Off Armageddon Reef

I like David Weber novels, even though they are terrible, in the same way that I like action movies. You more or less know what is going to happen, and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys in the first page or scene, and the dialogue is vastly different from anything any person might ever actually say, but the enjoyment comes in watching it all come together, with the occasional unexpected plot twist thrown in for fun.

I just read “Off Armageddon Reef.” It has some reasonable SF tropes, all three types of Weber characters—noble, misguided, and perfidious—good battle scenes, fast action, stilted dialogue, almost no sex (though there is a somewhat odd repressed hetero/homosexual (hey, it’s SF) relationship which Weber may or may not have intended). What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that on a brand new world, created with what amounts to a de novo society without technology or memory of Earth (several plot points there), he has created a society of kings and nobles, with titles of nobility, etc., which is essentially identical to the society in his Honor Harrington novels, and is closely based on the English nobility. The Harrington novels are basically the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars set in space, so copying the English nobility was perfectly fine. But in this book he’s done it all over again, with no excuse at all. He doesn’t even try to explain why the de novo society might have developed this way.

Niven and Pournelle did the same thing in “The Mote in God’s Eye,” but they at least took a page to explain why, and at least their characters knew Earth history. Weber’s characters don’t, and he doesn’t explain.

Obviously Weber’s books require considerable suspension of disbelief at the best of times, but for this book I couldn’t quite manage it.