Ahh, now here's an interesting thread.

I've been reading the novels for quite some time now, I believe Field of Dishonor just came out around the time I picked up On Basilisk Station. I've watched it develop, and even develop Wheel Of Time like complexity due to the number of plot threads being woven as the series progressed. On the whole, it's an enjoyable series, but it's not without its flaws.

Honor herself is clearly originally 'Horatio Hornblower in Space'. Those who cite her as a Mary Sue are both correct and ignorant of the genre he's writing in. Is she a Mary Sue? Undoubtedly. But that's kind of the point of the sub-genre he was aiming for, bombastic and larger than life characters are a mainstay of this sort of fiction. Of course, Power Creep ends up taking this to a pretty ridiculous extreme, which is probably why he started writing the Shadows Of offshoot, because Honor was no longer an interesting protagonist to write about.

The early novels are fairly typical of the Space Opera genre. You have a techtalk-plausable excuse for the sorts of fights you want to have played out, you have a larger-than-life main character who simply IS better at being a Captain than anyone else is, you have a nefarious moustache-twirling villain/faction, and plenty of action abounds from there.

Right up to about Honor Among Enemies. That's when things start doing a paradigm shift, and probably when he started looking at the larger plot which unveils itself in the events that occur after Crown of Slaves. This book is actually from the perspective of one of the youngest and newest people to the Navy, Petty Officer Wonderman. In it, the ship is given an enlisted's point of view, instead of one from 'officer's row'. His bullying leads him to find friends in 'Marine Country', learning martial arts from people who take it seriously, and ending in a climactic fight that ends up completely ruining his bully's life, in no small part due to his pounding leading to the discovery of the bully's attempt to dessert and become a pirate. The following naval battle was almost subdued compared to everything else going on around it, and the cleanup that followed.

From that point on, once Harrington achieved 'flag rank', other bits of story started coming out, including Crown of Slaves, which saw a naval widower with his daughter and a princess in tow, and led to the infamous meeting of Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachet. Well, technically they found themselves introduced earlier in a short story about how Victor Cachet went from naive young idealistic man to the somewhat less naive young idealistic man who can terrify slavers more than a group of Ballroom goons flashing their tongues. But this is where their partnership really starts.

This is where the Harringtonverse gets multi-threaded, in that you have many separate plot-threads from very different places, and mostly different people, that start all getting woven together. And where some balls start getting dropped.

You see, Webber couldn't depend on people reading the Shadows series in addition to the Harrington series (why he thought this is beyond me), and this is where the copypasta really starts. Entire chapters were copied in their entirety and simply dropped into the next book of the other main thread. Which really pissed off some people, accusations of 'padding' and 'hey, didn't I already read this book?' were rampant, and not without some validity.

The worst, by far, of the offenders of this was the halariously mis-named 'Shadows of Victory'. Which was simply 'some scenes we thought were cool but eventually got edited out because they didn't contribute to the book at hand, so here you go, the 'extra scenes, director's cut', with a one-book throwaway character to tie them all in'. Mind you, it wasn't a *bad* book. The character was interesting enough, I suppose. The scenes basically tie in with scenes we already know about, from a different perspective. There's precisely ONE scene at the end of the novel which was truly new. It is the most click-baity and misleading novel title in Baen's entire library. Heck, perhaps in all of published literature.

Honestly? All it did was make certain that I would NEVER pre-order another Harringtonverse book. I'm going to wait to make sure that the novel actually does what it says it does (i.e. advancing the plot in some way) before purchasing it. There's a meme about 'betrayal' that seems appropriate for my opinion of the text.

As far as other series done by Webber? ABSOLUTELY!

First off, the 'March Upcountry' series, which follows a bratty Imperial third son, bastard child of the Empress, whose biological father was in political eclipse, a quintessential 'clothes-horse' and big-game hunter for sport, as he gets sent to some nowhere place as an excuse to get him out of the way so that actually important people can get things done. And his transformation into something greater, at the hands of an alien warrior/guru and the most insanely dangerous natural terrain the galaxy has ever produced. He lost nine in ten of his people by the time he got out of that hellhole. But that last tenth were some of the baddest sons of somethings who had ever existed, and would follow him anywhere. After all, they'd already followed him through Hell, what really was there left? It takes him three books to get off the miserable planet. Only to find that his trials have now truly began.

Second off, the 'Safehold' series, which has now come to a definitive conclusion. Earth lost, got wiped out by an alien scourge. It was a close fight, if they had more time, they might've been able to win. But they didn't, the aliens came in overwhelming numbers, and as a 4X player might say, out-macro'd them. But there was still hope. A single colony ship was sent in secret to a far off star where humanity can start over again, to go 'bush' for a few centuries until the threat of alien invasion passed, then tech up and get some payback. Or at least, that was the plan... until it was hijacked by a commander with a god-complex. Now the entire planet worships the original command crew as 'archangels', and what they do in God's name is abhorrent. A theocratic society built to suppress, repress, and extinguish any and all innovation which might lead to a technological revolution, the original crew were brainwashed to literally believe that this was Divine Will. Several centuries later, a sleeper awakens, who remembers the original mission, and who is driven to break the stranglehold of religion, introduce the idea of technological innovation, and help humanity become all that it can be.