Ask Veeky Forums for space opera literature

It's popular because it's Horatio Nelson IN SPACE!

But aside from that it's not a good book series at all.

What? I like reading takedowns.

There are reviews online that go through book(s) step by step and detail what went wrong.

They're ... lengthy.

rant por favor

Isn't he the one who just dictates his books, and has them printed practically without editing?

OOOH, where??

Incoming, then! May need to pause and get my thoughts together a few times.

Starting with Book 1. It broke my suspension of disbelief outright, due to the way every character and the narrative reacted to the Medusans. Sapient aliens, people. SAPIENT ALIENS, the thing we've been telling ourselves stories about since we first looked at the surface of Mars.

And everyone acted like there was nothing special or remarkable about them. Weber could've partially justified that! Are aliens common in the universe? Have enough of them been met for standard procedures to be in place? A few sentences is all it would take!

But that still doesn't explain why the system wasn't CRAWLING with academics, and probably activists as well. People exist who aren't involved in military or politics, yet aside from a couple of merchants... Weber doesn't seem to realize that those people still have an impact. Manticore society isn't that different from what we have today; he never, EVER gives an adequate reason for everyone to ignore the Medusans!

Sorry, didn't see you-- I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me if he did that NOW, it's popular and he's popular, but he started writing in the early nineties, if not earlier.

Sounds hideous. Thanks for the recap, I'll avoid this shitpile. Dodged a bullet there, a friend was recommending this to me.

Sometimes Veeky Forums can recommend good things. Like Legend of the Galactic Heroes. OP should read Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

And honestly, once you get past the sheer absurdity of his treatment of aliens, possibly his biggest world building issue is ignoring everyone who's not in politics or military. It makes his societies less believable.

On a more technical standpoint-- he recycles descriptions. I don't mean that he brings up the same description every book-- he describes things the same way *from the perspectives of completely different characters*!

For example, Honor's "soprano" voice. It's not a great word choice in general, since not every reader will be able to relate to it, but he has every CHARACTER think of Honor's voice that way. Dude! No! Most of these people are not opera enthusiasts! (Or if they are... give you cast some more diverse interest, please.)

(How do I italicize on this thing, anyway?)

Anyway, Weber's characters don't all sound *identical*, but I don't think he's great at villains-- whathisface, Burgess? in book 5, sounded almost identical to Pavel Young in his perspective intro. (Fortunately he diverged a little afterwards, but with Young finally gone, he should have sounded COMPLETELY different-- meet the NEW villain!)

And I need to rant about my one pet peeve-- Weber CANNOT write visual descriptions. They are TERRIBLE, with the sole, weird exception of Honor's first Grayson dress. I really wonder if he had a reference picture or something. I'm a visually oriented person, so his flat-out *contradictory* factoids about Honor's facial structure drive me NUTS.

Some of the other technical problems are wrapped up in further worldbuilding problems-- basically, Weber just wants to write painfully detailed space combat porn that he's put so much effort into working out scientifically.

He obviously *doesn't* want to deal with the realities of broken bones, and so uses "quick heal compounds" that conveniently-- and, as far as I can tell, *impossibly*-- speed up healing of any and all injuries. Sounds like medigel from Mass Effect, honestly-- and while I've heard good ad bad things about that series, I've never actually heard it praised for *realism*.

It's a handwave, it's an *obvious* hand wave in a series that REFUSES to handwave any aspect of space travel, and it's a just plain bad hand wave given the rest of the setting.

Don't forget how soldiers are always purehearted and wonderful (except one guy) and civilians who aren't veterans or working for the military are idiots.

Now, Book 4 might deserve a post all to itself, the bizarre thing. It has one of the most effective scenes I've read in the series-- the one where Honor comes into the bar targeting the assassin.

Other than that... what the heck was wrong with the PACING? It was bizarrely bad. I got a few pages from the end and started seriously wondering if Weber meant to drag the entire plot out for *another book*.

Aaaaand... leading into the problems with angst and Sympathetic Sues. Now, I just don't *do* angst-- obviously SOME people like it since it sells so darn well, but it bugs the crap outta me!

Huh? How far into the series did you read? 'Cause there've been some VILE military personnel around, or are you not counting Navy?

"Bio of a Space Tyrant"

Go on.

Enjoy the main character. Enjoy his name. "Hope Hubris" . Srsly

Not in latin or some other language for those words, but as is?

Fucking yes. As is. Hope Hubris, the Tyrant of Jupiter. Holy shit.

Sooo, since I don't do angst but was hoping the books would get better, I trained myself to ignore Honor's angst sessions (more on those later). Book 4, something finally happens that DEFINITELY warrants a severe emotional reaction... and I couldn't get into Honor's grief, because it was just a stronger episode of the same stuff she'd done every book.

Now, Honor is Weber's pet, yeah, not arguing there, but as it happens, by the time I'd got to her I'd *already* read a much, MUCH worse Author's Pet/Sympathetic Sue... in a book which seems to be getting universal high praise, but which I found so bad I didn't even get a *quarter of the way in*!

Which book, you ask? "The Way of Kings". Guy in the second chapter whose name starts with K, I don't have my (free) copy on hand to look it up. Sanderson blatantly, BLATANTLY wants you to feel sorry for this guy, everything he touches goes wrong, don't you feel bad for him? NO I DON'T, I WANT HIM TO SHUT UP AND DIE!!! I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT KID YOU BAITED ME WITH AND KILLED OFF, DARN IT!

Seriously. I've read six and a half books of Weber's writing. Sanderson's? I couldn't finish the *third. chapter*. But that's another rant!

If the absurdity of his name is not addressed by the characters, I will be disappointed.

Be disappointed then.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant

I got four or five books in. Aside from Pavel Young and the evil religious zealots, every soldier is portrayed as awesome, loyal, and intelligent.

>actually reading Honor Harrington

You got trolled, user.

Baaack to Honor now... yeah, the surprise gunslinging was bad. We at least saw her learning some Grayson swordplay.

Aside from that... Honor's self-image issues highlight more worldbuilding problems. Manticoran society is *supposed* to be more equal and enlightened than our own, fine, I'd like that... explain to me *how*, exactly, Honor ended up with such severe self-esteem issues, and explain to me *why*, exactly, she never reported Pavel Young at the academy.

Now, I'm not saying either is impossible! But if society is so much better, neither is *probable*. It could just be Honor-- I'd accept that if it were SHOWN-- but Weber never shows us any such explanation. He just treats both things and their related phenomena like they're normal... which they *wouldn't be*, in the society he TELLS us this is.

*Show, don't tell!* And yanno, given how Honor reacts more aggressively in other people's defense than her own, she should realize that premeditated rape is frequently *serial* behavior. But as far as I recall, she NEVER thinks about the fact that Young just moved on to easier prey. And that's a really bad oversight.

>reading sci-fi not written by a guy named Wolfe, Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein or Burroughs
You dun goofed OP.

>Piers Anthony
Oh, the guy who wrote that series that was just a bunch of shitty puns? The one where seeing a woman's underwear makes you faint? The one where, in every book, one of the characters would have to ride a female centaur and grab her by the tits? Normally in front of their mother?
Please, Hope Hubris is mild for that guy.

Oh, you stopped right before the only (mostly) good one. There's a conspiracy of evil space sailors in Honor's crew in that one who go up to attempted murder.

>Baaack to Honor now... yeah, the surprise gunslinging was bad. We at least saw her learning some Grayson swordplay.
Be fair, they do show her training for two weeks. Two weeks of training vs the guy who's spent decades practicing, but the training is there.

I meant book 6, darn it me.

As much as two weeks? Huh. I think the weird pacing must have thrown me off. Okay, since her kinesthesia *had* been brought up well before that, it's *slightly* less of an asspull.

Wasn't the entire reason they ignored the Medusans because of laws and because they were primitive?

No, the translations are awkward.

I read everything up to Oyster Bay and I don't remember this plot at all.

Read this instead.

Or if you want to see what Weber was like before he was bad, read Empire From the Ashes books 1 and 2.

Horacio Hornblower, #1 nigga in the navy.

Also his name sounds like a gay porn title.

That is NOT what I meant. Sure there were laws to protect them; that's good! But NO ONE was INTERESTED in the Medusans, even out of IDLE CURIOSITY (except for unscrupulous merchants!). As I said, Weber COULD have hand waved it-- if aliens were as common as in Star Trek, *and the narrative made that clear*, I wouldn't have batted an eye.

But he never mentioned any such thing-- the Medusans are the ONLY species well-known to be sapient that are mentioned in that book. There should have been SCIENTISTS there, indeed there should probably have been scientists trying to smuggle themselves in-- and ACTIVISTS. My gosh the activists. At least three different factions of them to boot, some of them genuinely conscientious but some of them forever getting underfoot.

See, you could probably get a lot of story conflict and red herrings out of this! But noooo.

Man, this bitch session is cringey as fuck.

It was a sideplot in the book with the Q-ships. The conspirators wanted to desert and figured they could disappear better in Silesian space. They might even have gotten away with it if the ringleader hadn't been a single-minded scumbag of a bully who couldn't let the *slightest* perceived slight go by.

... Weber went a little overboard with the sideplot of the bully's main target getting revenge. Like a sort of mini-Sue.

Lost fleet has the worst characterizations and mary sue's you will ever read. Seriosly, that shit was painful. World building is pretty flat too. I still read quite a few of them. Why? Why the hell did i do that you ask? Because in my opinion it had just about the best space combat of any book i have ever read. Sure some of it was a bit sketch, but rather than just hand waving physics out of existence entirely the author actually made a good stab at accommodating it. I'm warning you now it isnt a very good book series. You probably shouldn't read it. I'm being honest. But there are some things in it that are quite good. Also, as a rule trust nothing on Veeky Forums. it's not even Veeky Forums specifically, its just 90 percent of what is on 4 chan is trolls and shit posters.

Trilogies are generally bad. Series that are more than trilogies are 99,9% bad.

If the first book is bad, the following ones are always worse.

Remember these rules of genre fiction.

I used to defend Weber.
Not as great, but as passable, and the stuff in his world cowritten by Eric Flint (better writter) is enjoyable.
But the most recent book made me stop.
Because I figured after the catching us up on the very complex backstory he'd move on to new stuff.
But he doesn't, until the very last chapter.
Hundreds of pages, and basically no new information except for extreme abouts of detail about shitty planets that we don't need to know anything more about.
I had to read more damn Russian names than I did in the Brothers Karamazov, all about a planet whose only damn purpose is to have the one space battle over.

I didn't even need to know about the planets politics, because the ships that show up have orders to engages any Soli ships they find, no matter why they were there.

I might read the next Eric Flint cowrite, because again he is a much better author, but Weber is done.

>Which book, you ask? "The Way of Kings". Guy in the second chapter whose name starts with K, I don't have my (free) copy on hand to look it up. Sanderson blatantly, BLATANTLY wants you to feel sorry for this guy, everything he touches goes wrong, don't you feel bad for him? NO I DON'T, I WANT HIM TO SHUT UP AND DIE!!! I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT KID YOU BAITED ME WITH AND KILLED OFF, DARN IT!

>Judging the quality of an entire writer based on the equivalent of episode one
Not gonna defend Honor Harrington, but you sound like a pretty awful reader OP

Oh yeah, that's where I was going-- now, one thing I DO like is the treecats. A sapient species that deliberately plays cute animal rather than making official contact-- and not out of malice-- is an intriguing concept. Throw in the telepathy and its effects on their cultural values, and I'd LOVE to see the treecats and all the implications of their behavior fully explored.

By a better, and more interested, writer than David Weber.

At least you didn't read the Northworld trilogy by David Drake. I was so mad by the end of it that I wanted to nuke Seattle.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with David Weber's writing: boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=635193

How David Weber orders a Pizza

Uh, sorry? Are you addressing the OP, or me who wrote this? And I don't understand what you mean by awful *reader*-- please elaborate?

I am going to BOLD WORDS so that YOU KNOW how I really FEEL about THINGS

Niven? Stephenson?

I'm sorry! I don't know how to italicize on this site! I normally just lurk!

... and that's capitals, not bold./pedantic

You can judge the quality of a writer by their first paragraph, sometimes even by their first sentence. Because if you don't manage the hook, the most important part of your entire novel, how the fuck will you make everything else good?

>is just so irritatingly perfect at everything and all of the interesting things happen when she's not around
It's the Harry Potter/StarWars problem. Huh.

different guy, but you're supposed to hate the guys self pity.
Things go bad for him, but every time he's whining about himself your supposed to think he's fucking up.
I know this, because multiple characters TELL him his self pity and self hatred are getting him nowhere and annoying as hell.

That's his flaw, it's an actual real flaw (because you want to slap the guy for it), and why he's not a Gary Sue. Because of his self pity and self hatred.

Your taking his internal narrative as being an honest and direct representation of the authors perspective and intent. That's not always the case.

I never got this. How can you judge a book by the very first sentence or paragraph? (coming from a guy who judges what books to buy by their cover art)

>I don't know how to italicize on this site
You don't, you fucking newfag.

Legend of Galactic Heroes user, the first and last space opera

I tried reading the honor harrington books as part of my free time while on jury duty, partly to get away from dealing with a sexual assault and child rape case and I can handily say that it was an awful novel and I was better off when I just blanked out putting puzzles together in the library game room.

Asimove can't write dialogue that's not exposition very well, and he can't write female characters outside of the short story Liar (i forgive Asimov many things because of that story).

Burroughs has really cool descriptions, but he's writting fantasy. Space fantasy, but it's Conan in space.

Herbert could drag like a motherfucker. I can deal with it because I don't mind extremely slow pacing, but his pacing is slow to "i need to skim the next 50 pages to have something fucking happen"

Heinlein writes good military fiction, but he's got a very restricted range. The best part about him is he recognizes his restrictions and works withing them.

Btw, I like all of them. They just have serious flaws.
Also, Arthur C Clarke. Philip K Dick.

Mixed you up with OP. Sorry about that, just general lingo to say "shit [x] OP"

Based on the way you're ranting, let me guess, you frequent SB/SV?

If we put this into TV terms, that's like judging the quality of Star Trek TNG by the first season, even though it didn't get better until after season 3. Or in literature terms, dropping Malazan Book of the Fallen because of the first novel, even though it is deliberately written to be obtuse until the second book.

>multiple characters TELL him his self pity and self hatred are getting him nowhere and annoying as hell.

Really? Huh. Then I guess Sanderson must've made an annoying character a little *too* annoying.

And I was hardly taking K's opinion of himself at face value-- I was going off how I *thought* the narrative was treating him. Maybe if someone had told him off at the end of that section it would've been clearer.

It's a style thing. Old school sci fi and fantasy was often serialized in magazines, was competing for space, and hammered out by the ton. If you wanted to be a success, you needed to grab first the editor, then the reader on the first page. This lead to a sort of convention among genre fiction the first line is where you present an image or an idea or even just a sparkling phrase that serves as a hook.

Okay, I could've sworn I'd seen it done, sorry.

Nope! Never SB and only very sporadically on SV.
I do, however, lurk at Das Sporking... bet you don't see many of us around here.

And Star Trek had multiple writers; that's hardly the same as a novel.

There's no such thing as a flawless story. The secret is to make a story so good people don't care about the flaws.

I've often thought this particularly applies to sci-fi movies. You make the movie entertaining enough and the same people who would rip it to shreds over continuity and plausibility will bend over backwards trying to justify all the flaws in it.

Yeah. That's actually the whole point of the character. He is an exceptionally capable person, who is smart, a decent fighter, a good leader, with magical bullshit powers only a few others get, and yet he is utterly wrapped up in how things in his life always go wrong.

The point of his character development is for him to finally figure out, and only after a bunch of people shout it directly at him, that he actually has the power to change everything going wrong with his life, has always had the capacity to make the things that go wrong not go wrong (or at least not so badly), most of what goes wrong does so because he expects the worst and so refuses to really try and prevent it, and that if he actually got his shit together he could actually turn his life around.

I get your point; and I'm not going to tell you to like the book if an annoying character feels like annoying writing; I've dumped books for less. I just wanted to point out that the things that annoy you about him are actually the point of him.

Sounds like Webber.

it's the next section where they introduce the first character who starts telling him off.
She's trying to help him, and takes a while to develop into a character. Like literally in the narrative, not because of the writing.
I can see you getting tired with him, but their introducing a lot and there isn't a non-asshole character who interacts with him in a way where they can tell him off until she comes in.

He slips, because in good fiction people's flaws aren't instantly fixed, but she keeps talking him out of that.

Now it's book 2 where he actually gets directly told of for that entire mode of behavior. By not telling him of, but having a character clearly tell him that she gets exactly what he's been going through, but she doesn't let herself fall into pity.

She's got her own flaws, but it's a good contrast to him, because she so totally evades his flaws.

You know, they made a show about Horatio Hornblower in space. It's called Star Trek.

It's breddy good.

true,
but those 4 he listed aren't in some special pantheon of being the only ones capable of doing that. He just refuses to see their flaws, and lets himself obsess over the flaws of all others.

It's treating his bias as fact. So I point out where his biases has blinded him to the flaws.

Like I said, I like all of those authors he mentioned. But they aren't gods.

Huh, OK, kind of interesting really. Still, he was hardly the only reason I stopped reading. Though I liked the assassin.

The assassin's one of my favourites; he's a surprisingly subtle take on the classic Edgelord Murderkiller. He gets an interesting arc, even if it is four books long because he only shows up every ten or so chapters and then briefly.

Actually now I think of it the main theme for most character thus far in the books is 'stop bitching about your serious problems; they are largely your fault and could actually fix your real problems if you tried hard enough'. It's cool, but it requires the major characters to be annoying to start.

But really, if you enjoy your books mostly for characters Sanderson probably won't help much. He is fantastic for worldbuilding; every book of his I've read has a world and way wildly divergent from the norm, and this series has probably the coolest. His plots are decent enough, although they mostly serve the narrative. His characters are a weak point, especially because they can be one-note until they develop into being better characters. If you aren't interested in worlds and you want character you'd be better served with someone else in the genre.

Not enough floggings or homosexual tension in Star Trek.

I read one short story set in the Honorverse. Not very well written, but I enjoyed how it started off as the sort of SF military school genre, and then got into the horrors of war a bit with descriptions of how awful it is when the bridge takes a direct hit. Iirc, one of her fellow cadets was flash-fused into his command console.
Anyway, the thing I was most disappointed in was Haven. The idea of a socialist dystopia that becomes inherently predatory due to its inability to provide for its people is kind of cool, and I would have enjoyed it if there were a few more "True Believers" in the cast who genuinely believed in the Haven dream and felt horrible that they had to do such terrible things to protect and provide for the common good. It'd be kind of a nice inversion of Star Trek's Federation.
Instead they seemed to all just be piratical jerks.

If you want to enjoy the positives of Honor Harrington with less of the bullshit Legend of the Galactic Heroes provides.

Not none of the bullshit; it still has lots. But less.

That's Weber's politics seeping through. He's not quite John Ring, but they're on the same wavelength.

The only book I liked the is first one because she's up against the wall and "Wins". Virtually everyone on her crew dies except for her, her ship is more slag than starcraft, and she walks out of the whole ordeal badly shaken by the casualties she suffered.

Unfortunately all of that gets chucked out the window in the next book.

The horrors of space warfare were interesting. People drowning in their own vomit because they can't open their helmets without explosively decompressing, having to scrap sections of the ship because people's shadows in their last moments had been flashed onto the walls and corridors making sections of the ship too disturbing to walk through etc

Yang Wen-li died for our sins.

Oh yeah. I barely remember it now. That was an interesting book but not one of my favorites.

Honestly? I would've loved it if the entire series could gut about 50% of the Manticore and Honor stuff and give a few more victories to Haven. Robespierre and St. Just and the Haven military were my favorite characters. It hurt so badly every time they lost to Manticore because God made it so.

>Thread about Mary Sues in writing
>ctrl+f "Anita Blake
>0 hits

Truly I cannot be the only who has suffered reading this series.

>Japanese science fiction
>ever
That's not even really a space opera. Half the book is space battles and fighting aliens, the other half is fighting aliens THROUGH TIME in all kinds of eras and alternate histories. It doesn't count.

Ancillary Justice is great.

Ancillary Mercy and Ancillary Sword become progressively less good until it ends up being mediiocre and predictable. Even when Sword introduced the idea that the true Radch are still around, it doesn't fucking go anywhere with it and instead focuses on... I dunno, mysteries about space stations and abusive teenage girls?

He is a good comparison, because he is ludicrously overpowered to the point it makes it hard to take the series seriously. Having a super-best commander is fine, but having one who is so much better than he easily beats the other best-of-all-history generals with inferior forces and against their explicit plans to bet him - particularly annoyingly, often completely offscreen. He only ever loses when politics makes him have to choose to lose. Compared to that, being a useless piece of shit in every other field still doesn't really do that much to make him tolerable.

I only tolerate him because it makes it cool when in a small battle he wins easily he happens to lose the logistics officer who, despite, never being mentioned, was actually the only man who made his bullshit possible and in the very next fight he is hopelessly outfought and dies weakly.

Also, Julian is worse.

I knew I saved this for a reason.

>The Ancillary series should have been called ‘Fascism Can’t Possibly Be This Cute.’ The whole trilogy is adorable.

>In the Radch everyone is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ The AIs that run the ships can control multiple human bodies, and when they get upset they have the bodies hug one another to feel better. The ships also give relationship advice to their human crewmembers, such as when it’s appropriate to sleep with your subordinates, or how to apologize properly for hurting your girlfriend’s feelings. The soldiers are constantly fussing over their officers, dressing them, bathing them, making them tea, tucking them into bed, and crying or panicking when they get separated on missions. On ships living space is cramped, so it’s also normal for the soldiers to sleep bunched up together in big heaps. Giving and receiving gifts holds vital importance, meaning everyone is constantly obsessing over tea sets, memorial pins, jewelry and clothing. Everyone wears gloves all the time, so getting to touch someone’s bare hand (or god forbid, hold it) is a huge deal.

>It creates the impression that the feudal space empire is run by anxious, insecure, perpetually feuding anime schoolgirls. On one page they say something about exterminating solar systems or putting whole planets in storage to thaw the population out as slave labor, and on the next one of the lieutenants interrupts a dinner party to give the captain news, when in reality it’s because she’s 17 years old and wanted to see if she could get any leftovers. Later she cries because she had a crush on the horticulturalist and the Fleet Captain forbid her from speaking to her. The protagonist is able to win partially because she’s a legendary badass, and partially because most of the time she seems like one of a few adults in a room full of squabbling, loveable children.

>10/10 series, would recommend

>Not enough homosexual tension in Star Trek

Awww! I'm happy to see TG recommending this. I figured the whole gender thing would make it a hard sell. Good to see you cats have taste.
Anyway, I think the author was saving up the more interesting, setting-shattering stuff for a later series. She seemed to really want to finish settle One Esk's personal story, and was more focused on that than the political situation in the latter books.
I did like the description of the Presger as humanity's predators, rather than them being simply a non-human empire, and I hope future books explore that.
I also really, really hope they aren't basically Doctor Who-bait like their human translators are.

FPBP. user beat me to it

And the first three are generally considered the BEST of the series.
I gave it up after book 2 as well.

How could you not tell it was trash from jacket summary?

You should try the Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell.
Some of the best space combat I've ever read.
Granted the romance bits are sorta ham-handed and at times forced, and that accounts for about 1/3 of the series as a whole, but the rest of it is pretty damn good.

I've watched the entire 110 ep OVA, the movies, and the two additional OVAs and loved every second of it (except for that one movie).I really enjoyed the books when they were focused about the history of setting, when they actually get to the beginning of the real story it just felt so dry.

They aren't really bad per say, but I guess the series set the bar a bit high for me.

The first book was fine. WoD-esque crime drama that just so happens to have modern fantasy elements. I didn't even drop it when it started to pick up telltale romantic quirks involving vampires/werewolves. Its horribleness sneaked up on me and I didn't even open my eyes until the series protagonists turns into a literal semen demon and has to rape people to start her day like most people need their cup of coffee before work. At one point Blake straight up rapes an underage boy because of her empty semen tank making her flip out and she not only uses that as justification, everybody else just goes along with it and lets it slide.