I wouldn't be surprised if there were some legal difficulties in importing earth cats anywhere considering the historical danger they tend to pose as an invasive species.
Let's Read: David Weber's Honor Harrington
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So Nike isn't being refitted, she's being fitted out, she's new build, and hasn't even passed her builders trials yet.
As for Mike's heritage, maybe, but also note that this tells us about her family, the Wintons, Mike is a cousin to the current queen and I think 5th in line for the throne ATM and she's black, as is all her family on that side, which I think says a LOT about David's politics.
As for Mike's heritage, maybe, but also note that this tells us about her family, the Wintons, Mike is a cousin to the current queen and I think 5th in line for the throne ATM and she's black, as is all her family on that side, which I think says a LOT about David's politics.
10ebbor10
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Later books reveal that that particular family trait is the result of genetic engineering, making the Winton genes dominant even though they're legally obligated to marry a commoner.
I think earth cats will be cruely defeated like SLN superdreadnoughts being slaughtered by the manti podpoopers.
…That is some Grade- A Metal Gear bullshit!
Like, who the fuck came up with that kind of genetic manipulation, and how did it get popular acceptance?
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I thought at the time and still think that it was Weber trying to make clear "Yes, black people exist in the future, in fact they are among the Upper Class".
YMMV on effectiveness.
David Weber has a shit ton of unconscious biases and cringe politics, but he does try pretty hard not to be racist. Doesn't always succeed, much like he often fails in not being sexist, but tries. There's a later book when a discussion of race-based slavery comes up (to contrast with the genetic engineering-based slavery practiced in the Honorverse) and some Manticoran is STUNNED to learn that once upon a time the Queen Herself might have been considered an inferior person just because of her skin color.
10ebbor10
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Some dude on old Earth, presumably, because the modifications were done upon the CEO who founded Manticore's colonization mission, nearly a millenia in the past. As for why it's accepted, that's just a thing in Honorverse. Human genetic modification is kinda common, and disliked solely because it's used as an excuse to reintroduce slavery.
In fact, Honor herself is also genetically modified, gaining increased strength, 99% percentile intelligence, as well as an unfortunate resistance to regenerative therapy.
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Yeah. Sometimes when you read a Weber book you can feel him trying to be enlightened-by-boomer-standards.
Like a lot of boomers, his awareness of how he's ditched the really, spectacularly overt racial supremacism and extreme misogynistic sexism that were commonplace in his youth kind of blinds him to all the other problems with the stuff he believes.
Speaking from the profession, we try, we really do. Part of the problem is that when you're teaching a bunch of eleven year olds, it's kind of hard to reliably teach them to do more than rote. Directed abstract reasoning aimed at solving practical problems in a realistic manner isn't always an eleven year old child's strong point, to put it mildly.
Then those eleven year olds turn thirteen and you've basically run out of arithmetic to teach them, so you start teaching the skill set that would let them engage with more complex problems and actually put that arithmetic to work for something more important than pure bean-counting... and suddenly you're cranking up the abstract reasoning requirements a lot.
And while teaching kids any single new skill is not that hard, teaching them "to reason abstractly" is a very difficult thing by comparison.
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One of the things I realized with hindsight is that while there is a lot of issues in the Honorverse, the fact they're 'not as bad as they could have been' is somehow presented as something which is deserving of praise, like they want a prize for basic decency.
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The problem is that "not as bad as they could have been," spoken in 2024 in the left-leaning young-leaning community of SV, is often "markedly better than many of its contemporary competitors and much better than most of its inspirations and source material" in the context of actually published works of fiction that went into print in the 1990s.
At some point we're engaged in a pointless masturbatory exercise. Adopting standards by which we are entitled, nay, required to denounce essentially everything that ever existed significantly before the present day, or nearly everything written by people much older than we are, seems kind of pointless. It may make us feel better about how enlightened we are, but I don't think it actually helps us understand literature, or for that matter the moral basis on which we condemn the things we're denouncing.
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There are plenty of issues with plot and pacing we can criticize the series for instead, not to mention the endless "Fire Missiles/Fire Counter-Missiles/Fire Counter-Counter-Missiles" etc.
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