It’s a fairly good book, the first in the Honor Harrington series. Main character is a kickass female captain who has a black belt in a “hard” martial art (aka hand-to-hand combat, as opposed to “sporty” ones) and an intelligent “pet” cat-like creature who’s almost as deadly as she is. The books concentrate a lot on the tactics used by space naval warefare, and what happens when radically new weapons are developed (radical in terms of combative power, not technology).
Joe
Hm, yeah, well, I’d say it’s an okay military scifi space opera, some people here said that it needs some books for it to pick up, I decided not to continue reading after the first book, it was too artificially construed in my opinion, I could see most it coming, especially the big battle at the end, everything too predictable.
OBS is probably one of the best of Weber’s Honorverse novels. after the 3rd or 4th book, the story telling tends to get more verbose without actually really telling you anthing. They’re good reads if all you’re looking for is straight action.
If story is important to you however, I’d suggest OBS, The Short Victorious War, Crown of Slaves, and Shadow of Saganmi
I tried, I truely did. I just couldn’t get into it. Maybe I need to read more of his stuff, but from that book I really didn’t like it that much.
Heh. Well it was obvious the attack in the end was going to happen for most the book. . .the point I think was how the characters survived it, and the price of such a protracted engagement.
Main problem I have is occasionally the characters will be a little too similar in their dialogue. Mostly this happens when they’re agreeing with each other. He falls into a trap where the characters spout whatever he’s thinking about the topic their talking about. This doesn’t happen all that often though, mercifully, though it does happen more and more as the series goes on.
Joe
There is an Honor Harrington novella in the anthology The Space Opera Renaissance which I enjoyed quite a lot. It was the first Weber I ever read. I tried to get into Shadow of Saganami but didn’t realize it was like “Honor – The Next Generation.” I plan to go back and try OBS at some point.
The later books are about the political aspects of the various star empires just as much as they are about space combat. In many way, they are an update to the Horatio Hornblower novels by CS Forester. Very good if you enjoy political intrigue and “hard” science fiction.
oh wow! you would call the HS series hard scifi? or merely the latter novels? because OBS is pretty much space opera and not hard scifi in my book.
I would say the whole series. Weber pays a great deal of attention to the maneuvers the ships make as well as things like time lag, weightlessness, and the long times involved in traveling within a star system.
Well, I recognized the elements you mentioned when I read the book, and yeah, there are elements of hard scifi in OBS, I’ll give you that. And going with the Wikipedia definition of hard scifi, it’s really a very arbitrary destinction between hard scifi and soft space opera:
There is a degree of flexibility in how far from “real science” a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF. Some authors scrupulously avoid such implausibilities as faster-than-light travel, while others accept such notions (sometimes called “enabling devices,” since they allow the story to take place) but focus on realistically depicting the worlds that such a technology might make possible. In this view, a story’s scientific “hardness” is less a matter of the absolute accuracy of the science content than of the rigor and consistency with which the various ideas and possibilities are worked out.
It’s just that when I hear “hard scifi” I think of Clarke or “The Cold Equations.”
Just a thought: if you enjoy hard science fiction, please check out the works of Stanislaw Lem, e.g. “The Futurological Congress” or “Solaris” - it’s miles above “average” scifi.