actually advocate Genocide...then again it would be cool to turn them into villans that are manipulating the Manties.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

it would be cool to turn them into villans that are manipulating the Manties.

Hmmm. Eliminate the Manticorans, allowing the treecats to catch up technologically without any close observers? Not a bad plan. And a treecat exerting mind control is about the only way to justify the continuation of the war at this point.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

My copy still hasn't arrived from Amazon yet, so can't comment. However it seems to me two things are going on:

1) In the earlier books, technology had been stasified for a while, only progressing in small amounts. Later books show a very sharp spike in technological development, and I susoect that tactics and strategy are still lagging behind the technological curve. Think WW I.

2) Ever since RTS forced Weber to use voice software to write, his books have become one data dump after another. Someone really needs to assign an editor to him full-time to edit while in progress.

[dekarch.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. My review of it was less detailed, but about as positive.

Bleargh.

I'm giving Weber one, count 'em, one more chance. I've got Windrider's Oath in my too-read pile.

[technomom]

Having read a bunch of stuff that Weber wrote or co-wrote when I ran out of the initial spate of HH books back when I "discovered" them (just before "A Short, Victorious, War" I believe), I quickly realized that he shared Heinlein's predilection for the superman hero. Somehow, his protaganists are genigineered supermen, or have been given upgrades so that they have extra advantages. Of course, some of them are just the, "Aw, shucks, it's just always been that way" guys. But they don't have human weaknesses, as far as I can tell, and they just aren't very interesting characters, as a result.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

That's a big part of why "Honor Among Enemies" is my favorite. It gives a lot of time to the lower-decks Manticorans and the Peeps, who are all much more interesting characters than Honor.

[dbroussa.livejournal.com]

That is the conventional wisdom...but with AAC Webber throws that out the window because he points out that if you disperse your fleet you can be defeated in detail at each start system while your enemy is concentrated at your weakest point. All that, theoretically, kept each side from such actions before was the fear that the enemy would move on their home system if they denuded it too much. This left only smaller fleets to fight on the fringes for less important systems. But in the end this just made the wars last a long time and still never allowed for a final decisive strike to win the war.

[dbroussa.livejournal.com]

My two biggest complaints about AAC have to do with the outcome of the second meeting between Giscard and Honor. That just ticked me off. I do not mention it out of deference to those who have not read it.

The second beef was the actions of Tourville at the end. Argh! His actions made the entire last 1/4 of the book wasted.

You are also correct in that Webber has effectively completely changed the rules of the series just to further his plot. IT annoys me a great deal.

Thoughtful hmm.

[the-blue-fenix.livejournal.com]

This struck me as such a good point that I posted it on alt.fan.david-weber, not crediting you by name absent explicit permission to do so. Here's how it's going so far.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.books.david-weber/browse_frm/thread/49c24f17074cd1cf/d28234b5a12a210d?hl=en#d28234b5a12a210d

Re: Thoughtful hmm.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Feel free to toss a link to me in, it's a public post.

The various comments haven't changed my mind on the urgency of a Decisive Battle. The Peeps are very vulnerable to infrastructure raids since they're so spread out, but taking Manticore would not just trash their space industry, it'd cut off traffic through the Junction and allow the Peeps to bring in ground troops to destroy surface industry. The SKM's economy would be gone and a landing force with space superiority can go where it pleases on the planets. An offense like that looks like the best way to defend secondary systems to me.