David Weber
1/1/15
I am utterly sick of this asshole's strawmen and author-tracting tendencies, but the occasional interlude of plot and spehss battles scratches a dirty itch.
I didn't really like the one of his books I read. Should I not look for another?
Pretty much all of his stories have one of two antagonists, sometimes two:
-Strawmen political
-Evil expies of the Catholic Church.
Seriously, it's almost painfully predictable. Guaranteed that any time he has the evil church, there is a faction of free-thinkers who are forced into opposition, supported by a handful of "good" religious officials who are equally tolerant and openminded. The technology is either far-future space or Thirty Years War-esque muskets &c (he has a
serious fetish for the latter). He also has used the "individuals from high-tech society are inserted into Renaissance-era tech civilization, fight against evil church" plot in at least three different series, by my recollection.
If it's not his obsession with evil organized religion and musket&pike era technology, it's Evil Leftists In Space.
There are only a handful of things he touched that I'd recommend:
Path of the Fury is a standalone novel which blends elements of classical mythology with AI-human mind-merging vaguely reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey's
The Ship That Sang and related works. It avoids pretty much all of his bad habits.
Hell's Gate and the sequel
Hell Hath No Fury were co-written with Linda Evans, which (I suspect) is why they avoid the usual problems in his writing. The premise is that various alternate Earths are connected by large portals (hundreds of meters to kilometers in width) which allow unaided travel between them, and that two civilizations exploring through this network run into each other.
One runs on magitek with ~medieval-era mechanical technology, tamed dragons (used like ground-attack craft, interceptors, and troop transports), and a unified but unstable world government, while the other is at around a 1930's level of technology (no aircraft, but substantially better trains and ships and related infrastructure) with psychic powers in (IIRC) something like 20% of the population, split into a number of categories ranging from empathy and telepathy (resulting in a high-speed high-priority telecomms network-equivalent) to mental mapping of terrain and more, but with a still-fragmented international order (dominated by an intercontinental empire which originated in alt-
Ireland of all places).
It's actually a rather interesting conglomeration of ideas which is fairly original and reads well, as such things go. Naturally after the second book there hasn't been a peep about the series for 8 years, presumably because Weber was busy churning out more rubbish.
Those three are worth picking up. Anything else he's written? Don't bother. The Honor Harrington novels can be tolerable if you skim over the sections where he's soapboxing.
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