Best giant space battle series in recent years?

[jollyreaper]

The simple argument is she's too perfect. A moment of awesome here or there is fine but she has crowning moments of badassery every time she steps out the door.

Now it's possible to do a character like that proper. Alucard from Hellsing is just as wank but the panache he's written with sells the idea. The whole formula is the enemy thinks he has Alucard's measure and his bloody scraps reform into his body and he's now able to unlock a higher power level to defeat the enemy. Part of why this works is we have no idea just how high his power can scale. We are only seeing bits of it.

Everyone's opinion of a work is subjective but you see enough people reacting the same way, maybe they have a point.

Ultimately every working artist is trying to sell their material. If its stupid and sells it isn't just stupid, it's profitable. My biggest gripe is always when a work is good enough to get my attention and the focus/quality changes. Either they've run out of ideas or have stopped trying and are just chasing in. But if it's stupid and sells, someone must be buying it.

[Eleas]

I think I can see what Thanas' greater point is: that certain authors lose their perspective and, in so doing, lose the ability to recognize what constitutes actual and dramatically viable conflict.

Conflict, when narratively appropriate, isn't just about two opposing forces clashing. When you want drama, the idea is to create opposing camps and invest the audience in them (preferably in more than one side). You furthermore have to make the conflict meaningful by presenting meaningful stakes (emotional or otherwise) and by being honest (i.e. by the author not pulling important factors out of his ass, relying on luck, or introducing unknown factors after the fact to skew the conclusion in a favorable direction). The stakes energize the conflict, and honesty grounds it in plausibility so that disbelief can be suspended. Without stakes the conflict will be tepid: without plausibility it will be vacuous. Both are vital.

So when authors sneer at these restrictions (as Weber, for instance, has grown to do), the result tends to be varying degrees of awful. When an author consistently does so in favor of a given character (Richard Rahl is another brilliantly effluvient example of such) or creed or polity, then that character or creed or polity will invite scorn because that favor is definitionally unearned. And when that happens, the author might as well just write "My team is handsomest and dey win!1!", which at least has the virtue of brevity.


*checks watch*

Also, Happy New Year!

[Thanas]

you know what? I think we've come way off what your original complaint actually was. So since I have no fucking clue what you're complaining about (other than grinding the axe of how much you hate Honor as a character, which I realize is your opinion and I grasped LONG ago and I am fine with) you go through the freaking novel and find the exact damn passages that have you so fucking pissed off. I literally give up trying to figure out what your point beyond 'I don't like Honor' is.

The point is that she is so very much wanked that she might as well have vampiric regen powers as well as all her others. In fact, vampiric regen powers is the only viable explanation there is why somebody with two broken ribs suddenly can pull off slicing through the upper body of a person and use enough force to cut their head off with the next blow. Any such maneuver requires a lot of upper body movement and the combination of the two even require twisting. Something you cannot pull off really when you got two broken ribs. And even if you can (and pull it off on three hours of sleep to boot) then chances are you are so sluggish that you should not be able to match the speed of a master swordsmen. What is even worse is that Weber goes out of his way to hype up all the heavy difficulties there allegedly are - and then just handwaves them away. Because Honor's willpower is so strong she can suddenly forget all the pain. Because she is filled with righteousness she can suddenly twist and turn her upper body with broken ribs. Because screw physical impossibilities.

It is at the point where restrictions do not matter because she is Honor and will succeed no matter what. She does not suffer any setbacks - even those she does suffer are not long for the world or turn into even greater strengths. Spoiler

She lost her hand? Fine, now she gets a stronger steel arm with inbuilt secret weaponry. She lost an eye? Who cares, her new implant allows her capabilities beyond the typical eye. She gets captured? No problem, she suddenly escapes with half a million captives and destroys an enemy armada in the process. And gets a Dukedom + Admiral rank in reward. Her treecat loses psychic ability? No problem, suddenly they develop sign language.

A lot of that could be handwaved away. But whereas Horatio Hornblower - the one who she is based on - was a real character, she is merely a block of superlatives that do not make any sense or create any drama.


Or, in short:

The simple argument is she's too perfect. A moment of awesome here or there is fine but she has crowning moments of badassery every time she steps out the door.

and

I think I can see what Thanas' greater point is: that certain authors lose their perspective and, in so doing, lose the ability to recognize what constitutes actual and dramatically viable conflict.

this.

[darth_timon]

It's true that Honor's character seems to be single-handedly affecting the lives of millions (if not billions, given the political ramifications of her actions). I thoroughly enjoy the Honorverse books but the earlier books were undoubtedly the best ones. 'On Balisk Station' was a great book, and got me hooked, whilst 'The Honor of the Queen' gave us a slightly more vulnerable Honor, who made, in hindsight, some strategic errors. That side to her character seems to have gone completely.

I would have also liked her relationship with White Haven be more complicated. The fact that he was already married should have been more of an issue. Instead, his wife was not only perfectly ok with their relationship, but had no qualms about her husband also marrying Honor!

Ok, so that's going a little off-topic... back on topic, I think the 'battle' (one-sided slaughter might be a more appropriate term) in the most recent HH book was a bit stale- it just seems that side A throws better tech at side B, and tactics no longer matter. I'd sorely love to see this trend change.

[Batman]

There's like 19 million reasons to decry Honor as a Mary Sue, and I agree with most of them, I just don't think that for want of a better word swordfight is a valid one nor is she the worst ever (if we leave the realms of SciFi for a moment, I'd argue that dubious honor goes to me.)
Not only is that woman borderline telepathic, she is up against an opponent who knows he cant lose, because she's a woman, a harlot, and God is on his side. Now I do not fence out-of-universe so I'm not competent to to comment on how it should have evolved if they ever got to fencing, but Honor having the psychological advantage on an opponent that already considers her beaten due to her injuries and the fact that she's a mere woman, on top of thinking she could never have beaten him in the first place (quite likely with good reason) to the extent that it allowed her to get in that first and essentially final strike does not seem all that far-fetched to me.
'I agree her doing it after being shot down was massively overboard, but Honor NEVER beat Steadholder Burdette in a swordfight (which she would inevitably have lost). She exterminated him before it ever came to one.

[Thanas]

Bullcrap. A strike being met by a counterstrike is the most basic element in a swordfight. What is even more wankish is that it is physically impossible to execute that maneuver with broken ribs.

[Batman]

It's most certainly not. It's merely extremely painful. And Burdette never had the time for a counterstrike, because Honor's first swing incapacitated him. You're assuming that just because he was the superior swordsman (which I'm not debating) he'd have acted like one...when his opponent was not only a mere female, but a heathen whore to boot, and one seriously wounded already. Even without Honor's latent psychic abilities that might have been enough overconfidence for her to get in the one shot she needed.

[Stark]

Even if he was overconfident, the reflexes he has spent years refining should have been enough. It wasn't, because its terrible writing.

I don't think this is the most egregious case (or the most relevant to the space battle element), but defending it is dumb. Super Mary Sue wins against Impossible Odds... yet again. Snore. Drama requires jeopardy, and lots of bad writing is just setting up straw men to be knocked over by the big strong hero.

However, what about the worst element of science fiction battles - poor spatial definition? In many battles, the sense of where anything is, where it's going, and what this means is extremely poor. Many authors simply rely on jumping from point to point ('the spaceship Winalot' and 'the dark moon of Zoltan' for instance) without creating a strong sense of where anything is and how this impacts the jeopardy. This is shared by bad movies as well, but in the written word it is far more important because there is literally nothing else. However, vague spatial relationships allow very easy super cop-out victories, because the cavalry of winning can show up from literally anywhere and for any reason.

[Eleas]

It's most certainly not. It's merely extremely painful. And Burdette never had the time for a counterstrike, because Honor's first swing incapacitated him. You're assuming that just because he was the superior swordsman (which I'm not debating) he'd have acted like one...when his opponent was not only a mere female, but a heathen whore to boot,

Okay, I didn't want to belabor David Weber any further, but... Jesus, this is just painful to read.

1. Someone ITT has never fenced and does not comprehend what it does to reflexive responses. If you enter the field without a basic ready stance, you are not a fencer. If you do, however, then even an exceptional fencer's first attack is unlikely to connect due to the basic physics of reach - the attacker has to approach within the range necessary for a strike to connect (and such an approach would be plainly visible even had the enemy been an amoeba), then make a comparatively large motion against the minute motion necessary to deflect a strike. The idea that someone trained in fencing (which emphasizes lightning speed and precision over killing blows) would fail to defend in such a manner goes well beyond absurdity. It wouldn't be a conscious choice - it would be like a person failing to hold a fork properly because the person sitting across the table was a (gasp!) woman.
2. Which brings me to my next point: that Weber leans on a kind of frothing caricature of rabid bigotry as his go-to crutch when it comes to his usual type of enemy. It's always a case of the villain (fiendish that he is) harboring undeserved rage against the gloury of the main character. This hatred is all-encompassing, incoherent, always debilitating, and written in a paint-by-numbers manner. You can always recognize a Weber villain by his inner monologues as he attempts to outdo Snidely Whiplash, and it's never a justified anger either, because that would introduce shades of grey into a narrative that abhors such things. The reason is plain: in the case of this sneering villain archetype, Weber never has any intention of representing his antagonists' motivations in a fair manner, and he seems painfully wedded to the notion that purity of intent (nobility and righteous fury, if you will) must ultimately be the deciding factor. Sadly, that's brought him to the point of feeling no need to justify how Honor goes about winning: he simply sums up all the overwhelming odds against her, then declares that she wins anyway. That's the antithesis of good writing.
3. My final point is simply to restate my earlier words: a scene in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion is not a dramatic conflict any more than saying "my guys win again, yay for my guys!!!" would be, and removing any shades of gray only compounds the error. Hell, Rob Roy's final scene has one of the most despicably vile villains in film history facing off the square-jawed and likable Robin Roy McGregor, and Cunningham is still vastly more sympathetic and likable than the cardboard-and-straw cipher Burdette.

So, how would a competent author go about things? Well, if we contrast this sham of dueling to, for instance, a conflict from Peter o'Donnell's Modesty Blaise series (the one where she faces Wenczel, the best rapier fencer in the world), a few things become immediately apparent:

• Modesty is established as an extraordinarily capable hand-to-hand fighter, expert in a plethora of unarmed and armed martial arts. The specific novel furthermore starts off by going into detail on how she practices with the sword under a renowned master who is exasperated that she won't accept a win that trades her safety for scoring a point. o'Donnell, who knows not just fighting but drama, thus starts by laying down the groundwork and the axioms of the conflict long before Wenczel even enters the scene. He even foreshadows the method she uses to later defeat Wenczel.
• Wenczel is still better than Modesty. His skill level is simply ridiculously far above hers when it comes to the sword. He is utterly lethal and if o'Donnell had made Modesty make some puerile attempt at catching him off-guard, that would have been the end of the series right there. Why? Because (as a general rule, at least) o'Donnel knows the value of being honest about the stakes.
• Wenczel is in love with the idea of the rapier itself. He considers killing by the single thrust to be the epitome of grace, and this is demonstrated in the novel where Modesty sees it.
• Modesty is already established as not being the world's foremost practitioner of any art, but an exceptional generalist, with an unprecedented ability to find the weak point of the enemy.
• Wenczel and Modesty are plainly on a collision course, and Wenczel is eventually given the opportunity of forcing Modesty to duel him on his preferred terms.

These are the stakes and the cards: they're all presented up-front. Everything is defined beforehand, meaning we have the aforementioned energy and grounding that an honest conflict relies upon. So, given all that, can you guess how she prevails?

Why, she engages him, barely surviving as he toys with her and she marvels at his skill, all the while waiting until Wenczel has her at his mercy. At the moment of the final perfect lunge which he so worships... she twists her body so that the rapier pierces not the heart but to its side, jamming it into her vital organs but not immediately killing her... and the instant in which Wenczel's blade is trapped in her body, with him horrified that his triumphant single-thrust victory must now devolve into gory slaughter, she has her opening and strikes the killing blow.


Yes, I know I'm belaboring something with little relevance to the OP, but these principles apply to space battles as well. Case in point, Battle of Endor.

[Batman]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Yes, his reflexes should have been enough...against somebody he actually considered a serious opponent. I personally find it completely believable that Burdette's belief that no woman, especially no woman without serious training in the sword arts, not to mention one who was at the edge of her endurance could actually be a threat to him in any way shape or form, was enough to give her that one opening that allowed her to kill him before the swordfight she'd have inevitably lost ever happened.

[Stark]

Look, its a bad example that Thanas likes to bring up because he understands whats involved, but seriously, defending it is stupid. You may never have been in a fight or learned how to fight, but what you are saying is absurd. The only way this could happen is if he just stood there snickering at the audience or whatever, in which case she basically killed a defenceless man.

Seriously, his spinal reflexes and muscle memory would have blocked the attack before his bigoted brain even registered it was coming. Move on to other examples of poor writing, because there's no way to fix this (and fixating on it is silly when there are so many 'better' examples).

[Batman]

And I'd agree with you if there ever had been a fight. No way she could have stood up to him. Getting the drop on him because of 'woman, inherently inferior, and damaged goods to boot'? All too easily.

[Stark]

No matter how many times you say it, you don't get less wrong. Its time to move on; surely people have more bones to pick with HH than such an easy target? Maybe even a SPACE battle! :V

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Batman, I fenced for a few years, and when we were at work I reflexively blocked one of my friends thrusting a damn paint roller at me. I didn't expect to be in a fight at all, let alone a sham of a fight, and yet my instincts took over.

You're wrong; there's no "agree to disagree". It's just dumb. It's okay, though, people are allowed to like dumb things, especially if they can recognise the flaws.

[Batman]

Not a comparable situation. Your instincts took over in a situation you knew wouldn't be a serious fight from the word go. Burdette and Honor were, except Burdetette was hopelessly overconfident on account of 'Yay! God is on my side' and 'Women fail by default' and again, Honor didn't beat him in a swordfight-she essentially killed him with the first stroke. Yes, a fighter of Burdette's calibre who actually took her seriously would likely have eaten Honor for breakfast. I'm saying Burdette's arrogance allowed her to get that first and decisive strike in.

[Stark]

Your ignorance is showing. I mean, the author's shows too (since the entire scene only exists to wank out his ridiculous understanding of combat and fencing in particular), but seriously. The quoted passage says he was waiting for her to attack so he could win; he just wasn't ready for the COLD STEEL OF HERO STRONG because how can you be ready for a plot device?

To be honest I think you've taken his arrogance (which is less important to the passage than Honor's hilarious MIND POWERZ) and read way too much into it. If he thought he had a no-risk win, why warm up? Why do the sensible thing and wait for her to make a mistake? If he was a super arrogant bigot, surely he would have simply stabbed her right in the face the first chance he got?

In short your understanding of martial arts is broken and your appreciation of the scene also appears to be wrong.

[Batman]

My understanding of martial arts is essentially nonexistant and that whole passage essentially shows he blinked before she did, nothing more.

[Stark]

So why are you stonewalling people explaining why this is stupid to you? Why not just shrug and say 'whatever' and shut the fuck up? Is it your plan to look as stupid as possible?

To be honest I'm glad Thanas posted the passage because while its fucking terrible it suggests to me that most people who mention it have a very specific interpretation of events that doesn't appear to be what's written at all. Heavily wounded novice defeats swordmaster through the power of UNSEEING POSER EYES? Yeah, pretty terrible. Not a big deal, but awful.

Not in space either. Surely all the HH fans can talk about stuff with spaceships and the amazingly contrived victories against 'huge odds'.

[jollyreaper]

Eleas got it right with the shortcoming of the typical Weber villain.

It reminds me of what Ringo did with some of his generic baddies in posleen, or Feank Miller. The generic contemptible liberal, a self-hating white who hates other white people and worships dirty minorities while also condemning military men for being brutal killers, then screaming that they aren't protecting him from threats. Extra bonus point if the threat is a minority. And they'll also have internal monologues about how politically corrupt they are and how they're going to steal because they're so liberal and corrupt.

When a villain, motivation is completely one-note, all the interesting character stuff has to come from other characters. Does the villain's second in command have second thoughts? If the baddies are all bad, then the only interesting stuff comes from the good guys.

"I win because virtue" as mentioned above means nothing is earned, that's why it sucks. Good will always triumph because evil is dumb. Yawn. And it's also related to the dumbness of battle rage where the emotional purity and desire of the hero actually buffs the performance of the weapon. It's not merely a question of getting whether a shot hits, the weapon will do more damage because hero is in holy badass rage mode.

[Thanas]

It's most certainly not. It's merely extremely painful.

In most duel cultures a duel was held back if one fighter was injured until he was ready. Why? Because any real fencer would know the massive advantage extreme pain gives you. And yes, it is impossible for a human being not on crystal meth or painkillers to execute that move due to the extreme pain.

Outside of ridiculous action movies where people shrug of gunshot wounds like nothing you cannot fight with broken ribs. If you don't believe me, here's a tryout. Have somebody bruise your ribs. A few good hits with a knuckleduster should do it. Then try to even move your body upwards. For bonus points, try it while crouching down and holding a 1-2kg weight in your hand. Heck, I got my ribs bruised (not broken, bruised) and I hardly could lift anything. Heck, I couldn't even really sleep because moving the upper body was freaking painful.

And Burdette never had the time for a counterstrike, because Honor's first swing incapacitated him.

Actually, it was more than that. She was soo ridiculously fast (with broken ribs) that she:
a) stepped into his reach
b) swung the katana upwords and sliced his torso
and then decapitated him. That are two-three moves, moves that require a lot of body moving.

You're assuming that just because he was the superior swordsman (which I'm not debating) he'd have acted like one

That's right, I expect a superior swordsman to actually have reflexes of a superior swordsman.

Someone ITT has never fenced and does not comprehend what it does to reflexive responses. If you enter the field without a basic ready stance, you are not a fencer. If you do, however, then even an exceptional fencer's first attack is unlikely to connect due to the basic physics of reach - the attacker has to approach within the range necessary for a strike to connect (and such an approach would be plainly visible even had the enemy been an amoeba), then make a comparatively large motion against the minute motion necessary to deflect a strike. The idea that someone trained in fencing (which emphasizes lightning speed and precision over killing blows) would fail to defend in such a manner goes well beyond absurdity. It wouldn't be a conscious choice - it would be like a person failing to hold a fork properly because the person sitting across the table was a (gasp!) woman.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Yes, his reflexes should have been enough...against somebody he actually considered a serious opponent. I personally find it completely believable that Burdette's belief that no woman, especially no woman without serious training in the sword arts, not to mention one who was at the edge of her endurance could actually be a threat to him in any way shape or form, was enough to give her that one opening that allowed her to kill him before the swordfight she'd have inevitably lost ever happened.

Batman, I fenced for a few years, and when we were at work I reflexively blocked one of my friends thrusting a damn paint roller at me. I didn't expect to be in a fight at all, let alone a sham of a fight, and yet my instincts took over.

Not a comparable situation. Your instincts took over in a situation you knew wouldn't be a serious fight from the word go. Burdette and Honor were, except Burdetette was hopelessly overconfident on account of 'Yay! God is on my side' and 'Women fail by default' and again, Honor didn't beat him in a swordfight-she essentially killed him with the first stroke.

Your entire argument is basically "people shut off their instincts and reflexes and forget basic safety procedures they have been taught for year when they enter a duel they expect to win". Do you actually realize how stupid you sound?

[Stark]

I was interested to read that despite his moustache-twirling he seemed to be taking it pretty seriously. He followed form and he was rude, and somehow people have taken this to mean 'he wasn't even paying attention at all despite the paragraphs about nothing but him paying attention to things'.

How long have people been trying to explain away a scene that is admittedly lame, but not very important? And why can't someone post passages of the same sort of shit involving spaceships?

[jollyreaper]

It's possible for a trained fighter to be caught off guard. It's possible for a single person to make an uncharacteristic mistake, a forced error. But those space battles really show how unlikely things are in the series.

The interesting fights are the ones that are subject to human influence. With a different general, maybe the battle could have been won. But sometimes there's just not a damn thing even the best commander could do, not in the situation he's been thrust into.

Battles can become downright deterministic, especially with highly automated weapons. It can severely minimize the impact of the individual in the outcome of the battle.

If she were put in charge of the Yamato on the final voyage, we could rest assured of a Japanese victory, not just in the battle but for the entire war.

[Stark]

I think thats a symptom of bad fiction. If the battles are deterministic because numbers and megatons and shit, the focus of the drama shouldn't be on what Space Ironclad is exploded by Admiral Freelancer, it should be on what xyz means or how abc affects the people involved or what jfk tells us about human nature etc etc.

You can have dramatic and interesting battles where the outcome isn't in doubt ... by not making the jeopardy the outcome of the battle.

[jollyreaper]

That's the challenge. Someone who grew up on romances wants to see larger than life heroes, personal courage, glorious this and that. If someone dies, he needs to do so in a clean way that gives him a few minutes for a stirring death speech, etc.

Contrast that with total war and all that romance goes away. Men die like dogs and for no good reason.

The problem with the Honor setting is he's trying to replicate the romance of the age of sail but borrowing many details from modern navies and modern experience.

Weber stopped doing the personal stories that gave weight and feel to the story. Those little touches make you care when a compartment is blown out to space. But the feel of the last one of these I read basically has the feel of an Honor RPG. The whole world only exists for her story and things are built for her gratification and achievement and is a given because we get to exult in her greatness.

You know, I just twigged on something. This is Jack Ryan disease. Early Clancy was very readable but he was trying to write in a reality-based world but the contrivances became more fantastic and Ryan is now a magical author avatar. His early work remains quite readable even today. The America über alles jingoism wasn't quite so pronounced.

[mr friendly guy]

Isn't Honor supposed to be genetically bred to live in a high gravity world? She is stronger than a normal human, so can't that account for some of her faster speed in the duel which can compensate for her inferior skill.