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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jhallum" data-source="post: 2726900" data-attributes="member: 682">Or the 11th if you count just the Honor books, or 17 if you could the Anthologies and Crown of Slaves.  Anyway, David Weber is building up the story even further in this tale, which overlaps for the first 2/3s with Shadow of Saganami, and extends the overarching storyline even further by extending the consequencies of what happened in the Talbott Cluster at the end of that book.  After the concentration of honor's Personal life in Book 9 and for the first half of War of Honor, I'm glad that we're back in a warring mood in this book, and the battles come fast and furious through the length of it.  This is space opera candy at it's finest, and after reading the vicious backstabbing of Martin, and the high magic works of Robert Jordan, it's nice to retreat into some light reading like this.  There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it, except for maybe the fact that the author has at least another dozen books on the subject in the pipeline, perhaps two dozen.  Luckily for us, these books aren't going to just concentrate on Honor herself, but also continue the Crown of Slaves storyline in the same universe, as well as the continuation of the Hexapuma storyline from Shadow of Saganami.But enough about the author's plans, lets talk about the book.    It's the first of the books to deviate from the cardboard approach (the good guys are good, and the  bad guys are eeeevil) that earlier books in the series sometimes suffered from. The events of the end of War of Honor left another gap between the Alliance represented by Manticore, and the Haven Republic, as the two groups find themselves at war yet again.  And just like the end of the last war, the Havenites have a huge advantage in ships, while the Alliance finds themselves outnumbered, but with the tech advantage.  However, now the Alliance has Honor on their side, not in a prison camp, and they are prepared to use her...There are over a half dozen space battles in this book, and Honor actually manages to lose one of three she is in charge of.  While critics of the Honor Harrington character won't find many changes to it here, people who complain about her invulnerability will find some changes here.  The battles lead to an ending that is pretty impressive to say the least, and sends the series spinning in a direction that I didn't expect to see for at least a book or so more, if at all.  War is hell, and the casualty counts keep climbing.  The book is superior to War of Honor, and advances the metaplot over the series in a BIG way.  There isn't a cliffhanger in the self contained story in the book (the actions of the 8th fleet), but there is a large metaplot cliffhanger looming over the series at large that I can't wait to be answered.  The story itself moves very fast over about 18 T months or so.  I had a small problem with some of the technical advances that were made over the course of the book.  Ghost Rider's implications, for example, and the implications of SD(P)s were discussed in detail 2 books before they were first seen.  However, the two major technical advancements in this book sort of pop out of thin air toward the end of the book, and their implications don't become fully evident until the very end.  I can't shake the Deus ex Machina feeling that they provide for the author to advance the plot, but they are very very interesting, and add to the cliffhanger feel at the end of the book.I do like Baen, the publisher, however, as a bonus for buying the hardcover, they include a CD with the prior books in the series.  They also provide the first three books in the series online for free (at <a href="http://www.baen.com" target="_blank">http://www.baen.com</a>).  The first three are free, but after that, you gotta start paying for the fix. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />  As new books are edited, they also have been putting snippets of the books on their forums: <a href="http://bar.baen.com" target="_blank">http://bar.baen.com</a> (in the Honorverse forums), and you can read them from there before they are released to the public.  About the first half of each book is published via snippeting on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before the release, and it's trivial to get them forwarded to your inbox, there's nothing like getting a story developing in your inbox every week.  Without the freebies, I never would have been hooked, or discovered I like space operas so much.  Give them a shot and see what you think.  Like I said, don't expect too much from them, it's like candy, but they're pretty addicting.   The CD that is released with the book is also running around the net, and is downloadable from most of the p2p nets, and I'd bet that some enterprising soul may have made it downloadable by now (after all, it does say on the label to share with anyone you want, just don't sell...).</blockquote>

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