So, a friend recommended this sci-fi series. He said it was good space opera and technology and tactics were not only self-consistent but even ground in actual physics (read: pretentiously "hard" military sci-fi). He also said the first two (out of at least ten) books are fully and freely available from the publisher's website. The following is what I have to say about "On Basilisk Station" & "The Honor of the Queen".
It's not given away for free because it's so addicting you'll immediately go and buy the rest of the books from Amazon. It's given away for free because of fierce competition from FFN. Seriously.
The only criticism I had for Lois McMaster Bujold's excellent Vorkosigan Saga was that it was too soft to be read by the hard core sci-fi audience (read: boys). That's how I explain it being so unknown among the sci-fi readers I talk to — it's treated like romance fiction, sometimes legitimately and justifiably so. Lois only mentions how spaceships, weapons, propulsion systems, communications, etc. work when necessary. And now I'm sure she's doing the right thing, too: Weber spews (besides too many characters' names and titles) accelerations, orbits, vectors, relative velocities, ranges and all kind of numbers and units all the time, but I'm not going to sit down with Mathematica and my high school physics textbook to run his numbers. It's dull, and it's the only thing he has working for him. The rest of the stuff that make up a good book, like: plot, characters, dialogue, subtlety, style - he has none of those.
The books have a girl-power feeling to them, which is forced and thus counter-productive. The heroine is not Cordelia Naismith by a long shot. In fact, and I ask to forgive my slight here, I think the future Admiral Lady Dame Duchess Honor Harrington is a butch. Also, she enjoys eating the cake and having it too a bit too often: She has forty-five years of experience, but she looks like a college student. She is from a high-gravity planet making her very strong, but she's also tall and graceful. She is self-consciously not pretty, but she possesses a unique beauty that makes her attractive to interesting men. She's bad at math, but is a gifted 3D tactician who can plot intricate trajectories by instinct.
The author's excuse for Regency-era social and political structure in a well-into-the-future galactic empire (which has never had a Time Of Isolation) is as plausible as any other, and the introduction of a six-legged empathic killer cat of plot-device a reasonably original twist (though she appears to love her kitty more than people), but I don't even know what to think of the heroine's naval career closely resembling Admiral Nelson's (I noticed that by myself).
Had it been published as a fanfic, I'd have said "nice try" and "props for having it proofread", but really, it feels like the bad Hollywood-movie version of some good books I've read. Don't waste your time.
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