Remove ads

Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington

Reader mode
Alane1 said:
Given how the Masadans are written you'd pretty much would have had to rewrite Manticore having a Queen to give that even a chance of happening and even then, I'd suspect they would try to horrid things to Honor who'd almost certainly would have been sent by people trying to send her to her death.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You underestimate the power of Manticoran realpolitik and Masadan fanaticism.

Masada is evil and insane, not stupid. They know that Haven does not share their ideas about the Proper Place of women. They're willing to make an alliance because they want Grayson's World, and that means they need Haven's support. Politics ain't beanbag.

If Haven was lucky enough to get Grayson- clearly the superior ally- then Manticore would be left with Masada. Of course, David Weber writes Manticore as Good People who are fundamentally unwilling to do Bad Things. They would never ever make a deal with a horrible regime for a fleet base!

The best way for David Weber to write Manticore is simply to make politics a minor background detail. Let Honor have fun adventures in space, and use the Star Kingdom as flavor. Tell the story of Space Adventures, the fight against wicked pirates and scheming Havenites, and ignore the Manticoran goverment. This is the right way to handle a good space opera.

The second-best approach- the one I adopted- is to just accept that politics ain't beanbag. Like most nations, the Star Kingdom struggles with ethics in foreign policy at the best of times. When faced with a long-term existential threat, they will make any treaties necessary to protect their people.

Even if Manticore was a happy egalitarian democracy, foreigners are not their constituents. They do not care about Bad Things happening to other people far away; they care about Bad Things happening to them.

Glimmervoid said:
Again, why do you think it matters if they're technically mobile? The only reason to go with a first-rate, second-rate etc system is vibe and treating your shore battery/sea forts expy as first-rate warships ruins that. And if 'the vibe is dead' as you claim, why in the world would you try to change to a rate based system at all! The only reason to use such a system in your space scifi is vibe!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The system of ship classification is an absolutely meaningless detail. If the characters and the plot are good, the vast majority of readers will not care. If the characters and the plot are not good, then you have bigger problems.

Weber plays around with Age of Sail, but he's not willing to really commit to it. If you want that kind of vibe, check out Drake's RCN series.
 
The thing is, the Star Empire of Manticore* does care about other polities. Just, you know, a distant second to their survival.

So yeah, Greyson, which for all it's faults *tries* to be good, will always win to Masada which is evil.

* I read a decent Honor fanfic that basically invalidates all Weber canon post Echoes of Honor. It's pretty good.
 
I'm pretty sure that Manticoran realpolitik would involve more regime change and occupation of Masada, because the pr costs of that are less than those of allying with those lunatics.
 
consequences said:
I'm pretty sure that Manticoran realpolitik would involve more regime change and occupation of Masada, because the pr costs of that are less than those of allying with those lunatics.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Something that, I'm pretty sure, after the debacle of THoTQ in canon a whole lot of very angry memoranda are going to've been written in the Havenite operations staff arguing for having done (and the one guy who did argue for it at the time gets to be discretely smug).
 
Captain Orsai said:
Something that, I'm pretty sure, after the debacle of THoTQ in canon a whole lot of very angry memoranda are going to've been written in the Havenite operations staff arguing for having done (and the one guy who did argue for it at the time gets to be discretely smug).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If you really want Manticore to be schemy bastards, provoking an inciting incident to justify an OFS style intervention would be pretty darned trivial. As in just waiting and refusing to nuke Grayson to break their will to resist would probably do it.
 
KNakamura said:
The thing is, the Star Empire of Manticore* does care about other polities. Just, you know, a distant second to their survival.

So yeah, Greyson, which for all it's faults *tries* to be good, will always win to Masada which is evil.

* I read a decent Honor fanfic that basically invalidates all Weber canon post Echoes of Honor. It's pretty good.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Share, please.

consequences said:
I'm pretty sure that Manticoran realpolitik would involve more regime change and occupation of Masada, because the pr costs of that are less than those of allying with those lunatics.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Manticore has allies because Manticore is Not Haven.

The most essential part of being Not Haven is that you don't break treaties. You don't just roll up on planets and conquer them. If Manticore invades Masada with zero provocation, their allies will be worried. If they go in, pretend to be Masada's friend, and then stage a coup, their allies will be terrified.

Captain Orsai said:
Something that, I'm pretty sure, after the debacle of THoTQ in canon a whole lot of very angry memoranda are going to've been written in the Havenite operations staff arguing for having done (and the one guy who did argue for it at the time gets to be discretely smug).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Haven certainly doesn't have problems invading people without a real justification.

consequences said:
If you really want Manticore to be schemy bastards, provoking an inciting incident to justify an OFS style intervention would be pretty darned trivial. As in just waiting and refusing to nuke Grayson to break their will to resist would probably do it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The Manticoran Alliance would not be happy with Manticore inciting an incident to justify an OFS-style intervention. The problem with running an alliance, rather than an empire, is that the little people get a vote.
 
Simon_Jester said:
In the Honorverse, if a category of ship would be impractical because of its great size and being past the point of diminishing returns for mobility, it is simply not constructed. There is no equivalent in their semi-recent history of the Mary Rose or the Vasa, nor should there be. Furthermore, since ships fight with guided missiles and ECM systems rather than with gunpowder cannon at point blank range, single very large ships as "flagships" are a very reckless design concept, asking to be focus-fired into oblivion by massed barrages from the entire enemy fleet.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
To an extent you've just described the way the RMN designed and used it's Ad Astra-class Dreadnoughts and later on Manticore-class Super Dreadnoughts.
 
Didn't Manticore wind up making Masada a protectorate anyway? Cause no one wanted to be their allies and they were a threat to Grayson?
 
Cobalt-60 said:
Didn't Manticore wind up making Masada a protectorate anyway? Cause no one wanted to be their allies and they were a threat to Grayson?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There was an egregious provocation first. Almost as egregious as learning that they were child raping and enslaving pirate fucks going up to the highest levels of the Council of Elders a decade prior.
 
excalibur2008 said:
i.e. The whole trying to nuke Grayson in a hijacked Haven Battlecruiser thing.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's the one from Honor of the Queen. A decade prior there was an attempted diplomatic mission to Masada that ended up preventing the recapture of a ship of slave-wives, the leader of which was sixteen, pregnant, taken from a Grayson civilian ship five years prior, and raped since then in an effort to sire a male child by one of the most powerful men in Masada, and later married into the Manticoran royal family.


Which, you know, fair play if anyone wants to change that as part of an AU with the way it makes Manticore look like some lazy useless ass apathetic fucks and Canon Houseman somehow an even bigger worthless douche, but it is the default for the universe that anyone sufficiently familiar with the source material is going to have as their baseline assumption.
 
SCC said:
To an extent you've just described the way the RMN designed and used it's Ad Astra-class Dreadnoughts and later on Manticore-class Super Dreadnoughts.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yes, and with the, uh, Prince Consort and Crusaders. And it wasn't a very smart design concept and they stopped doing it one generation of ship designs later. The best you can say for it is that it probably saved enough on construction that they were able to scrape another 5% or 10% more hulls in the relevant ship classes out of the same budget. But I really, really question whether that's worth all the obvious downsides of making most of your ships unsuitable for flag and command and control duties, and making it particularly easy for the enemy to deduce which of your ships to blow up in order to decapitate your fleet.
 
Last edited:
MondayBlues said:
Weber does a good job of making Honor work for her prizes, but she's still the genetically enhanced, heavy-world-strong, daughter of two super scientists/doctors, with a rare empathetic cat sidekick who rarely loses a fight and never loses an important one. Compare that to say, the son of a fourteen-year-old prostitute, raised by the state to be a military drone but somehow managed to assemble a functioning moral compass and enough competence to survive two-totalitarian governments and stand against the magic technology people...

Look, I'm just saying that Thomas Theisman might have been a better protagonist.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Tom not destroying the entire Manticoran navy and conquering the place while broadcasting "The Rains of Castamere" during Mission Of Honor suggests that he may well be the most upstanding and moral person in the series. Certainly better than where Her Grace Duchess Steadholder Countess Dame von Harrington ends up.
 
slybrarian said:
Tom not destroying the entire Manticoran navy and conquering the place while broadcasting "The Rains of Castamere" during Mission Of Honor suggests that he may well be the most upstanding and moral person in the series. Certainly better than where Her Grace Duchess Steadholder Countess Dame von Harrington ends up.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Kind of hard to do that when most of Haven's fleet was wrecked trying to actually do it in the previous book.
 
consequences said:
That's the one from Honor of the Queen. A decade prior there was an attempted diplomatic mission to Masada that ended up preventing the recapture of a ship of slave-wives, the leader of which was sixteen, pregnant, taken from a Grayson civilian ship five years prior, and raped since then in an effort to sire a male child by one of the most powerful men in Masada, and later married into the Manticoran royal family.

Which, you know, fair play if anyone wants to change that as part of an AU with the way it makes Manticore look like some lazy useless ass apathetic fucks and Canon Houseman somehow an even bigger worthless douche, but it is the default for the universe that anyone sufficiently familiar with the source material is going to have as their baseline assumption.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

There are two good ways to write stories around this.

One way- the best way, in my opinion- is to have a fun Space Adventure. Realism is overrated. Political details are unnecessary. When you have fun characters doing cool stuff, there's not much need for moral complications.

The other way is to say that Someone Else's Problem is Someone Else's Problem. Unlike Haven, who is dangerous to everyone in the region, Masada is just a problem for Grayson. I'm sure that there are plenty of Manticorans who read about Masada's society with horror and disgust, and even voices that call for military action against these monsters. But Masada isn't dangerous to Manticore, and the Star Kingdom is not Team Manticore Galaxy Police.

Eritrea is by any objective standard one of the worst countries on the planet. However, they don't have nukes, and they aren't particularly dangerous to the global community. When considering whether an offense is likely to be punished, it is more important to look at the identity of the victim than the severity of the crime.
 
dptullos said:
There are two good ways to write stories around this.

One way- the best way, in my opinion- is to have a fun Space Adventure. Realism is overrated. Political details are unnecessary. When you have fun characters doing cool stuff, there's not much need for moral complications.

The other way is to say that Someone Else's Problem is Someone Else's Problem. Unlike Haven, who is dangerous to everyone in the region, Masada is just a problem for Grayson. I'm sure that there are plenty of Manticorans who read about Masada's society with horror and disgust, and even voices that call for military action against these monsters. But Masada isn't dangerous to Manticore, and the Star Kingdom is not Team Manticore Galaxy Police.

Eritrea is by any objective standard one of the worst countries on the planet. However, they don't have nukes, and they aren't particularly dangerous to the global community. When considering whether an offense is likely to be punished, it is more important to look at the identity of the victim than the severity of the crime.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's the piracy that makes it something that conflicts directly with Manticore's established pattern of breaking Silesian members(and if I'm reading the wiki right, occasionally Silesia as a whole) for letting things get out of hand. Sure, they can't conquer the place without the strawman Liberals and isolationist fuckboy Conservatives in parliament losing their shit, but stopping by periodically and blowing up anything even slightly militarized in Masadan space until at the very least the Templetons no longer sit on the Council of Elders would be a public service, nearly free live fire exercises, and jolly good fun old sport.
 
Last edited:
excalibur2008 said:
Kind of hard to do that when most of Haven's fleet was wrecked trying to actually do it in the previous book.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
All Tom had to do was sit back and watch the Solarian Navy attack rather than assist the Manties, forcing them to expend all of their irreplaceable MDMs, then fly in to mop up the survivors and declare victory. Or if he wanted to be ironic, he could have helped destroy the SLN fleet, waited until the royal wedding, and enacted Operation Late Lord Frey.
 
slybrarian said:
All Tom had to do was sit back and watch the Solarian Navy attack rather than assist the Manties, forcing them to expend all of their irreplaceable MDMs, then fly in to mop up the survivors and declare victory. Or if he wanted to be ironic, he could have helped destroy the SLN fleet, waited until the royal wedding, and enacted Operation Late Lord Frey.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Why? Haven doesn't want an empire anymore by that point and knows someone is fucking around with everyone.
 
Apologies for bringing up something several pages back, but I'm still catching up on this thread. (And still figuring out this forum's finer points of etiquette: someone throw something at my head if this is unbearably rude, please.)

Void Stalker said:
It is probably due to the time that has past since I read the books, but my old interpretation was always some sort of UBI that spiraled out of control of and away from what UBI actually does. Some sort of idiocy of you get this UBI but you are not allowed to work.... which is like really? UBI is best used as a support to let people be more comfortable at changing jobs and taking care of health and other important things but Haven at some point got this idea of if you are on the dole you are not supposed to work which is all sorts of wrong. Not working because you cant work is fine, but stopping someone from working is just foolish.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Being as fair as possible to Weber, I think he was inspired by a very real flaw in the US welfare system. The current system can and does discourage people from working, because there is a fairly broad band of wages where working full-time pays too little to match what the welfare system will give you (food stamps, subsidized housing, childcare, healthcare, etc) but pays enough that you're kicked off those welfare programs entirely. Thus there very much are people who could work, but don't, because working would cut them off from the aid they need to survive without allowing them to buy comparable services with wages.

There have been various and sundry attempts by state and federal governments to fix this problem, but those "fixes" tend to be punitive rather than reparative. If you make the services less generous and more difficult, time-consuming, and dehumanizing to access, then fewer people will use them and more people will work for wages (and/or resort to crime), and the fact that those people are worse off is an acceptable price for exposing them to the virtue of work.

This happens because roughly half our political system wants to help the worthy poor and believes it can means-test its way into identifying that class, while the other half thinks that being poor is both an inevitable result of and incontrovertible proof of moral unworthiness.

That's very much not what UBI is supposed to do, hence the "Universal" bit. But Weber's deeply bought into welfare states as moral hazard, and doesn't see the difference. He's a bit more interesting than most modern conservatives, because he doesn't seem to think that anyone "should" be poor. Rather, he thinks that it's okay for any individual to be arbitrarily rich, as long as the standard of living for the not-rich is sufficiently good. But you can't maintain that minimum living standard through government welfare, because Reasons.
 
azarias said:
Being as fair as possible to Weber, I think he was inspired by a very real flaw in the US welfare system. The current system can and does discourage people from working, because there is a fairly broad band of wages where working full-time pays too little to match what the welfare system will give you (food stamps, subsidized housing, childcare, healthcare, etc) but pays enough that you're kicked off those welfare programs entirely. Thus there very much are people who could work, but don't, because working would cut them off from the aid they need to survive without allowing them to buy comparable services with wages.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah I have known quite a few people in this camp that for various reasons really want to work but could not get jobs that would pay enough to match the welfare offered. Which is a really stupid design because how do you expect them to start getting work experience for better paying jobs and getting both off of welfare but also contributing taxes.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I'm now much of the way through the latter story, and what I really like about it is that its point of departure is basically just "what if a bunch of Honor's friends and allies started actually trying at ten-tenths capacity, rather than arbitrarily fading into the background whenever they aren't the focus of a scene?"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Plus it seems to be utterly fucking over the Mesan Alignment who are worse sues than Manticore by a wide margin, so thats a plus.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I'm now much of the way through the latter story, and what I really like about it is that its point of departure is basically just "what if a bunch of Honor's friends and allies started actually trying at ten-tenths capacity, rather than arbitrarily fading into the background whenever they aren't the focus of a scene?"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The big one appears to be what if Nimitz and the other treecats consistently had agency.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top