October 17, 2002

Review of War of Honor by David Weber After a wait of two years since the Ashes of Victory, previous book the Honor Harrington Series, Baen Books has released the 10th book in the series, War of Honor. Most of this 869-page book is devoted to describing the increasing tensions between the Kingdom of Manticore and its surrounding neighbours. The first area is tensions between Manticore and the Republic of Haven, which is the democratic successor to the People’s Republic of Haven, which Manticore decisively defeated in Ashes of Victory and is now partially occupying in this book. Honor’s character has for the most part no role in this plot, as she is dealing more with increasing tensions between Manitcore and the Chinese-Germanic, Andermani Empire who see Manitcore as standing in the way of their interstellar expansion. None of the sides is portrayed as evil; Haven is led for the most part by sympathetic characters that have been shown in earlier to be "good guys" through their dealings with Honor Harrington. As a result one is hoping for a peaceful resolution to their tensions with Manticore which is now lead by a greedy group of aristocrats. However Honor Harrington is an Admiral in the Manticore space fleet and so her people are portrayed as evil, only their current government. The Andermani Empire’s motivation is less clear but their expansion can be seen as way to bring peace to an area plagued by pirates and to protect their borders. With this multitude of competing sides, the novel’s focus on the growth of interstellar tensions that can led to war, rather that actual fighting is interesting for the most part but does suffer from its extreme length. This book will appeal most to previous fans who are accused to David Weber’s infodump style of writing, and also to Tom Clancy fans, War of Honor is very similar to his later novels in which there is a great deal of introduction and set-up before the book’s action. War of Honor includes a number of references to events in and characters from the previously published story collection, Changer of Worlds. This collection and all other Honor Harrington novel plus a number of novels by other Baen authors are included as electronic books in a CD-ROM bound with the novel. Provided you like reading electronic books from a monitor, PDA or other device, this CD-ROM is a very good deal. 11:52:01 PM

A new form of spam is occurring, popups using the Windows Messenger Service (not Instant Messenger – it’s an OS service) on machines that leave the service open to outside callers. Your best bet if you use the Internet (if not how are you reading this?) is to install a personal firewall or active the one Microsoft includes in Windows XP. 11:50:03 PM