Customer Reviews

Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, Book 12)

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Mission of Honor takes place after the events of At All Costs, Storm From the Shadows, and Torch of Freedom. It's the mainline Honor Harrington book after At All Costs, and it delivers. (SPOILER ALERT) At the end of At All Costs, The Battle of Manticore was won by Honor's 8th Fleet, and for all intents and purposes, the war with Haven is over. The question now becomes, how do Manticore and Haven end it- especially with a war looming betwen Manticore and the Solarian League? I think the book does a really good job of showing just how out-of-date the Sollies are, but how desperate the Manticorans are to avoid such a war.

What happens next is probably Weber's best attempt to bring in a 9/11 type event to the Honorverse. Sure, we've seen terror attacks in the Talbott Cluster, and some of the Manticore/Haven battles were epic in scale and casualties. But what happens in Mission of Honor is a complete shift away from what the Honorverse is used to- and it brings about reprecussions- for Mesa, Manticore, Grayson, Old Earth, Haven, and beyond- that will completely redesign the Honorverse.

And through it all, we get the great narration of Honor, Pritchart, and Hamish. What was a great suprise, was to see just HOW much of a leader Queen Elizabeth II really is.

The book ends on both a bombshell and a cliffhanger, and it's the Honor book I've been waiting for. It's got great narration and we're finally learning about what the "Mesan Alignment" is all about. This isn't a case of watching your heroes win the day; it's a case of heroes learning that sometimes, getting back up after a fall is just as hard as the fall in and of itself. But, that's why we read the books! Heartily recommended.

I've been waiting for this book for a long time, waiting for the cliffhangers which went into motion in "Storm From the Shadows" to finally be resolved. The cliffhangers hung in suspension throughout "Torch of Freedom". Perhaps it's the length of the wait, but when the cliffhangers finally stop hanging, they're anti-climatic, as is this book, a book which has a very truncated feel to it. As someone else has mentioned, this book feels like it was cut in half, and not properly re-written for it's shorter length. This book needed to be either re-written and expanded, or streamlined and shortened. It's an awkward read.

"Mission of Honor" opens with Honor Alexander-Harrington heading to Haven in an effort to finally end the war with Haven by negotiating a peace treaty with Haven. Vice-Admiral Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak, is facing an onslaught by a force of 70 Solarian League superdreadnaughts, a threat the reader knows she'll be able to handle due to the enormous tech advantage Manticore currently possesses, but sets up the danger of Manticore possibly getting into a war. But the big threat, a threat no one on Manticore even knows exists, is coming from the Mesan Alignment, a secret attack on the Manticore and Grayson Home systems.

While "Torch of Freedom" finally exposed a great deal about the Mesan Alignment, "Mission of Honor" finally reveals the true nature of the enemy and their long range goals...and yet it's still not clear why a plot aimed at the Solarian League has manipulated Manticore and Haven to be at each other's throats for the last 70+ years. There are still mysteries to be revealed in this series about the new bad guys.

The Solarian attack on the Talbott Cluster ends as expected, but then wastes pages and pages about the problem of taking old-fashioned, heavily manned warships into custody by Manticore vessels which have been modernized to have much smaller crews. If this was foreshadowing for events later on in the series, it's poorly placed, a waste of space.

The attack on the Manticore system is the big event of the book, but it feels very anti-climatic. When compared to time wasted on the problems of prisoners, it really feels diminished. The result of the attack is devastating to Manticore and Grayson, and we lose more cast members. Honor loses family and friends in this attack, but, again, there's a truncated feel to all this. The Harrington clan suffers mightily in this attack, and Honor is again turned into the lethal avatar of vengeance. But there's a problem: While we can understand the heavy loss of family on Honor, the reader has no investment in most of her dead. The attack itself is dealt with all too briefly for the havoc it wrecks upon Manticore and Grayson. Consider: the attack on the Manticore system covers 34 pages; Weber spends 28 pages dealing with TAKING the surrender of the Solarian forces at Spindle. We never even see any of the attack on Grayson.

The conclusion of the book is, however, satisfying, and should come as no surprise, considering that it's been coming since the good guys got in charge on Haven, with Manpower/Mesa shifting to be the true bad guys. It took seven books to get to this point: "War of Honor", "At All Costs", "Mission of Honor" and the four Honorverse novels, but arrive we finally do.

"Mission of Honor" is a hard novel to rate, as it has flaws: It drags at times with unnecessary exposition, and speeds through crucial action sequences. I've said this about the Safehold novels: Weber needs better editors. As has been noted, Honor herself isn't nearly as involved in this novel as in past main-stem novels. No action for Honor. A recurring character is set up to be in the attack on Manticore, but her fate isn't revealed (Ginger Lewis).Yet the finale is indeed satisfying, the Solarian attack on Spindle is well-written, and though too short, the attack on the Manticore system is well written. Queen/Empress Elizabeth gets to shine, we get more details on the Solarians, and the curtain of secrecy over the Mesan Alignment is finally, mostly, lifted. Plus the conclusion of the book finally takes the series off in a long awaited direction. And I love Honor, despite her limited use in this novel. With some reservations, I over-generously give this 4 stars.

Reading the first two thirds of this book is a boring chore. It's all recap and exposition that could have been done MUCH better with a 30 page "Previously In The Honorverse" overview. I really can't think of ANYTHING before the Battle at Spindle that was not covered in previous books.

Obviously, writers can create a successful novel that re-presents a previous plot but from a different point of view. Unfortunately, this is at least the fourth Honorverse novel with an overlapping time-line, and the same characters. Things are not just moving ahead slowly, they are crawling. And to fill in the pages there is padding where minor characters do unimportant things. In one scene, we follow a team of marines through a captured ship, from the airlock to the bridge. Nothing happens. They don't even encounter any casualties. Why was this in the book?

Once we get to the execution of operation "Oyster Bay", an event that was first explicitly mentioned three novels ago, this book finally picks up its pace, and becomes worth reading. We finally get big revelations about the "Real Enemy" behind the war(s) of the series, and even a surprise resolution or two.

If you pick up this book, do yourself a favor and skip right to chapter Twenty-Two, (page 286 in the hardcover) you won't be missing anything.

Having just finished reading Mission of Honor, I can say that I am impressed and pleasantly surprised by how successfully David Weber pulled off tying loose plot ends down, expanding the Honorverse, and giving new direction to the series.

It is a great challenge to do these three things, especially when the series is some 18 years old and has seen "much of the same" (not a bad thing!) in terms of the sequence of promotion, battle, promotion, battle, or some variant with a spice of plot twist thrown in.

Something many readers may not know is that David reportedly considered having Honor die in the Battle of Manticore (see At All Costs (Honor Harrington #11)). This is because he was using Admiral Lord Nelson, a famous Napoleonic War British fleet commander who died in the epic Battle of Trafalgar, as a role model (for a more intricate look at this connection, and the parallels between this series and my childhood's favorite series, the Horatio Hornblower series by CS Forester, see the wiki article on Honor Harrington). Had he done so, the series would have tied up nicely (though myself and many other fans surely would have shed many tears), had historical connect, and the inevitable sequence of promotion, battle, etc would have reached a near perfect conclusion.

However, and I say thankfully, David has found out that Honor really didn't die in the battle (after all, he is not deciding what is happening, as much as recording what "comes to him," as he has previously said). She saved Manticore, was still alive (though there were some heartbreaking losses I won't reveal), and at the end of At All Costs was guarding the Star Kingdom like the last guardian angel defending a wounded charge from innumerable evils.

Then came the grande question, Now What???

Enter Mission of Honor.

The tasks David faced in this book were as delicate as heart transplant surgery. Had he failed to successfully introduce new plot themes, tie up loose ends, and introduce the necessary details into the Honorverse to keep things vibrant and interesting, it would have been similar to the surgeon failing to connect one of the major arteries during the heart transplant.

And I use the analogy of a heart transplant for more than just technical purposes. The series has run the course that I described in the second paragraph, and needed new direction, indeed a new heart and soul. For, as much as we all love the themes introduced into the previous 11 books, there are indeed 11 books containing those themes! Copy and paste with some new plot "spice" would have introduced staleness, but was indeed an option.

Fortunately, David chose not reiterate the past, but to expand into the future. There is more than one surprise, even for the dedicated Honorverse reader, and the details introduced expand not only the character roster of the series, but the political dynamics, technological realities, and the underlying challenges facing Manticore and her allies.

This book represents a brave and bold new direction for the series, and while changing the direction of an 18 year old series of so many installments could potentially pose fatal risks and deep pitfalls, David has maneuvered these challenges deftly and given a heart transplant to this series that lays the groundwork for the Honorverse to live and grow into both ours and Manticore's future.


*Disclaimer* I really, really like the Honorverse, Honor Harrington, the Star Kingdom of Manticore, Queen Elizabeth, the Planet Grayson, the Ship designs and technical details, the unraveling changes of Havenite society, the political dynamics, and almost everything else of the series, so please realize that this review may be biased somewhat by my fanaticism, as fair though I may try to have kept the review itself.

Been reading David Weber since On Basilisk Station and for the most part was highly pleased by the story-telling and plots of Weber's Honor Harrington Universe. But the last few books the story has gotten buried in inane detail and back story recaps, inner mental self-anguishing thoughts of even the minor characters....that plot-twists and any drama has become a yawn.

Finally got the hardcopy, though I had read the e-copy Baen sells a few months ago. The first 200-300 pages are a chore. I thought Torch of Freedom was bad, but this is much worse. The plot moves ever so slowly (Harrington's negotiation dialogues with Haven are scattered throughout).... So many pages wasted on boarding and capturing the defeated ships - why? A few paragraphs would have sufficed to cover the problem due to the sheer number of prisoners...

As expected the book in a cliff-hanger. and because of all the "background" thoughts you can almost see the next plotline-story.... The upcoming bad guy is another military idiot and stooge for M.... He will be given a chance to surrender, but will choose not to or if he does choose to act rationally and surrender - someone or something takes control of him and still get his fleet trashed....

Mr. Weber ask for an editor and please listen to him, your books are excellent when focused on a few characters and the immediate action. Leave some drama, some "oh" "ah" for the reader to find and enjoy.

The book needs five stars because (a) it's an essential part of a must-read series, (b) it briefly has Hago Shavarshyan with a pithy analysis of his stupid boss (the book has many similar analyses, but that's the only one that really worked, for me), and (c) it has a very satisfying finale... though it's really a cliff-hanger for the next book.

Sadly, the book should have no more than two stars because Honor Harrington is barely in it. She doesn't accomplish a damn thing, and that's not what we pay her for. I suspect she'll make up for it next book; I certainly hope so. But that's too late to add anything to THIS book. Her character virtually disappeared, after the famous sword and pistol duels.

Worse, the book deserves no more than one star because the writing is SO tediously long-winded. Thousands of sentences are repeated in different words, often on the same page, sometimes by different speakers on different planets. There are around 2000 blatant examples of deadhead words and phrases: variants on "frankly", "to be honest", "if I were to be honest", "for that matter", "actually", "the next best thing to", et cetera. The word "honest" is probably used 500 times, and only ONE of them passed muster in terms of meaning what the word is supposed to mean (or anything), when a speaker seemed to genuinely put himself in the shoes of someone with whom he disagreed, and said that, "to be honest", in that man's position he might think the same thing. The other 499 occurrences were nothing but some "paid by the word" syndrome at work. If most of the book HAS to consist of people sitting around talking (and must it?), can't they, for the poor reader's sake, avoid rambling interminably?

All that verbiage leaves no room to say anything about Honor's children, even to make clear (in my mind, at least) how many they are or whether they survive. It leaves no room for any number of important things. There's no mention of Honor's prostheses or Nimitz' brain damage. There are just a couple of tiny hints that ANYTHING would change if all the genders were switched at random, or if everyone were a eunuch. Is space opera supposed to be asexual?

There are possibly a hundred simple editing errors: missing or repeated words and such. In a book this long, it isn't surprising.

The writer of "The Apocalypse Troll" will forever deserve an extra star for ANYTHING he writes. Yet it's hard to believe this is the same writer. Is it?

So... in the afterglow of the last chapter, the best I can manage is three stars. Okay, three and a half, but that's not an option.

But keep 'em coming, David!

I've been an HH fan for quite a while now. With that said, I am a fan of the main story line. Not all the side stuff. The Honorverse stuff has never really gotten me that interested because a) they aren't as well written, and b) I don't care enough about the characters. I am invested in HH, not all the side stories. In the past few books of the main series there's been a disturbing trend towards including more and more of the Honorverse storylines. That inclusion is ractched up a thousand times in this book. If you haven't read the latest Honorverse material, you will be as lost as I was. I had to give up, go read it, then come back. Without that background this book is simply a lot of people whom you have never met before talking about stuff you don't have the context to understand. This book frankly belonged as part of the Honorverse and not as part of the main storyline. Unfortunately the events were so stupendous it HAD to be included. The book also ends on a huge cliffhanger, which is not at all typical for this series. I wanted to love it. It's been so long since we had a good solid HH book. But unfortunately I don't, and this isn't one.

Wow. What happened to this series? Mayhaps Weber is writing so many books he's just getting lazy. Imagine paying $16 to see an iMax 3D action flick - a modern version of say, Star Wars. Instead of seeing the Death Star destroy Alderaan, we instead watch a couple of Admirals discussing it. "Our large spherical weapon massing 21 million tons (serial number 1233ferr4) with a personnel of 22,002 beings and 21,980 droids, successfully initiated weapons fire at 22:09 galactic central time, thus destroying the planet and surrounding artificial satellites." Exciting, huh?

That's what this tedious waste of paper pulls off. We don't see battles. We're stuck reading about the meetings talking about the battles. PATHETIC! But this is where Weber has been headed for years. Unfortunately, other popular SF authors are following the same, sad, path. LAZINESS. It's much easier to write a book about meetings than action. The glow is gone. The magic used up. The originality of the Honor series is no more.

Mr. Weber: give it up or start to actually WRITE again - not just spew out this garbage in an obvious attempt to make money! Hey, there you go - remember the concept oh honor, and apply it you your writing. The fans made you who you are, and you are ripping us off with this junk.

Mission of Honor is written in such a way that it constantly alludes to events in other spin-off books. Weber is plainly saying "Want action? Buy the other books. Need to see what happened, not just read about meetings? Buy the other books. Otherwise, you're stuck with this."

The writing in much of this book is amateurish - one wonders if Weber is using ghost writers. We'll see a paragraph along the lines of "... in the darkness, lots and lots of missiles are heading towards these dudes. Man will they be surprised! I'm putting this information here so you don't just close the cover and walk away..."

or

"You see, these two guys were involved in all types of sneaky stuff on Mesa - buy the other books to see what really happened - well, we don't know where they are or what happened to them (read the other books!) - but I'll mention them dozens of times, building up to a SURPRISE at the end! Well, I thought it would be a surprise, but looking back on this mess, I guess it's kind of obvious five chapters into the book,"

You could totally skip this book and not miss a single thing. Unless you like to read about endless meetings where people whine, back-stab, lie, cheat, cover their butts, etc. Only the final three pages are decently written and engrossing.

This book is a hard one to rate. I read it and found it enjoyable but I don't think it's up to Weber's other efforts - it's certainly not as good as "at all costs", where there's a whole lot of suspense. It's obvious what is going to happen when the Sollies attack the Manticorans, and just as obvious when the MAN attacks. That part is especially in need of editing - we get a whole bunch of exposition about people dying but we don't care about them so it just drags. I think it would have been better to treat it from Honor's perspective and have her find out about things rather than the tedious exposition.

The ending is a bit obvious but I think that's inherent in how Weber decided to take the narrative, and it does set the stage well for the next novel.

This is the follow on to Storm from the Shadows (Disciples of Honor) and Torch of Freedom (Honorverse). The characters are excellent and again we get to see more of the villain. I have felt that Mesa was pretty obvious for the last several books (they really surface in Storm From the Shadows. Anton and Victor finally get the goods on them. An excellent story and its nice to see a villain that thinks ahead. (BTW if you don't have the previous books don't despair the included CD has them all).

The whoopie do shoot em up kids will be disappointed though.

Frankly there are a couple bobbles (not bad) and two flaws. The Mesan defector seems to know a lot for his position compared to what is in the previous book and there are an awful lot of characters and switches of POV (they seem to have totally derailed one reviewer with a short attention span).

Some of that is inevitable given the story but I still feel it might have been handled better. At least the centuries old conspiracy isn't halfvast like some others.

The conclusion is well done and thought out so I look forward to the next book.

Spoiler Alert!!
One other inconsistency is that the Mesans have left the Manticore system defense pods untouched presumably so that when the Solies attack Manticore (the Mesans have them at war with Manticore) the attack will hit a buzz saw. But then Detwiler the (planner for the villains) thinks about attacking the Manticore defense force and that could negate the plan of destroying Solarian credibility and breaking up the league.