A Pious Man: honor harrington

Showing posts with label honor harrington. Show all posts

Friday, January 30, 2015

Author Review: David Weber. FREE BOOKS.

We're back with another author review. Remember, Baen books has a marketing gimmick. The theory is that if they allow books out for free online, it will prompt people to buy the books in real life. Below, I have assembled not only the lists of series and novels for each author, but also the link to each author's current novel series. You can download ANY of the books listed below.

David Weber writes so many series in so many worlds .... to quote him directly, he said that he wished he could break off parts of his personality so that they could write individual series; except that with his luck, they would spawn new spinoffs within those series, creating entire new storylines.

The most notable of his works is his Honor Harrington series-- a female space naval officer, usually worrying about 100-to-1 odds. Imagine the Napoleonic War done in space.

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/17-StormfromtheShadowsCD/StormfromtheShadowsCD/

The Stars At War: giant insects with spaceships eat planets whole .... you know how hard it is to kill a cockroach? Add an interstellar armada, and there's not enough Raid in the galaxy to deal with them.

Stand Alone Books:

Empire from the Ashes---- What do you mean our moon has been replaced by a spaceship?

The Apocalypse Troll --- the lone survivor of a fleet from a hundred years in the future fell to earth in pursuit of a life pod that has a world-killing alien on board. They both fell through time and space... and now she has to kill it with allies in the 20th century. Assuming it doesn't kill everyone first.

The Excalibur Alternative-- humans make great mercenary soldiers... even if they are from the 16th century, abducted by aliens, and pressed into service.

In Fury Born--After 3,000 years of slumber, a Greek Fury stirs, awakened by a human whose own fury calls...

---------------------------------

His honor Harrington series is Horatio Hornblower meets Star Wars. I have it in recommended order of reading.

On Basilisk Station-- what do you do when you're a shiny new Captain who has to deal with a hostile crew, rioting civilians, an evil empire next door who wants your sector, and, oh, yeah, you've been left by yourself in the middle of the busiest sector in the galaxy with only one ship? Improvise.

The Honor of the Queen-- Honor Harrington is a female captain trying to save a world of semi-Mormons who think she's inferior, and has to defend them against an enemy of religious zealots who make her “allies” look tame.

The Short Victorious War --- Robert S. Pierre and his revolutionaries have created the People's Republic of Haven. Now it's time to flex their muscles.

Field of Dishonor -- What do you do when the people who are trying to kill you are the people in charge of the war you're fighting?

Flag in Exile

Honor Among Enemies

In Enemy Hands

Echoes of Honor

Ashes of Victory

War of Honor

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Honorverse Short story collection – it will explain a few things from the books here and there

More than Honor-- I'd recommend only the first story in this one. Seriously.

Worlds of Honor--- I suggest only the Weber stories here.

Changer of Worlds-- now things get interesting.

The Service of the Sword--- Even better.

Crown of Slaves – Takes two sets of characters from Changer of Worlds and Service of the Sword and brings them together against a common enemy.

Shadow of Saganami: Honor's graduating class from officer training has there own ship... and their own problems.

At All Costs--- Honor has lost an eye and an arm leading her Majesty's Navy... much like Admiral Nelson... and this is Trafalgar.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Monday, February 20, 2012

Author Review: David Weber. FREE BOOKS.

http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/17-StormfromtheShadowsCD/StormfromtheShadowsCD/

Stand Alone Books:

Empire from the Ashes---- What do you mean our moon has been replaced by a spaceship?

The Excalibur Alternative-- humans make great mercenary soldiers... even if they are from the 16th century, abducted by aliens, and pressed into service.

In Fury Born--After 3,000 years of slumber, a Greek Fury stirs, awakened by a human whose own fury calls...

---------------------------------

His honor Harrington series is Horatio Hornblower meets Star Wars. I have it in recommended order of reading.

The Short Victorious War --- Robert S. Pierre and his revolutionaries have created the People's Republic of Haven. Now it's time to flex their muscles.

Field of Dishonor -- What do you do when the people who are trying to kill you are the people in charge of the war you're fighting?

Flag in Exile

Honor Among Enemies

In Enemy Hands

Echoes of Honor

Ashes of Victory

War of Honor

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Honorverse Short story collection – it will explain a few things from the books here and there

More than Honor-- I'd recommend only the first story in this one. Seriously.

Worlds of Honor--- I suggest only the Weber stories here.

Changer of Worlds-- now things get interesting.

The Service of the Sword--- Even better.

Crown of Slaves – Takes two sets of characters from Changer of Worlds and Service of the Sword and brings them together against a common enemy.

Shadow of Saganami: Honor's graduating class from officer training has there own ship... and their own problems.

At All Costs--- Honor has lost an eye and an arm leading her Majesty's Navy... much like Admiral Nelson... and this is Trafalgar.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Someone has jumped the shark: women and military scifi.

Just when I thought I ran out of material, someone on the internet goes and says something unbelievably stupid.

I don't know who set off one of the people at Tor books, but a recent blog focused on how women don't get a fair shake in military science fiction. Toward this end, they make a rather passing mention to David Weber's Honor Harrington, damning her with the faintest of praise. They they follow it up with an attack on John Ringo, Tom Kratman, and David Drake, crying horror! Horror! at how women are treated in those novels.

Ahem ....

I'll start small, mostly by throwing David Drake under a bus. I've read some his stories, I found them as dry as dust. It could just be me, and my family, and my friends.

Now, onto some books I do know very well: those of Tom Kratman, John Ringo and David Weber.

While the Tor blogger does acknowledge that Weber's Honor Harrington is a good female character, an equal to the male characters around her, it immediate turns into a backhanded compliment, complaining that Honor didn't get laid for the first half-dozen novels -- even though it was pointed out in book one that Honor was sexually assaulted at the naval academy (well, "nearly" assaulted ... she completely trashed her attacker into next Tuesday. It was awesome). I'm sorry, but the rape victims I've read of and those I know personally (nine and counting) go one of two ways, nymphomania, or celibacy ... would the Tor blog have preferred nymphomania?

Not to mention that the article focuses on Honor Harrington as if she were the only woman in the entire "Honorverse" series -- ignoring, for instance, that the heads of state of the major governments are both women. And (for the brief racial whining they did), the article seems to gloss over the fact that the ruling family of Honor Harrington's government is all black. One wonders if the blogger even read the Honor Harrington novels.

Anyway, after bitching about Honor Harrington's lack of a sex life, they then go into how John Ringo's character Ghost treats women like sex objects.

I'm sorry, but who goes into a rant about over-sexualizing women after complaining that a woman lead isn't sexualized enough? You know, aside from hypocrites.

Not to mention one tiny little detail ... Ghost, the novel, isn't even science fiction!

The article jumps the shark altogether at this point, in reference to Ringo and Kratman.

Their female characters tend to suffer unpleasant fates, or to be relegated to
backwaters of the narrative, and the old canard of “no women in the special
infantry” is once again in play

At this point, I know from personal experience that this writer hasn't read Kratman and Ringo. John Ringo has written over 33 novels in the last dozen years. The blogger focused on one.

In the category of "unpleasant fates," when people die in military science fiction, they don't die well. Going through Ringo's Gone with the Wind-sized epic of The Posleen Wars, most of the main characters who die, die horrible, painful deaths -- they are either vaporized, eaten alive, or blown to pieces. There is no good way to die in a John Ringo novel. This guy kills off so many people per book, he has contests dedicated to being a red shirt in his novels.

In Tom Kratman's series of A Desert Called Peace, et al, the women are essential to the novels: at first, by keeping our main characters sane (which is a job in itself at the best of times,) and, later, serving as front line troops. As the series progresses, there are no civilians in war zones -- culminating in The Amazon Legion, which is all about women soldiers.

And, looking at John Ringo's post-Posleen War novels, the Cally series, revolves solely around a female special forces assassin -- so much for "no women in the special infantry" whine-ery. Even before that, if one were to read the joint Kratman-Ringo venture Yellow Eyes, one of the main fronts of the Posleen war in Latin America is held by -- wait for it -- a female commander of an artillery unit. The other major lead: the female artificial intelligence of a battleship (artillery barrage to the tune of O Fortuna, for the win!).

Continuing through the article, the author continues to screw up by focusing exclusively on John Ringo's non-scifi work, his Ghost novel. And, even then, she shows her ignorance of the subject by focusing on the first book -- which even I criticized for having way too much sex -- and the point of the first book is in the opening quote: "We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us." Ringo went out and invented the roughest person he could create. And, had this blog author read the rest of the Ghost novels, she would see that, not only did the main character's initial crude proclivities disappear over time, she would have also seen that women become major front-line military troopers.

And, of course, the blogger skips over Ringo's Princess of Wands, which has a kick-ass female lead who fights demons that would make Buffy go "Aw crud." And there's Ringo's Into the Looking Glass series, in which the spaceship, and most of their missions, is mostly held together by the primary female lead, Miriam ... who appears to be based off of Ringo's own girlfriend. (Whom I met. She was cute. And wry. And witty. And I can see what Ringo sees in her ... though the dye-blue hair is distracting.)

And Ringo, as in Kratman, even the women leads who are not front-line troopers, or major political and military tacticians, they become instrumental in keeping our heroes from falling to the dark side (or, in some cases, deeper into the dark side).

This article was petty, starting with "Well, there's Honor Harrington, but she didn't get laid for a long time" -- if I were to judge my novels by how fast my female leads got laid, I'd go into writing erotica, thank you.

At the end of the day, the most interesting part of the entire article is this: most of the books attacked have something interesting in common. Ringo and Kratman work for Baen books. The Honor Harrington novels? Published by Baen books. The David Drake series mentioned in the article? Baen books. The books praised in the article? All Tor books ... I'm shocked, shocked I say.

Not to mention one other tiny detail .... if this were a fair, open and honest look at military science fiction as a genre, there is one, gigantic, glaring omission. A tv show called Babylon 5.

But J. Michael Straczynski has never worked for Baen, so I guess it's too unimportant to examine. So are the dozens of other genre writers out there. But if they don't work for Baen, I suppose it doesn't matter.

Don't get me wrong. I like Tor. I read their authors all the time. There's a reason I found this article -- because I'm on the Tor newsletter. But this was a hatchet job from start to finish; the sad thing is, the blogger isn't even listed as a Tor employee, but a graduate student in Ireland, and a sometimes reviewer. Which is depressing -- if the blogger is going to pretend to know about what is being written, you'd assume that reading the books would be a requirement.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Author Review: The Wrath of Zahn

Timothy Zahn will always be marked as the man who resurrected the Star Wars series from it's unholy grave. He wrote three books in the early 1990s, and the Star Wars book series was born.

Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, Vol. 1)

Starting with Heir to the Empire, it was one of the few modern novels at the time I had encountered protagonists who thought. Not just a passing thought, covered in Italics, but whole paragraphs of tactical thought and maneuvering. And sometimes for entire pages. Shootouts in space and in infantry tactics had become chess games with lasers and missiles. And the antagonist of the piece was brilliant; the conversations between him and his side kick looked like Sherlock Holmes and Watson with a tactical manual.

Though, to be honest, Zahn is the only person in the Star Wars world I'll read ever again. There are only so many books about X-Wing pilots, and trashing the universe before it gets tiresome. With Zahn, All of his books are well thought out, and no one is stupid. There are some cases you can probably say that everyone thinks too much, but a smart book is never a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned. Every time George Lucas entered into the world of Star Wars, Zahn followed, and improved it.

Zahn created a planet called Coruscant -- which appeared in the first "prequel" movie. Lucas made droids with little shields, Zahn came up with a way to out-maneuver them. Lucas went back in time, Zahn went back in time, and, while Zahn couldn't make Anakin Skywalker interesting, everyone else around him was.

And, in true George Lucas fashion, he took everything that Zahn created, and promptly ruined it ... read the most recent Star Wars novels, and you'll see why. Zahn and an author named Michael J. Stackpole had come up with a concept to expand the Star Wars novels into a kind of Next Generation series ...

It went ahead without Zahn.

Let's just say that there's a reason Zahn's latest Star Wars novel is set in the past, before the first and second movies. I would rather read his take on the rise of the most brilliant tactical leader the bad guys ever had, than read one more petty, pedantic, grim novel set around Lucas's regular Star Wars novels. It also includes the funniest group of rogue stormtroopers you've ever seen, and possibly the only ones who have the ability to shoot straight.

What I've learned from Timothy Zahn

There's really only one thing I've learned from Zahn -- never assume your audience is stupid. If you're willing to explain everything, the audience will follow you, as long as your story is engaging.

As some beta readers of A Pius Man can tell you, I rely on the audience's intelligence a lot ... some might say too much. But, I figure any editor will tell me when I lose them.

Other works by Zahn

At the start of Zahn's career, he started a series called Blackcollar. Twenty years after Earth loses to an invading alien race, the chemically enhanced guerrilla soldiers made to fight that war have come out of retirement ... while not his best series, you can see the seeds of everything that Zahn would become.

And by "Not his Best" I mean that the characters are not very engaging. They are, for the most part, plot vehicles. Ironically, the most interesting character in the entire series was a human commander working for the aliens. But, the plot is intricate, the maneuvering and the strategy is brilliant. Basically, the quality of the plot and the characters is on par with, say, Mission: Impossible.

There are only two books, but they're both fun little reads.

The Cobra Trilogy (Baen Books Megabooks)

The Cobra Trilogy, one of his later series, was a multi-generational epic involving and examination of guerrilla warfare, high-tech implants, and what do you do when soldiers come home from battle.

The premise: humanity is struggling with a war against an alien race called the Troft. The best idea to counter the Troft: Cobras; soldiers who are cybernetically enhanced with micro-hydrolics in their joints, metal laminae over their bones, and weapons systems implanted in their bodies.

But when the war is over and the Cobras come home, what happens next? What does one do with a person whose response to a near collision with a car is to shoot out the tires with weapons in their little fingers?

You send them to another end of the galaxy, and let them become frontiersmen.

At the end of the day, this becomes a solid family saga of three generations as they go from warrior, to statesmen, back to warriors.

I actually wonder what Zahn's going to do now that he's starting a new trilogy... which is not a multi-generational epic, but takes place over a single month.

Sometimes, old soldiers don't have the option of quietly fading away. Sometimes, it's time to start hunting again...

Anyway, next book....

Angelmass was an interesting one-shot....

A nebula is the source of "angels," small molecules that radiate positive energy. They make politicians truthful, they make criminals honest. Angels remove people's fear ....

But to everything there is a polar opposite. By removing "angel" molecules from the nebula, what dark forces are they breeding within?

And, by books end, it's up to two tramp freighter Captains, a thief, and a rogue politician who have to save the entire planet, and possibly the galaxy, from a creature that can eat the sun....

As I said, it was a fun one-shot.

In another end of the Zahn Galaxy is the Quadrail series. The intergalactic train system is run by a mysterious race called the Spiders. No one knows anything about them and there's a good reason for that -- they're actually a front for an older species, one with a hidden agenda, and a secret so deadly that the entire universe really is at stake. A secret army has been gathering in the shadows for decades, leading into a cold war that's about to warm up.

It's the Third Lynx, but the

second book... got it?

Into this particular mess is thrust one Frank Compton. Like Burn Notice's Michael Weston, he's a spy who's been burned by political superiors who have decided that he's too inconvenient to have in government employ. When a billionaire's messenger drops dead on Frank's doorstop, in perfect Mickey Spillane fashion, he has to hop a train in short order.

And in doing so, he's going to be sucked into the biggest cat and mouse game this side of the pod people ... or maybe fighting the Flood in Halo.

This book has all the trademarks of a Zahn novel -- character who think, plan, the overthink and over plan.

And then all plans are shot to hell upon first contact with the enemy, and it's time to run.

So, they're fun....

A bonus for those of you who understand where the title of the blog was stolen from:

A Pious Man

Friday, January 30, 2015

Author Review: David Weber. FREE BOOKS.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Top ten Pius Blog posts, March 2014: Politics, sex, comic books, music.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Author Review: David Weber. FREE BOOKS.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Someone has jumped the shark: women and military scifi.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Author Review: The Wrath of Zahn

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