I've followed the Honor Harrington series since On Basilisk Station and have loved many of the books in the series. Others have been less appealing, and unfortunately, A Rising Thunder falls in the less appealing category. The Solarian League, manipulated by Mesa, becomes more and more foolhardy in its attempts to hold on to its power. Manticore and Haven make an alliance, previously supposed impossible. New weapons, many characters, machinations by the Mesan Alliance, nanotechnology....
Strangely, I was involved as I read this one, while at the same time thinking that there was nothing much to hang on to.
Honor has taken a smaller role in recent novels (perhaps this is a good thing), but the number of characters has increased exponentially over the thirteen or so books in the series.
The result (for me, at least) is that by giving approximately equal time to all characters and situations, it becomes difficult to develop a rapport with any of them, to latch on to their particular stories, to even sort them out as to planet, star system, history, etc.
Someone mentioned that A Rising Thunder is a kind of "bridge" to the next H.H. installment. Hopefully, the next one will give us some time with a set of characters.
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Don't get me wrong, Weber is a mastermind in creating characters and worlds. Having my attention spread so thin, however, didn't allow me to become attached to a particular plot wrinkle or its participants.
Fiction. Science Fiction. 2012. 464 pages.
The Honor Harrington series has been very gradually going downhill for a while now, but this book was the last straw for me. Weber has always had a bit of a problem coming up with good reasons for his villains' actions. The introduction of Mesan mind control as a plot device has now given him total license to just skip all internal logic for the bad guys. If an action is necessary for the plot, then someone is mind controlled to do it. Nothing makes sense, nothing has to. Why bother reading a book where there's no connection between the characters' personalities and their actions?
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