Veeky Forums recommends Honor Harrington

>Veeky Forums recommends Honor Harrington
>Premise of Space British Empire fighting Space Regency France over incompatible economic reasons despite no one wanting war sounds promising
>Main character masters strategy, martial arts, marksmanship, archaic guns, pet ownership, swordfighting, and governorship without trying, and the only thing she fails to learn instantly is how to apply makeup
>Everyone loves her or is a villain who specifically hates women/resents women who stop him from raping them, and her big character flaw is that she hates injustice, so she punches a guy who wanted to abandon billions of people to nuclear-armed zealots
>So deep, so passionate
I really just wanted to read about exciting space battles and the difficulties of economy in an FTL-equipped space empire, but I had to stop.

I originally wanted to post about how stale this bait is, but then I realized that remembering a bait thread from a few months back down to exact words makes me an autist.

You're not wrong.

>autist

Not wrong though. As the series drags on, Weber is more and more just jerking himself off to his Mary Sue special snowflake character. I fully expect him to pull a Robert Jordan and drag the series out until he's dead.

I don't remember if it was Honor Harrington but I remember a thread on Veeky Forums about how its engineers the people who like that crap and that day Veeky Forums and Veeky Forums joined together to hate on engineers.
Good old times.

Lost Fleet, Jack Campbell

I mean that happens with any sufficiently long fantasy series.

I mean it happened with Pratchett, it happened with Tolkien, it happened with Moorcock, it DEFINITELY happened with Hickman, etc. etc. etc.

Why would engineers like it?

Your first mistake was trusting Veeky Forums
Make it your last

It sounds like you got took on the Veeky Forums Ruse Cruise.

They did the same to me with that diarrhea abortion Sword of Truth. First book was just bland and luls you into a false sense of safety. Then the shit starts. And it never fucking ends.

Sadly when it comes to actually reading books read for the love of reading Veeky Forums has always been more loving and lovable than Veeky Forums who treat books as snark points in their games of asshole superiority. Down side is that many denizens of Veeky Forums have an odd sens of humour and once one dude gets prodded in the direction of the septic tank everyone else will continue to prod for sheer mischief.

Remember that poor bastard we convinced to read the Twilight books? Truly we are damned.

For the same reason they love The Martian.
Engineering and technical knowledge saves the day all day every day.

It really did happen with Pratchett, and I never noticed how preachy his books can get when I started but eventually it really became noticeably blatant.

Snuff was just... painful in that regard.

Like the prevailing anti-bigotry narrative in the the Watch series was definitely a bit too much telling and not enough showing, but they were also really well written books.

However Snuff was just him ranting at the reader for a couple hundred pages.

Which is sad, because I genuinely think he wrote some of the best fantasy when he wasn't talking about how badass his own characters were or ranting at the reader.

Well, by the end, I think he was just really angry over his condition and it started to bleed into his works.
You can chart a pretty interesting course with his writings as things develop.
You have the lackluster Fifth Elephant where he doesn't want to admit there's a problem, but by Thud you can tell that he knows and he's not quite fully come to terms with it. I still really enjoyed the football one, although there were a few weak places for sure.
But that's mostly because the Unseen Universtiy is second only to the Watch in terms of entertainment value. Plus I like how Rincewind basically got a good end after all the bullshit he went though over the years.

First rule of Star Trek: If you want to survive, wear Blue.

>I really just wanted to read about exciting space battles and the difficulties of economy in an FTL-equipped space empire, but I had to stop.
Let me give you a nearly complete list of good books that have exciting but realistic space battles as well as the difficulties that FTL introduces.

The Forever War

There ya go. Now you don't have to read crap anymore.

Well, Snuff was written towards the end... right?

Huh, looked it up and surprised I've never even heard of the two books that followed it, one released before his passing and the other after.

>But that's mostly because the Unseen Universtiy is second only to the Watch in terms of entertainment value.

I can't be having with that.
Witches Abroad was essentially one long self aware polemic on British tourism and the nature of stories featuring grumpy women.

My favourites were one offs though, Equal Rites and Mort.
The development of the main characters, and dealing with class issues and finding your place were dealt with excellently in a fantastical setting.

Raising Steam is essentially one big book about how great trains are.

Never clicked with Witches Abroad. Loved Masquerade though.

>My favourites were one offs though, Equal Rites and Mort.

I've only read Mort in Comic Book form oddly enough. I forget which one was Equal Rites. In terms of one-offs, I loved Pyramids and Reaper Man.

If it's not Discworld were talking about Carpet People was my first Pratchett book and anyone who hasn't read it NEEDS TO. Especially if they remember fondly the Truckers/Diggers/Wings trilogy.

OP,
try this series.
only a couple of space-battles, but the ground fighting is as detailed and Ringo and his style somehow makes the series flow FANTASTICALLY.

IT'S 2 AWFUL TASTES THAT TASTE AMAZING TOGETHER!

whats more, this universe is just barely exposited(expositioned?) enough to make for some fantastic campaign settings

if it's any consolation, she was SUPPOSED TO DIE in book 12 or 13...but some author writing a book in the same universe had her make an appearance AFTER that point so weber made a different character take the death...

I could never click with Moving Pictures myself...
not sure why though.

>Raising Steam is essentially one big book about how great trains are.
but trains ARE great.

I liked the first couple, and the spinoffs with actual good authors aren't too terrible, but iirc the last three published books have been literally the same events from different viewpoints.

Weber is even more out of ideas than grrm.

Equal Rites is about the only female wizard, being the 8th child of an 8th son and her staff.

Reaper man isn't really a one off though, death is the main character in more novels.
Although Reaper Man was the best yeah.
What can the harvest hope for if not the care of the reaper man?

>but trains ARE great.

If you want to read a couple hundred pages about how true that is, read Raising Steam.

I mean Moist doesn't even get to do shit until like halfway through, because it's busy talking about how cool trains are.

>March series
You are definitely my nigger.

I got recommended a sci fi book by the internet like... 10 years ago?

Anyway, it was a book about this planet filled with all kinds of biospheres and enforced technology levels to keep things "Balanced. (The big strong species' didn't get to use advanced technology)

And the main character was this bad ass Han Solo esque woman.

But then the author started his fucking Magical Realm shit, and she was like transformed into something less than human by her captors and she was basically used as a portable cocksleeve by every single antagonist over and over again.
It was super fucking weird, and turned me off sci fi for years.

I believe it had "well of" in its name.
I just... couldn't deal with it.

indeed
a pity there will never be other series in that universe...I could get behind reading about the Satanists war on Armah or the Force Recon squads spying on the Greenpeace Commandos...

for that matter I'd play the SHIT out of that in a TTRPG.

That sounds pretty fucked up user, more than Gor even

I thought lovecraftian trains were great. But I won't argue that raising steam and snuff had begun a descent.

Like it starts out pretty okay, like this woman is exploring the universe and being badass and everything, and then suddenly it's all rape every day while she talks about how she can't fight back because of her arm and leg stumps.

It was pretty mainstream too for weird sci fi, like to the point of being translated into a wide variety of languages. (I read a translation)

Star fire series.
Insurrection, the stars at war, shiva option, in death ground, etc.

I honestly think his depiction of "The things from the dungeon dimension" from Equal Rites beat Lovecraft in terms of horrifying descriptions of weird shit from beyond the stars. (Too bad they stopped mattering after that book)

He was good at weird.

Engineers hate this shit, because it's the tech is basically just handwave bullshit and any engineer can tell you that real engineering has nothing to do with technical knowledge.

I generally refuse to accept the existence of anything he wrote after about 2007-2009, because the Alzheimer's kicked in soon afterwards. And I heavily prefer his earlier stuff.

I'll believe it as soon as my engineer friends stop shiling it and the Expanse.

Apparently you can see the precise point where he switches from typing to dictation software, as the rambling ramps up tenfold.

I remember something about needless descriptions of spaceship machinery

FUCK OFF.

SOME PEOPLE LIKE THAT KIND OF SHIT.
I did, years before I even started my engineering courses.

The stuff he's written in the same universe with Timothy Zahn is much better.

>Navy is being built
>Economy is just getting figured out
>Honor is not born yet

It's got everything Weber critics want, and it's still the Honorverse.

Some parts of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence have space battles, and also the complete time fuckery that happens when two intergalactic empires with access to time travel fight each other.

The author is absolutely terrible at writing memorable characters, though. The only one who I actually remember is Micheal Poole, and that's because of some more time-travel fuckery.

>The stuff he's written in the same universe with Timothy Zahn is much better.
MOTHERFUCKER
for a second I thought you meant the March series...

>March

Ahh, yes, the Series That Shall Not Be Named.

I need more Roger ripping through enemies on a toad-rhino-dino with the mentality of a Cape Buffalo.

>March series as written by Timothy Zahn

I'd read the FUCK outta that.

I got recommended Monster Hunter International by a friend. It started out really fun and action-packed, but the author liked to remind the reader about his political beliefs at every turn.
Every character is a southerner except the ones you're supposed to hate. The protagonist organization proudly displays confederate flags, and its leader hates Yankees. The secondary antagonist of the book is the Federal Government, represented by sociopathic thugs who are as evil as they are incompetent.

The main character is really obviously the author, a goatee'd, severely overweight, gun collector who is somehow physically fit and also the best at shooting things.

>Patty, best waifu in the thread...

I don't even need Roger to enjoy it. tell me a story, the backstory to Armand Pahner or Eva Kasutic. I'd sit and read those for DAMN sure

>Timothy Zahn
I actually am not familiar with him.
whats he written?
and since I am going on a long driving trip soon, is any of it on decent audio-book?

fucking hit submit too early

Anyway, the sheer level of "MUH GUNS" was too much for me. It would've been a great book if the author tried even slightly to keep his politics out of it.

>Sword of Truth

Hilarious, but come on, its all on good humor. Just imagine playing someone else like that.

....Veeky Forums has NEVER recommended honor Harrington.

Veeky Forums did, at one point, recommend Honor Harrington.
It was many long years ago and we've all rightfully forgotten it, but nevertheless it occurred.

objectively wrong

>....Veeky Forums has never SINCERELY recommended honor Harrington.
>fix'd

and I have a friend who LOVES THE SHIT out of the series because complicated politics give him a frighteningly massive boner...

You're the only user in this thread who knows what's up.

Veeky Forums has made people play FATAL.
We used to have challenges of trying to make characters.

What was specific about their depiction there? Different from other instances of the dungeon dimensions?

I always liked "ocean trying to warm itself around a candle".

The economic stuff is shit too, they unironicly talk about non productive people draging down one empire while the other is realizing they should be using 100% automated production. There is no discution of the people this will put out of work.

>I actually am not familiar with him.
>whats he written?

This stylish suave motherfucker wrote the only books I consider to be canon for SW EU: THE THRAWN TRILOGY

EMPIRE RESURGIN'
PELLAEON ASSISTIN'
RUHK COMMANDIN'
CLONE CLONIN'
CAABOTH ARGUIN'
KATANA-FLEET STEALIN'

THRAWWWWWWWWWWWWN BITCHTITS, GO AND READ IT

>Heir to the Empire
>Dark Force Rising
>The Last Command

go and read now, you will not be disappointed

>The protagonist organization proudly displays confederate flags

Bullshit you read the book, Where and when does Earl or Ray show off a Confederate flag? Julie makes a point to tell the audience that the founder of MHI bought the land from old slavers and then fought the Klan.

>Everyone's a southerner.
By what exact definition? Holly's from Vegas. Owen's from Utah, originally. The SEAL who's one of the team leaders is from Colorado. Shacklefords are southern, yeah, but they're not the only people in the book.

>Hates Yankess

Granted, but Earl was only one generation removed from the Civil War. He fought in WWI. Also, I'm from out West, and I hate Yankees. People who only recognize you exist when you bring them artisan coffee or run their ski-slopes tend to get on your nerves. They're all filthy, vulgar sods who couldn't find their own asses with a map, a guide, and a flashlight.

It is no sin to hate a Yankee. They fucking suck as people.

>It self-insert-fic

Well, that I will grant you. Owen gets it entirely too easy in the first book. And the cheap way he gets Julie is first-novel-itis written all over it. The main antagonist is less of a threat than a nuisance, and the bully is hilariously one dimensional.

>Severely overweight gun collector who is somehow physically fit and also the best at shooting things

This is a guy who used to run a gun store because he likes guns. Yes, it is possible to be big and also fit. Strongfat is a thing.
I would not call Larry Correia overweight. He's just goddamn huge. Exactly the type of build I'd expect from someone who used to run cattle and do PMC work. I am overweight. Larry is just built like fucking Gregor Clegane.

>SW
star wars?

ewwwwww.....
as the son of an original super-fan who was named after one of the characters, I'd almost prefer sticking my dick in a blender.

your loss, user, your loss.

Dude, the Thrawn Trilogy is not to be missed.

It's the sequel trilogy that should have happened, and it literally built the old EU.

Dumb, quick reads, but definitely enjoyable.

>Bullshit you read the book, Where and when does Earl or Ray show off a Confederate flag?
Must have misremembered. The book is the literary equivalent of a raised Ford F150 covered in second amendment bumper stickers and matching gadsden/ confederate flag window decals.

>I hate Yankees. People who only recognize you exist when you bring them artisan coffee or run their ski-slopes tend to get on your nerves. They're all filthy, vulgar sods who couldn't find their own asses with a map, a guide, and a flashlight.

And there it is. Wait a minute.
>sods
That's not an American word you goddamn limey.

Midnight at the Well of Souls maybe?

The thing that bugged me about Snuff was how special he made the Goblins. It's kind of a running theme, first you wonder how humans even exist on Discworld when everyone around them is obviously so much better at just about everything. Second, despite being ham-handedly anti-bigotry it still managed to invoke white savior tropes left and right.

I was going to insult you, but I had a look at the publication dates, and there's so little from '07 onwards that it basically doesn't matter. Making Money is pretty cash though, so I'll fight you over '07.

He focused on them as being tragic as well as malevolent. These are misshapen, horrible things, which is not really a pleasant state of existence. I always really liked that line about the candle as a motivation for them as well.

Making Money is good, yes, but it's probably the last good thing he wrote.

But after that, the Alzheimer's started killing his brain piece-by-piece, and I'm sure that his writing skill was one of the earlier losses. Especially given that he lost the ability to type and had to dictate most of his later stories to a computer.

Sorry, Brit roommate for two years, things rub off. Brits do have a talent for invective.

I'm from Montana. And Yankees, and their cousins the Left-Coasters still suck and will always suck. They do nothing but move here and try to make the place they moved to into the same shit hole they left.

Or protest legitimate resource opportunities. Like mining and logging.

This.

Yep, we're all autistic down here.

I'm not familiar with the Sword of Truth series, what is bad about it?

It's the author's political tract.

I did some googling and I think you're talking about the "Well World" series. Most of the books have "Well of Souls" in the title.

This is pasta

I'm really excited, because in April we're getting a new novel by Zahn centered around Thrawn.

Look up Rich Man's War by Elliott Kay.

It constantly breaks the standard "show, don't tell" rule. It creates the feeling that it's really just the author talking at you.

What's his political tract?

>complete time fuckery that happens when two intergalactic empires with access to time travel fight each other

If they have time travel, why doesn't one just wipe the other out before they're a threat?

Objectivism

Objectivism.

I really don't blame Pratchett for his last works dipping in quality.
It's not like some authors where it's an ego trip, or ignoring the advice of their editors, or whatever. I virus was killing his brain, it is not a character flaw.

To go back to Honor Harrington, I used to kinda defend Weber, not as good but as alright if you liked very detailed british navel stories in Space. Partly because I sprinkled the Eric Flint books in there, and those are legitimately pretty fun.

But I read Weber's most recent book in the series, and I'm fucking done. The man has gone completely up his own ass. And he doesn't have a brain disease to blame it on.

What happened in it? I am the OP and stopped after five books.

Because Humans can only go back so far in time, the Xeelee are are basically as old as the universe, and the Xeelee see Humanity as closer to a pest infestation than an actual threat.

Nothing.
Or to put it in more detail, the series kinda splits into different paths covering various areas Galaxy things are happening at the same time. This book covers the same things that happened in the previous two books from two of those paths. Not the good one (the Eric Flint ones), and not Honor.
It instead focuses in great detail on minor characters. Not telling you anything new they do, at least for the 2nd string characters, just lots of little details.
It also develops takes the evil plot from the books, where they're setting up minor planets to fail and blame Manticore. And then shows 5 of those plots in great detail, 3 of which were already covered.
We know in general how those end, and in 2 cases specifically how they end, but now you get to read about it again. Only in the two cases that we know the specifics skipping the actually somewhat cool action scene.
Because that wasn't what we wanted, we wanted to tones of meetings and minutia of local politics. The colonial powers League are oppressive and bad and people don't like them, repeat 5 times over 300 pages.

Also, 50 pages of one of the 2nd strings character's wife trying to go out and meet him. These are some of the better part, because she's actually kinda insteresting and will matter after this book, maybe.

Then the last chapter actually advances the plot by shitting over what happened in the Eric Flint books and making no goddamn sense.

>It's not like some authors where it's an ego trip, or ignoring the advice of their editors, or whatever. I virus was killing his brain, it is not a character flaw.

No one is faulting him as a person for the dipping quality due to Alzheimers, people fault him for preachiness which was present since pretty far back. (The first one where I really started noticing it was Small GodsĀ“)

Because they generally have autism

oh and 100+ pages of some people in the Solarian league government finally catching onto the giant evil conspiracy, which was openly announced a while ago but now some people start to believe.
This also happened in the previous book, but now there are twice as many characters so they can explain how the two groups they introduced before start talking to each other.
Not doing anything, just talking about it.


To add some small defense, one of the 5 planet revolt subplots was kinda alright by itself, it just doesn't matter on the large scale and is burried in the rest of the shit. Including another planet subplot that made me learn more Russian names than fucking Dostoyevsky.
He had to put a goddamn appendix in the back just for those names, and somehow didn't think that was a problem.

Also one of the planets was supposed to be psuedo Scotland, and the other was psuedo West Virginia, ie also many very scottish names. And having to remember which one which, when neither matter.

ITT: people without moral clarity who just want to throw bricks and call it literary criticism.

Moral clarity, aka living off government handouts while calling anyone else who takes welfare a worthless parasite.

MY LITERAL NIGGA. Best books of all SW

ooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH GET HYPE SON

I love Weber and his books (Why yes, I even like Heirs To Empire: Naval Warfare Edition and SUDDENLY VAMPIRES (Spoiler Alert: There's Vampires)), but he has one major issue: his specialty is history. And that means major wanking over minor details told as major details by another characters viewpoint.
Put him with Ringo or Flint, or any other author, and the issues go down. Even the infodumps make more contextual sense.
Flint is... Best with other people and he knows it. You wanna know what happened the last time Flint wrote something major by himself (that I can remember)? The prologue to Forward the Mage happened (highly suggested, I can still make my dad fall out of his chair just by saying "lustful herd of pachyderms" and it's been over 5 years since that book was read at the dinner table).
Ringo... Ringo doesn't have a wife. She's the cover for his love affair with a George Washington blow-up doll made from M16 rifles, M1A1 armor plates, and bald eagle feathers.
Ringo does not top. On the other hand, the second part of Ghost is a great intro to BDSM. Just watch out for his constant theme (IN EVERY FUCKING BOOK! JUST GIVE IT A FUCKING REST JOHN!) of "America shall rule forever, no matter how much bullshit I have to make up for their survival".
Make him work with Weber and you get awesome (see, The Series That Shall Not Be Named). Make him work with Flint and... Ringo knows some guys who knows some guys who have about 20 acres and a backhoe.

Eric Flint got solo credit on several of the 1632 series. Imhsome of those are pretty great.
Baltic war, 1633, Eastern front.

You're not wrong about any of this.

I enjoy Weber's writing more often than not, but the dude has absolutely no sense of pacing. In the very first Honor Harrington book, in the buildup to the climax (the chase before the final space battle) he drops a 10 page infodump about the in-universe history of FTL travel. Weber really is a historian first and novelist second, and he writes his novels exactly like you'd expect a historian to write them.

The Eric Flint Honor Harrington books are probably the best in the series, despite (or possibly because) Flint focuses on entirely different shit than Weber. What's more, he is actually capable of being funny, whereas Weber is only really capable of writing snark.

And yeah, Ringo is ridiculously over-the-top 'murrican. In his defense, he's an army vet and it's probably hard to find anyone in the armed services who isn't extremely America Uber Alles. His Posleen War series reads like someone who stumbled on a Humanity Fuck Yeah thread, thought to themselves "holy fuck this is the coolest shit ever" and then put The Star Spangled Banner on endless repeat and started writing.

1633 was with Weber, I think.
But basically anything he had a major hand in was great. I still love the other stuff (Canon law was awesome, and so is anything that Harry gets to play a good part in), but when Flint does more than edit and keep a vision, it's awesome. Still needs other people though, because then... Well... Foreward The Mage, Prologue.
Flint can pull what Weber is trying to pull: explore multiple interweaving plot threads that happen at the same time, over multiple books. The difference is, Flint knows how to make every single plot thread stand on its own, even when major decision points are influenced or decided by other events - because then it reads "Random Sensible Background Event Table: The Bad Rolls", and not "Master Traynyr is not aware of how big the universe is".
I could barely stand The Legacy of Aldana series thanks to that. Cally's war was okay, but that's because Ringo and I share many fetishes. The best part of the Posleen War was Daisy and the Reformed Nazi party of HUMANITY, FUCK YEAH! Shared magical realm is why I loved Paladin of Shadows, even though Mike is my least favorite character. Out of any of them.

Flint also knows how to do a quick recap, where Weber spends four chapters retelling shit.

>Armagh Satanism

My favorite fake religion. A plausible DIY heresy that spreads because of philosophy, not theology. Contrarian enough to be believably human.

>First book was just bland and luls you into a false sense of safety.
The seemingly endless chapter of the main character being raped all day erry day by BDSM nuns, the hilariously awful romance subplot, or the awkward moral absolutism might have tipped you off that this wasn't going to go anywhere nice.

>The seemingly endless chapter of the main character being raped all day erry day by BDSM nuns
Man I read that as a kid that was young enough that I just thought it was a torture scene.

Then my mom read it after me and tried to talk with me about it and I had no clue what the fuck she was going on about.

Then the book mysteriously disappeared.

Read David Drake's RCN series, he writes great military sci fi

Armagh Satanism screams "we got drunk with Flint and shitposted on the Bar".
Despite not being a barfly, I'm 99% sure those three have drunkenly shitposted on the Bar a minimum of once.

Words of an engineer.

It's shit.

It's horrid shit.

I've forced myself through some godawful shit before on the expense of a favor, but I couldn't get through this shit.

Slap your "engineer" friends who probably also like SAO and tell them to unfuck themselves.

Most of Veeky Forums's suggestions are shit but they did recommend to me the Deed of Paksenarrion as required Paladin reading and I still re-read it every few years. I think I've read the series five times now.