Honor Harrington comics

[Forbin]

In the first book I didn't really get to even finding Honor interesting until close to the end and didn't "like" her until several books later. (The one with the pistol duel, I forget the title.)

Field of Dishonor.

(Sorry, don't have anything to say about the bulk of your post. I see where you're coming from, and I can't really disagree with your opinion. Figured I'd at least be helpful and flesh that one bit out!)

SPOILERS:


The book where, besides being the first to hold citizenship in two planets, the first to be an admiral in two navies, a nobelwoman risen from a commoner, the first foreign landholder on Grayson, the first human to achieve telepathy with a treecat, so feared by her enemies they gave her a nickname, personal friend of the queen, (um.. what else? I know I'm only half way thru the Mary Sueness), she's also a perfect hip-shot with a thousand-year-old .45 auto.

OY!

 

[J.T.B.]

Keep in mind that this is also our introduction to Honor. A dry, lengthy techno-babble discussion with her new XO. I know classic naval literature also like to quasi-fetishise the nomenclature ('Moby Dick' leaps to mind) but character introductions still need to be strong as that's the audience's primary point of engagement and as the saying goes you only get one first impression.

I agree, I found it awkward. I can only guess that what was being set up was so different than most people's expectations of space battles that he figured he had to get it out of the way immediately or risk losing bewildered readers down the line. With nautical nomenclature, they are at least real-life terms and if you get desperate you can go to the dictionary. BTW I agree Moby Dick is classic literature, but it's not naval!

 

[Star Wolf]

My take is that Honor was never the draw. Space ship porn was

 

[Reverend]

In the first book I didn't really get to even finding Honor interesting until close to the end and didn't "like" her until several books later. (The one with the pistol duel, I forget the title.)

Field of Dishonor.

(Sorry, don't have anything to say about the bulk of your post. I see where you're coming from, and I can't really disagree with your opinion. Figured I'd at least be helpful and flesh that one bit out!)

SPOILERS:


The book where, besides being the first to hold citizenship in two planets, the first to be an admiral in two navies, a nobelwoman risen from a commoner, the first foreign landholder on Grayson, the first human to achieve telepathy with a treecat, so feared by her enemies they gave her a nickname, personal friend of the queen, (um.. what else? I know I'm only half way thru the Mary Sueness), she's also a perfect hip-shot with a thousand-year-old .45 auto.

OY!

Most of that didn't really bother me, but yeah it got a bit much after a while. I suppose it would have been easier to swallow in certain respects if the books started out showing Honor as the great and legendary Admiral and war hero, with the main narrative being a recounting of history, rather than taking the reader by the hand and lead them from one victory to the next.

An author can get away with a lot more if you know you're being told the origin story of a titan of history. Dune did this to a certain extent with the chapter prefaces.

Keep in mind that this is also our introduction to Honor. A dry, lengthy techno-babble discussion with her new XO. I know classic naval literature also like to quasi-fetishise the nomenclature ('Moby Dick' leaps to mind) but character introductions still need to be strong as that's the audience's primary point of engagement and as the saying goes you only get one first impression.

I agree, I found it awkward. I can only guess that what was being set up was so different than most people's expectations of space battles that he figured he had to get it out of the way immediately or risk losing bewildered readers down the line. With nautical nomenclature, they are at least real-life terms and if you get desperate you can go to the dictionary. BTW I agree Moby Dick is classic literature, but it's not naval!

"Nautical" then.

I suppose the Horatio Hornblower or the Jack Aubrey books might have been more apt comparisons, but I've never read them so I can't speak intelligently as to their content.

My take is that Honor was never the draw. Space ship porn was

Kind of a hard sell given the medium.

Action of any kind is notoriously difficult to do in prose without quickly boring the reader. It's not like in visual mediums where you can just show a battle, using clever editing and music to help tell the story. In literature you have to *describe* everything and it can quickly become confusing or just plain dull. I remember more than one book where an author fell into this trap. Using Dune as a reference point again, there's a reason why there's a grand total of two real action scenes in the whole book, both of which are close-quarters knife fights, with the "big" action mostly taking place off screen (or is it "off page"?)

Usually the only thing that can hold it together is investment in the characters. The first Honor book *barely* gets away with it in this regard, even if the title character is a little two dimensional at this point, but the battle is well executed.

 

[Star Wolf]

^
Even though we call them Jack Ryan books and movies Clancy made his money by describing Los Angeles class attack subs and Special Operations helicopters. The same with Weber in the Honor verse. First with a destroyer doing a torpedo attack, then with motor torpedo boats and finally aircraft carriers.

 

[Reverend]

^ I never did finish reading 'Red October', but what I remember mostly of what I did read (about 2/3rds IIRC) was a political spy thriller with a strong authentic (or at least authentic feeling) military/intelligence gathering component. Not the other way around.

Can't say much about any of his other works since I never read them (though I've seen all the films) but I don't seriously think most of his fans skim though the Jack Ryan scenes like the plot of some trashy romance novel, just to get to the lurid descriptions of military hardware.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I loved the Honorverse from pretty much the start, but that only intensified later in the series when she also became pretty much the only positive hero and role model I'm aware of in mainstream media (I count bestsellers as close enough) for the lifestyle that my wife and I live. And that's all I'll say about that, lest I get entire too spoilerific.

How many issues does the first arc take? I prefer to read entire arcs instead of issue by issue.

Amazon shows a graphic novel due on November 11th that appears to combine this first storyline into one volume for $12.64. That's probably the way I'll go for this, and sounds like it would suit your preference as well.

I definitely pictures Nimitz as much cuter than the freaky gargoyle in the comic.

Me, too. At least, when he's calm. The depiction might suit for when he's on the attack, but he isn't Grumpy Cat all the time.

Never got into the Honor Harrington books. Was always more into the Seafort Saga books. For those that have read both, how do they compare?

I read some Honorverse books first, then the Seafort Saga. The latter seemed to me like what would happen if David Weber really and truly HATED Honor Harrington.

 

[Forbin]

In the later books he started overusing this one phrase - "The next best thing to 1100 missiles streaked through space toward the enemy..." "The next best thing to 500 ships appeared out of the wormhole..."

The hell does that even mean? What's the next best thing to 1100 missiles? 1,099 missiles? 1100 plush treecat dolls? It's an awkward phrase, IMHO, and way too vague to fit in with his usually VERY precise technical prose.

 

[Hypaspist]

Amazon shows a graphic novel due on November 11th that appears to combine this first storyline into one volume for $12.64. That's probably the way I'll go for this, and sounds like it would suit your preference as well.

I'd say that the comics would probably be the way to go to...after the first volume. No matter what, I'd say give the first book a chance. I can't picture the best part of the whole series (book 1's climax) being done justice in another medium.

I always pictured treecats as looking slightly grotesque. Fluffy and cute can be lots of different things, but being like a regular cat was not what I was thinking at all.

Actually I found it kind of weird how Honor became more beautiful as the series went on. One of the things that never bothered me about her was that she was not conventionally pretty. It really just started to get old fast in book 4 how it went back to the Grayson's attitudes. When I read the author's notes about how he wanted to make a statement about domestic terrorism, I lost a lot of interest.

 

[ATimson]

Never got into the Honor Harrington books. Was always more into the Seafort Saga books. For those that have read both, how do they compare?

I read some Honorverse books first, then the Seafort Saga. The latter seemed to me like what would happen if David Weber really and truly HATED Honor Harrington.

As someone who's in the middle of book 3 of the Seafort Saga now, thanks to the recommendations here: Seafort deserves to be hated. The environment that he was raised in certainly didn't help him any (he was raised in an autocratic dystopia that believes in enslaving minors, corporal punishment, death penalty for thought crimes, and has a state-sponsored religion - that'll be enough to screw anybody up for life!), but he's still a thoroughly unpleasant being who has a penchant for taking out his screwups on his subordinates through unwarranted punishment, both career-wise and physically.

Honor is, at her heart, a good person. She's not afraid to hold someone accountable if they deserve it. But she believes in teaching, and second chances. And she's willing to own up to her mistakes.

And the Honorverse - well, asides from the Peoples' Republic of Haven - generally seems like a nicer place to live, at least for the protagonists. Even though Grayson wouldn't be my first choice of home thanks to the Church, even it seems more accommodating of change and outside traditions than some modern faiths here on Earth.

I know which setting I'd rather live in, and which one I'd rather serve under.