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    SamuraiGuy

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    Default Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Posting this for a continuation of the Previous Honor Harrington Universe Thread, which has it's last post dated as being 7/22/2017, and I didn't want to get slapped with the Thread necromancy burn.

    Been trying to get each of the books, with mostly the short story collections missing from my collection, along with book 3 of Manticore Ascendant needed. Otherwise, I have most of the books in a collection on my kindle with the 1632 series, which I need to buy more of.

    Honorverse books I looking forward to: The remaining two House books, the books to finish out the series, and maybe something written around Edward Saganami(sp?)? Unless Edward's history is covered sufficiently already.

    Is there any updates for any of the forthcoming books? And anything about the Movie? TV Series? Anything about further plans relating to the Honorverse? Anything further for discussion?
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    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    The Movie/Series is dead and buried, along with the studio that was supposedly making it. Probably for the better.

    Snippets from Uncompromising Honor, the last mainline novel, are starting to appear on Weber's personal forums. One of them has Honor trying to convince her two-year-old son to eat his vegetables.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    A GoT styled series if some sort would clearly be the better option. Just not one on a network. They butchered the Expanse over at SciFi.
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    I agree completely. The TV series format would be far better than a movie for this series (the film was supposed to skip the first book entirely because it wouldn't work in a movie format, for example), but most networks would screw it up. A Netflix series would probably be the way to go, but something like HBO would also work.

    I've often wished that raising enough money to buy the SciFi network was a feasible goal. The current management doesn't seem to like Sci Fi very much, and putting somebody in charge that was in it for love of the genre would be a great improvement.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    I would postulate that even a series done by sympathetic and interested creators might have significant problems.

    Looking at the book covers, the artists forget or missed that 90% of the Manticore population is supposed to be of a blended skin colour. Getting this right would probably need a very odd set of actors and/or a lot of makeup (with complaints from people who don't understand the reasons about why it's not honest use of actors of various colours). It would also be very odd to actually watch for people brought up in our cultures - racist or not, we epxect to see people of the colours we normally see and everyone being a blend woudl be weird.

    Looking at the early shots from the computer game (don't know if it was ever finished) the space combat shots would either be very boring or totally wrong. The impeller wedges shoud be far bigger than the spaceships and one ship should not be visible from the next (there are comments to this effect in several books, and then the inital game shots had the wedges as the same size as the ships...). Basically any time they decide to depict combat except from the ship's combat information centre or the effects on a single ship (i.e. a nice vista shot) it will be wrong.

    I too am waiting on news of more books...

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post
    I would postulate that even a series done by sympathetic and interested creators might have significant problems.

    Looking at the book covers, the artists forget or missed that 90% of the Manticore population is supposed to be of a blended skin colour. Getting this right would probably need a very odd set of actors and/or a lot of makeup (with complaints from people who don't understand the reasons about why it's not honest use of actors of various colours). It would also be very odd to actually watch for people brought up in our cultures - racist or not, we epxect to see people of the colours we normally see and everyone being a blend woudl be weird.
    Most of the described Manticorans fall close enough into actual ethnic groups that you could get away with it, although a few characters (such as Honor herself) would pose challenges in finding a suitable actor.

    However, that doesn't get into the nonexistant genotypes of the Honorverse. Somebody from Trevor's Star would be almost impossible to cast convincingly, and somebody like Thandi (who has every "African" racial trait except a high melanin count)) would require so much makeup that it would probably fall flat.

    Something animated would probably be the best bet.


    As for the visual scale problem, that's not insurmountable. The distances could be fudged if need be, you could use the old "show one ship firing and cut to the other getting hit" technique, use an extreme zoom-out, or just show battles almost entirely from CIC.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnoman View Post
    Something animated would probably be the best bet.
    Nice idea - and the disbeleif threshold tends to be lower with animated which would help too!

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnoman View Post
    As for the visual scale problem, that's not insurmountable. The distances could be fudged if need be, you could use the old "show one ship firing and cut to the other getting hit" technique, use an extreme zoom-out, or just show battles almost entirely from CIC.
    My problem is that I don't think TV/film makers could bring themselves to do this, they would want to show the nice cinematic panorama shot of enemy ships interacting - exactly as the naked eye cannot see.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post
    My problem is that I don't think TV/film makers could bring themselves to do this, they would want to show the nice cinematic panorama shot of enemy ships interacting - exactly as the naked eye cannot see.

    You can get a pretty good equivalent of that with the proper cuts.

    Zoom out far enough to "see" both sides' ships. You won't be able to see the hulls, but you will see the explosions of the warheads and possibly the impeller wedge (depending on how visible you make these - I would find it acceptable to make them a haze rather than the more opaque book versions).

    Pull in tight on one ship to see missiles pouring out of the tubes.

    Cut to CIC to show just how many missiles are being fired (not specifics, just "many" red dots on the screen)

    Close cut on the missiles. Missle wedges are small enough that a tracking shot with multiple in-frame isn't too much of a strain.

    Close cut on an opposing ship as counter-missiles and point-defense clusters fire - you'll probably want to make lasers visible for this purpose.

    Back to the missiles, show exploding missiles all around the focus point.

    Back to CIC, show the missile wave eroding.

    Extreme close on a missile, showing the lasing rods deploying, the warhead detonating, and the rods lasing.

    Cut to the ship as lasers gouge into it.

    Cut to CIC, show ship system displays and fleet icons showing damage and/or vanishing.

    There's ways to show the combat pretty decently - it just would take somebody wanting to do so.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnoman View Post
    Most of the described Manticorans fall close enough into actual ethnic groups that you could get away with it, although a few characters (such as Honor herself) would pose challenges in finding a suitable actor.

    However, that doesn't get into the nonexistant genotypes of the Honorverse. Somebody from Trevor's Star would be almost impossible to cast convincingly, and somebody like Thandi (who has every "African" racial trait except a high melanin count)) would require so much makeup that it would probably fall flat.

    Something animated would probably be the best bet.


    As for the visual scale problem, that's not insurmountable. The distances could be fudged if need be, you could use the old "show one ship firing and cut to the other getting hit" technique, use an extreme zoom-out, or just show battles almost entirely from CIC.
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Treecats also seems like a good reason to go animated. Obviously, they can be done as CGI inserts into live action, but given how much screen time they get in series as a whole it would be nice to not have to deal with all of the "CGI character" issues you get when using that approach.

    From a logistical standpoint, the fact that so many characters fade in and out of importance in different books makes for a casting nightmare if you want to follow the books closely in terms of which specific characters are along on which specific missions. "Ok, we don't need you on this year's show because your character is assigned to a different ship during this plot arc, but please don't take a recurring role in anything else during this year that we're not paying you, because we'll totally need you again next year when we do this other arc" is a hard sell for actual humans trying to make their acting careers work. (Movie schedules work somewhat differently, and big-name actors that primarily do movies can be booked during specific blocks of time since they then schedule other movies in the other blocks of time, but tv actors tend to be needed for an ongoing chunk of time if they have a regular role on a series since more shooting time is involved. A limited series can get around this somewhat, but the constant coming and going of Harrington-verse characters still seems like it'd be really hard to manage if you cared about getting the details right.)

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by Khedrac View Post

    Looking at the early shots from the computer game (don't know if it was ever finished) the space combat shots would either be very boring or totally wrong. The impeller wedges shoud be far bigger than the spaceships and one ship should not be visible from the next (there are comments to this effect in several books, and then the inital game shots had the wedges as the same size as the ships...). Basically any time they decide to depict combat except from the ship's combat information centre or the effects on a single ship (i.e. a nice vista shot) it will be wrong.

    I too am waiting on news of more books...
    Honestly, accuracy in the engagements would be one of the first thing I would sacrifice in bringing the Honorverse to TV. Forget the whole visual aspect, some of the salvo travel times are longer than most act lengths in commercial television. At that point, doing things like shrinking the impeller wedges to be noticeably closer to the ships is not that big a deal. It would actually make the idea of "Down the throat" or "Up the kilt" more easily understood to newcomers, while emphasizing the shield aspect of the wedges and sidewalls. As for showing the ships themselves, since you're already fast forwarding the missiles it wouldn't be bad to track them from A to B, right through the clash of counter-missiles, before finally separating into the lasing warheads and the following attack. Or cutting to show a single ship heeling over under impacts, or even the typical anime wave-motion gun shot of two or three ships getting hit by the crest of the attack followed by cutting a wide shot of space getting blotted out by the explosions. It wouldn't be terribly original, but it would work just fine.
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    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    I wonder if Cikomyr ever finished his read-through of the series. At last check, he had Shadows of Victory to slog through and the anthology Beginnings unread.

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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Regarding a show featuring the Honorverse or Film doing the same:

    I think you may need to modify moments to keep the speed, or action of the book's battles work. Like cut out the bulk of missile travel time. Then you can use Gnoman's method to show battles. Closer range would help.

    As for story, I think you could make the first book work by making the different parts more clear, by combining the plots a little more and streamlining them. The business with Klaus Hauptman could be modified so that a few of freighters engaged in smuggling are found smuggling items for the Havenite bunch that Summervale was working for, like one of the Havenite enclaves picks up the shipment and takes it out into the wilds. And maybe you could tweak the natives a bit, show that the Manties work to preserve their culture and resist Imperialist efforts. Or just replace the natives with humans that have rescinded to primitive technology, understanding. Maybe make them a lost colony that crashed landed and have learned to survive by their wits, then the Manties found them thanks to the jump bridge etc. So the locals have their own culture, and the Manties do stuff as they do in the books. Haven wants the planet of course, so they would try to influence the natives. Have the natives live Stilt houses. With Anime, you could easily depict the natives. Which would work.

    Converting the second book would work, but you probably should increase the importance of both sides interest in making use of the area. Maybe Grayson and Masada have a jump bridge, maybe the travel waves are more stronger which creates a valuable shortcut around so If Haven controls it they can send naval ships quickly into the Manties space. You would need to play up the value of each side has, because I think the average person would not understand why they would be needed, and take offense at how the two cultures treat their women. Play up how the Manties have a prime directive, so they can't really just annex the system and do whatever they want.

    To be honest, I think that you would need to show details about why Honor being a concern, and how/why the Havenites are using her actions at Basilisk to cause trouble in Grayson. And you would to play up why the Havenites don't just kill the Masadans outright and annex that system. Maybe the Solarian League could be used for that?

    Either way, Animation would be the way to go. You could do more, and you would have less worry about employing real life concerns like height and some of the creatures. To do this, you would need a larger budget to make it work, but as a movie or TV series, it would work.

    Regarding other concerns:

    Have been re-reading the 2nd book, along with others. Been looking to getting books about Haven, Andermani, and the others. Also excited for more about sleepy backwater Manticore becoming more impressive or closer to what it turned into (Manticore Ascendant books). Then once these books are done, does that mean that Weber is finished with Honor and Co?

    Where do we go from here? What other Weber stories are worth investing in? What other series are similar to the Honorverse and worth getting?
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    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.
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    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Not a bad assessment, overall. I tend to dispute the 'Honor is a Mary Sue' accusation on two points - one being what you already mentioned, that a hyper-competent, larger than life protagonist is as much a core part of the high-seasspace opera genre as, say, incompetent police are in the detective-novel genre; it's just expected that your Captain will be more Captainy than anyone else. The other's a lot more nebulous, founded on my personal belief that honest Sue-dom requires a certain mindset from the author regarding their hero(ine) being irreplaceable, which Weber's original intent to kill off Honor at the end of the Haven story arc counters. Plus, he seems to take way more enjoyment out of maiming or traumatizing her along the way than any Sue properly sees outside their Dramatic Backstory.

    (Personally, I find Ashes of Victory to be where the series starts plateauing and going downhill - coincidentally this is also the point where the side-stories begin. Honor Among Enemies is one of my favorite books for exactly the reasons you mentioned, and the utter crowning badassitude of Horace Harkness singlehandedly elevates In Enemy Hands to readability.)

    As far as future Weber Works go...the Prince Roger quartet (starts with March Upcountry) is a good read as described. It's also interesting for being a co-written work between David Weber and John Ringo, two authors whose political ideologies could not be further apart...won't go into detail here, but the bits of the story Ringo wrote are pretty easy to pick out.

    Safehold is pure Weber, and personally I find it to be a better work overall than the Honorverse because of that - no side-stories or co-operative works to muddy the narrative. It'd be almost impossible to properly discuss here on the boards because of the omnipresent religious angle - the Religion of Evil antagonists are fictional but their ideology is clearly hacked together from assorted real-world religions (both in-universe and out), but it's still good. You'll see many recurring themes between Safehold and Honorverse as well - Quality beating Quantity, a hyper-competent protagonist (slightly more justified in Safehold, and used more sparingly as well), Extremism Is Bad, and lovingly over-detailed descriptions of naval combat (blue-water, not space).

    A third series Shneeky didn't mention, and one I'm fond of even if it gets a little hard to follow at times, is the Multiverse series. Its core conceit is the existence of interdimensional portals that connect parallel Earths, and the story follows the war that results when two human civilizations - one essentially steampunk with psionics, the other magitech - encounter each other while expanding into the same unoccupied reality. Both sides are given sympathetic PoV characters and more or less shown as decent folk, neither being the Obvious Bad Guys to root against. It's a lot shorter than either Honorverse or Safehold, being only 3 books deep at the moment.

    Path of the Fury/In Fury Born is a fun stand-alone adventure romp, about a (you guessed it) hyper-competent badass female ex-commando getting revenge after pirates murder her family.

    Out of the Dark is another standalone, but one I don't want to talk about.
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Ahh right, Path of Fury/In Fury Born! I forgot about that one, despite having it in my personal library.

    I really like it. Yes, the main character is over-the-top powerful, but then, she really needs to be considering the opponent she's picked out for herself.

    She starts off... head and shoulders above everyone else. In her first tour, she gets placed in a team she really shouldn't have because no matter your scores, you really should've had at least one tour before getting assigned there (although this was actually given a reason by plot), proceeds to kick more ass than most of her veteran partners, and goes on from there to kick ass through her entire backstory, culminating in a situation that not even Admiral Akbar would've enjoyed, and coming out the other side anyway, albeit sustaining heavy losses. But when she manages to save her worst enemy, she learns a secret that forces her retirement from the military.

    She tried to retire, really she did. She wanted to put it behind her. Mind you, her actions in that little issue put her name on the front pages, so she's something of a household name by this point, but she was doing well in a little back-water freshly-started colony. Then, of course, the biological waste product hits the rotating propeller blades, and a pirate team learns the hard way that it doesn't pay to get into a firefight with her. But hey, at least she can die content knowing she bought a side-party. Right? Or will she end up questioning her own sanity, along with everyone else, hunting for the leader of the pirates, culminating in a most virulent battle being fought amongst herselves.
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Well, if we're talking other Weber series too...

    Prince Roger was good, but limited, and it didn't really make me care much about it.

    I liked Safehold, but it gets very repetitive and the protagonists had a (well justified in-universe) advantage so extreme it just about amounts to cheating. Where the setting goes from the end of the Jihad may be interesting to see, but I think I'll enjoy it more if and when the technology disparity - the one involving the main character's secret supertech, not the publicly known Industrial Revolution level stuff - gets evened out.

    Multiverse isn't bad, but I didn't find it all that interesting.

    Neither of you mentioned the Dahak trilogy? 'twas a fair bit of fun, and each of the three books has a very different kind of story to tell.

    The other Weber series I'm really interested in, though it's not scifi, is the War God series. It's got very much the same Larger Than Life Heroic Protagonist thing going, but it's high fantasy, and the main character is a (very very competent) soldier, not a commander. And if the story is headed where I think it is, it's building up to an epic scale conflict of good and evil with lots of machinations on both sides in an expansive and fleshed out world.

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    I think we're seeing the tail end of a literal millennium-long plot by Wencit to take back Kontovar.

    The Fall of Kontovar happened about 1000 years ago - and the refugees escaped to Norfressa, and nobody there thinks about Kontovar except as ancient history any more. But Kontovar still exists, is ruled by the descendants (biologically and ideologically) of the Black Wizards who conquered it way back then, and has been slowly recovering for all that time.

    There is only one reason they have not sought open conquest of Norfressa by military might - that any attempt to do so would prompt Wencit to lay waste to the entire continent of Kontovar in an unstoppable scourge of Wild Magic fueled by the only living Wild Wizard in the world. But Wencit, powerful as he is, cannot live forever, and when he dies that protection will be gone and the Black Wizards of Kontovar will conquer the rest of the world.

    I think Wencit has foreseen this and laid a plan all the way back at the Fall of Kontovar to counter it. Wencit's plan, as I speculate it to be:

    A Wild Wizard's power fades as he grows older, this is well known to wizards. Exactly how quickly it fades is not so well known. I think Wencit has been slowly, over decades and centuries, been holding back more and more of his power, pretending to grow weaker faster than he actually has but still at a pace that no one will question.

    Eventually, Wencit's apparent power will grow weak enough that the rulers of Kontovar will think they can defeat him. And, being greedy selfish ambitious bastards, they will act as soon as they think they can, not wait for their great-grandchildren to be certain of it.

    A Kontovaran army will land on the shores of Norfressa and begin conquering everything in sight. And Wencit will use this event to rally the entire continent of Norfressa into an alliance to fight their common enemy, the only motivation that could possibly convince them all to unite and put serious effort into it.

    Having produced a united Norfressa that is all too well aware of the present day threat of Kontovar, Wencit will then reveal how much power he actually still has, along with various other hidden, disguised, and/or underestimated assets such as Bahzell, Bahzell's daughter the super-Mage, and the titular Sword of the South and its wielder from the latest book, push Kontovar's army off Norfressa, and lead a counter-invasion to take back Kontovar.

    And Bahzell will be at the forefront of all of it.
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  18. - Top - End - #18
    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    I did forget Dahak. Though I tend to ignore book 3, with its main plot being a clear prototype draft for what later turned into Safehold and its other plot being a generic and weak thriller. Books 1 and 2 are excellent.

  19. - Top - End - #19
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Any love for the old Starfire novelizations with Steve White? Crusade, I Death Ground/Shiva Option, and Insurrection are the ones I've read, and I like it even though I've never gotten an actual game of Starfire going ever. (apparently there were 2-3 more books after Insurrection, but I never found them.)

  20. - Top - End - #20
    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    The Starfire books aren't awful, but I do think they are very forgettable. Being essentially novelizations of a wargame, they sort of suffer when each new threat is overcome by the introduction of an EVEN BIGGER class of warship, from dreadnaughts to superdreadnaughts to ultra-mega-dreadnaughts...

  21. - Top - End - #21
    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    The Starfire books aren't awful, but I do think they are very forgettable. Being essentially novelizations of a wargame, they sort of suffer when each new threat is overcome by the introduction of an EVEN BIGGER class of warship, from dreadnaughts to superdreadnaughts to ultra-mega-dreadnaughts...
    Eh, fighters ops are actually a big deal as a standoff engagement weapon. The arms race between fighter weapons/range/ecm and ship point defence/anti-fighter missiles/defensive fighter screens is a much bigger deal that "bigger classes of warship"

    SDs were the largest practical weapon platform if you cared about speed, and that's what the heros used... until they ran across an empire that cared more about logistics than speed.

  22. - Top - End - #22
    Eldritch Horror in the Playground Moderator
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    Default Re: Honor Harrington -- For the Honor of the Treecats, Destroy Everything!!!

    It's been a very long time, so you're probably right. I just remember the assorted humanoids wars having big ships, then when the Bug Swarm invaded they built Even Bigger Ships, then after the Bug Swarm war the refugees from another galaxy showed up in EVEN BIGGER SHIPS. It just felt like plot-driven escalation more than an arms race, though again it has been a very long time since I read through that series.
    Last edited by The Glyphstone; 2017-11-09 at 11:21 AM.

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