The Mesan Alignment is revealed, and, for Honor Harrington and the Manticoran Star Kingdom, this means war!
Unintended Consequences
Sometimes things don’t work out exactly as planned.
The Mesan Alignment has a plan—one it’s been working on for centuries. A plan to remake the galaxy and genetically improve the human race—its way.
Until recently, things have gone pretty much as scheduled, but then the Alignment hit a minor bump in the road called the Star Empire of Manticore. So the Alignment engineered a war between the Solarian League, the biggest and most formidable interstellar power in human history. To help push things along, the Alignment launched a devastating sneak attack which destroyed the Royal Manticoran Navy’s industrial infrastructure.
And in order to undercut Manticore’s galaxy‑wide reputation as a star nation of its word, it launched Operation Janus—a false‑flag covert operation to encourage rebellions it knows will fail by promising Manticoran support. The twin purposes are to harden Solarian determination to destroy the Star Empire once and for all, and to devastate the Star Empire’s reputation with the rest of the galaxy.
But even the best laid plans can have unintended consequences, and one of those consequences in this case may just be a new dawn of freedom for oppressed star nations everywhere.
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We miss Jim BaenDavid Weber writes a cracking good story--you only have to read the first few Harrington books, or the first few Safehold books, or the first few Empire of Man books... Do you see where I'm going with this?
Somewhere along the way, about the time Jim died, David lost his ability to move a plot forward. All three series got bogged down (EoM suffers the least from this) and have slowly dissolved into endless dives into minutia, re-telling of other points of view, and an apparent inability to move ahead.
My suspicion is that Jim was helping keep David on track. Now that Davis is a famous author, whoever is doing the editing at Baen is no longer willing (or able?) to stand up to him and compel him to stick to the plot. So we get meandering plots that seem to rehash events from six different points of view, dozens of pages per battle of naval trivia, and not much happening.
I enjoyed EoM right to the end. I gave up on Safehold after four books. I will likely try one more Harrington book. But if the next one turns out like the last one, I'm done.Posted on
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Storm from the shadowsSee author's note from Storm from the Shadow. History is messy, always elusive.
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Better second time aroundI have to admit, first time I read this I felt ripped off by too much seeming cut and paste from earlier books. Then I re-read the entire series with this book following closely behind earlier books. It turned out to be a much better story (IMO) when read that way. There is certainly overlap with three story arcs proceeding along at the same time. When I read it alone, I thought it was mostly overlap, but when read in time sequence, there was much more detail in the events in this story arc with much less perceived overlap from the other two story arcs. I'm not sure if there is any other way to cover such a huge spacial area, and still allow for (somewhat) stand alone books without some overlap between arcs. Mr. Weber has not set himself up an easy task. Reading it again, I liked and enjoyed it, and felt it was well worth the time involved in reading it.
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No more eARC'sI have to admit, i was really antsy getting this eArc, bought directly on the day it was sold...
What shall I say... i do regret paying the 15$ for it, I was hoping for a movement in the plot, seeing how the Sollies are to react and such, what did i get? The same Plots about Mesan induced uprisings all over the shell. The had been fleshed up yeah but there was really nothing new. It was especially horrible on some planetes where Mr. Weber was putting in huge amounts of czech or polish loanwords, didn't really improved the readabillity.
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Ties up lots of loose ends
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Done after ch2Huge Honor Harrington fan, but after skipping 4-5 paragraphs at a time by the end of chapter 2, I just have to stop. It's just a boring slog of words that mean nothing.
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SlowMany people have complained that this is a re-hash of events told in other books. This is a story thread that is simultaneous with events in other books, but the events are new, and add to the picture of what is happening across the Verge. There is also insight into the machinations of the Alignment.
It does drag out, and I am not certain how necessary all of the minutiae are to the development of the story lines. The middle of the book drags. It seems to want to be a story about Firebrand, but then it goes in a different direction in about the last third.
At least we got to see *some* space action at the end. That made it worth the effort to push through to the finish. I hope we get to see more of that in upcoming books in this series. Scotty and Harkness back in action!Posted on
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Same story and new movement forward for story.
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poor writing
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