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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More treecats and less fighting, May 28, 2000
This review is from: Worlds Of Honor (Honorverse) (Mass Market Paperback)
Honor Harrington now appears to be a franchise, something that makes me a little bit uncomfortable; however, my wife bought me this book, and I willingly read it, so that says something, I suppose. As my title indicates, these stories focus more on the treecats and less on Our Heroine. As a cat lover myself, I had little problem with this, and in fact the stories could pretty much be ordered in quality based on how much the treecats were involved. I thought the first two stories were the best. "The Stray" involves a brutal crime that a treecat helps to solve - in the early days of human contact when treecats were still very mysterious and not to be trusted. David Weber's "What Price Dreams?" is from a similar era and focuses on the appeal of humans to treecats. Both are emotional, bittersweet stories, rather different from the usual HH fare. "Queen's Gambit" focuses more on politics and the investigation of an assassination, but a treecat proves helpful nonetheless. This one wasn't quite as strong as the other two and seemed to end somewhat inconclusively, as if it would have been better as the first or middle third of a full novel rather than a story to itself. The last two I didn't like at all. Despite having Harrington as a major character (the only story of the five to do so), Weber's "The Hard Way Home" has a contrived situation (Harrington dealing with an officious boss first during a military exercise and then while trying to save the victims of a massive avalanche) and too many expository blurbs unaccompanied by progress in the story. And "Deck Load Strike" is simply dreadful: confusing and badly characterized, it reads about as I would imagine an imaginatively annotated description of a militaristic computer or board game would. My recommendation: buy the book only if you're fond of treecats and even then only read the first three stories.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More background of the Honorverse, December 9, 2005
This review is from: Worlds Of Honor (Honorverse) (Mass Market Paperback)
Worlds of Honor is a collection of five short stories set in the universe of David Weber's Honor Harrington series. I have enjoyed the HH novels immensely, and I am finding the short story collections are quite good as well. The first story, The Stray, by Linda Evans, is a murder mystery set on Sphinx with a human doctor and a treecat working together to solve the crime. Weber himself checks in with What Price Dreams about the first adoption of a member of the Manticore Royal Family by a treecat, told largely from the 'cat's perspective. Queen's Gambit, by Jane Linskold, is a more politically-driven story about the rise of Queen Elizabeth III to the throne of the Royal Kingdom of Manticore and the investigation into the assassination of Elizabeth's father. Weber delivers again with The Hard Way Home, the only story in which Honor Harrington puts in an appearance. This story gets away from the usual military or political conflicts found in an HH story and gets more into a man versus nature with the Attica Avalanche. This is probably my favorite story of the five. Finally, Roland J. Green checks in with Deck Load Strike about a raid on a distant backwater planet. This is my least favorite story in this volume. If you're looking for a regular entry in the Honor Harrington series, stick with the full-length novels, but altogether, Worlds of Honor is a fascinating read which, like More Than Honor, helps to further deepen the reader's understanding of the Honorverse.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All but one ..., April 11, 2000
By A Customer
I didn't know anything about Weber, or Harrington, or treecats last Friday night when I first picked this up, idly, at a local bookstore. By Saturday night, when I finished the last story, I still didn't know that much about Harrington (or care all that much, based on the glimpse in "The Hard Way Home,") -- but Treecats were a different proposition altogether -- and that's why I thought "Deck Load Strike" shouldn't even have been included in this book. Its only mention of treecats is in a metaphoric phrase more than three-quarters of the way into a story that, unfortunately, is just another tired old war tale in which ultimately only the bad guys survive, and nobody really wins. However ... the other stories make the book well worth the cover price. What I'd really like to see is a fleshing out of the tale by Linda Evans; "Hard Way Home" has a pair of interesting proto-protagonists, and "Queen's Gambit" is a lovely bit of insight into not just 'cat culture, but people culture too -- specifically, the awful pain people can inflict on one another in the name of love. "What Price Dreams" brought tears to my eyes. Now, if only the last whole useless story had been left out, this would be a gem of an introduction into Weber's universe of treecats, chivalric services, and all-too-human royal families. What didn't I like about the last story, besides the lack of treecats? It's gratuitously profane and vulgar, it has very little originality and its style was tired before Ernie Pyle ever saw his first battlefield with the WWII USMC. Green should be ashamed -- and so should Weber, for letting this junk pollute what could have been quite a pleasing read.
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