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Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)

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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by cthia   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 6:41 am

cthia
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Theemile wrote:
cthia wrote:
Good news!

I've been doting on OBS since I joined the forum. It's the greatest work Weber produced. For everyone who wasn't introduced to the Honorverse by way of OBS first. . . I'm sad for you. You don't know what you missed by losing your virginity out of turn.

On piracy: Isaac, piracy also makes sense when it gives you acess to goods that otherwise aren't available to you.

Sometimes piracy makes sense simply for the value of being a pain in the ass to your enemy.

P.S. OBS can make a strong case for the best Space Opera ever written, hands down.


2 quibs - 1st, piracy of an enemy during war is either Privateering or Commerce Raiding depending on the ownership of the unit doing it (and piracy with a letter of Marque or by a naval unit during peace is an Act of War). If you're not doing it officially, you are just a "petty" criminal (enemy or no), and can't truly call the other side the enemy, because in truth, pirates are the enemy of every civilized nation.

2nd - personally, I'd vote for HotQ as one of the Best - It just feels like David was more in his stride writing that and had worked off the rough edges of his style.

Your first quib is true enough, but I wanted to allow for the gray areas that came up in the 'Beowulf - the Karma Suitsya' thread . . . like peace, war, a de facto war or anything else in-between. Like footing the bill on some other navy doing your dirty work for you. Piracy by proxy.

I can understand HotQ being your choice for the blue-ribbon. Personally, I like every single book in the entire series. Yes, even that awful(?) AAC, kzt. The sympathy card I picked out from Hallmark is only meant for you if you didn't hyper in-system via the OBS junction first, before you landed in the HotQ sector of the galaxy.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by cthia   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 7:57 am

cthia
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Here's the thing. If you began the series with OBS, you'd have an intimacy with the characters like none other. Then you'd be part of her innermost circle and you'd be receiving your own RSVP.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 12:41 pm

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George J. Smith wrote:OBS was written first and portrays a time when WH travel was commonplace therefore using "T time" to tie everything together was more practical (Grayson notwithstanding) :lol: , the Manticore Ascendant series is set in a time before the WH junction was discovered and all times/dates were therefore local to Manticore.


Sorry, I didn't mean that the Manticore Ascendant series used Manticoran time-keeping. I meant that OBS did. The first sentence in my reply was related to the other reply in this thread that talked about how one starts with the books.
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by drothgery   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 1:40 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
George J. Smith wrote:OBS was written first and portrays a time when WH travel was commonplace therefore using "T time" to tie everything together was more practical (Grayson notwithstanding) :lol: , the Manticore Ascendant series is set in a time before the WH junction was discovered and all times/dates were therefore local to Manticore.


Sorry, I didn't mean that the Manticore Ascendant series used Manticoran time-keeping. I meant that OBS did. The first sentence in my reply was related to the other reply in this thread that talked about how one starts with the books.


I think it's more likely that RFC (and his co-authors) decided it was less confusing for readers to just normally use Earth years rather than trying to have everyone use local years and then note the conversions.
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 1:46 pm

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drothgery wrote:I think it's more likely that RFC (and his co-authors) decided it was less confusing for readers to just normally use Earth years rather than trying to have everyone use local years and then note the conversions.


Fair point.

Though what confused me more were not the years, but the weeks and months. I could convert the 3-to-5 Manticoran to Terran years easily after the first time, but figuring out how long the months were and how many weeks in each didn't really work until I got to the Appendix.
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 2:45 pm

TFLYTSNBN

It is confession time for me.

OBS was not my favorite Honorverse novel nor was it the first book in the series that I read. To be blunt, if OBS had been my first read of the Honorverse, it would have been my last. Weber was expanding the boundaries by having a woman as a warship commander. The character had to be credible. The focus on the attempted rape by Pavel Young and Honor's cowardice in response to that assault demeaned her. It is the only shower scene that Weber has written that I didn't want to visualize. In retrospect, I realize that Honor was reacting to the realization that she has the same beast lurking inside her that frightened her father into becoming a physician.

OBS also demanded to much suspension of disbelief. I am usually able to accept Weber's handwavium, but TWTSNBN was just to implausible.

I can not recall which Honorverse novel I read first. I remember perusing it and being encouraged to see that Weber had actually calculated acceleration, velocities and distance. I am manical about Sci Fi with rivets.. I believe that it might have been Flag in Exhile or Honor Among Enemies. After reading that novel, I returned to the bookstore to buy the first novel in the series but they were out of OBS so I bought HotQ.

HotQ is definitely my favorite Honorverse novel. The weapons and tactics employed were more credible. Not even a reference to Pavel Young. The portrayal of the attempted assination of Protector Benjamin and his family was excellent. Weber set the stage by portraying Honor's high gee physique and martial arts skill in previous scenes. In retrospect, the Pavel Young encounter makes her homicidal response to finding the surviving prisoners from Madrigal even more credible.

Another confession is that AAC is another one of my favorite novels. The final battle of Manticore offended my sense of plausibility. Yanekov had been employing Apollo with only quadruple patterns (24 pods) suggesting that the number of FTL control links was limited. Then Honor launches hundreds of Apollo pods in a single salvo. I accepted the BoM after Weber explicitly revealed how capable Apollo was even without FTL communications. I will piss people off by mentioning that Honor's decision to tube her baby then the scene where she links telepathically with him while he is in the incubator appealed to me politically as well as emotionally.

Shadow of Saganami was another of my favorite Honorverse novels. The shower scene with Abby Hearnes in In the Service of the Sword had certainly made her character more appealing to me but it was the ground combat with Mateo against the pirates that made her a favorite. The reference to her standing on the balcony of her father's palace watching the battle as Honor Harrington took on a BC with her CA just clinched my connection to the character.
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by kzt   » Sun Dec 22, 2019 4:07 pm

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HotQ is the best book in the series. AAC, aka 'That Awful Book' isn't. Way too many character actions driven only by 'the almighty plot demands that you must be a moron here',

AAC also needed an editor wielding a chain saw through the parts before BoM.
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by George J. Smith   » Mon Dec 23, 2019 5:27 am

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You have to remember that RFC had to rewrite AAC to take into account that Honor was not going to die in BOM.

Only RFC knows what the book would have been like if he had not needed to have another favourite character die instead of Honor.
.
T&R
GJS

A man should live forever, or die in the attempt
Spider Robinson Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) A voice is heard in Ramah
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by Jonathan_S   » Thu Dec 26, 2019 1:24 pm

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cthia wrote:Sometimes piracy makes sense simply for the value of being a pain in the ass to your enemy.
That'd be commerce raiding.

Piracy has to be financially self-supporting. (Or at least appear sufficiently so to bring in a constant stream of pirates).
Commerce raiding, being military funded, can be a money loser as long as the funding government is happy with the impact on the enemy that their funding is achieving.

(Plus it can be harder to defend against commerce raiding because the raiders usually have more resources than pirates and when it comes down to it they're almost as happy to just destroy your shipping as to capture it. So you have to keep them out of attack range, not just keep them from being able to board and seize a ship)
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Re: Space piracy (and OBS named SFIA book of the month)
Post by cthia   » Thu Dec 26, 2019 1:36 pm

cthia
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Jonathan_S wrote:
cthia wrote:Sometimes piracy makes sense simply for the value of being a pain in the ass to your enemy.
That'd be commerce raiding.

Piracy has to be financially self-supporting. (Or at least appear sufficiently so to bring in a constant stream of pirates).
Commerce raiding, being military funded, can be a money loser as long as the funding government is happy with the impact on the enemy that their funding is achieving.

(Plus it can be harder to defend against commerce raiding because the raiders usually have more resources than pirates and when it comes down to it they're almost as happy to just destroy your shipping as to capture it. So you have to keep them out of attack range, not just keep them from being able to board and seize a ship)

See this post.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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