New Tropes Please!
Posted by andyslack on 13 October 2008
Off Armageddon Reef is the latest David Weber to land on my bookshelf, albeit briefly. I like most of Weber’s stuff, but this one was read, dithered over, then donated to a charity shop. Why? It felt too familiar.
The main character is almost exactly like his signature heroine, Honor Harrington. I like the Harrington novels, although personally I felt once the war with the Republic of Haven was over Weber should’ve moved on to another milieu. Anyway: Here we have another heroically capable female space navy officer. (Incidentally, why are so many military SF protagonists female these days? Harrington, Serrano, Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica… the list goes on. Not complaining; just curious.) I could see no reason for her to be female, other than having to agonise over disguising herself as a bloke fairly early on.
We have the daring defence against alien hordes overrunning mankind (hmm, been there before too, in Weber’s earlier Heirs to Empire series and The Apocalypse Troll, both of which I enjoyed to be fair).
We get the marooned-spacer-introduces-improved-technology riff (which is also seen in Heirs to Empire). This allows Weber to write about the Napoleonic sea warfare he clearly loves, but I’ve just read this idea too often now. Flint and Drake’s An Oblique Approach; Drake and Stirling’s Raj Whitehall stories; Flint’s 1632 – I can go on, how long have you got?
We get the corrupt Church trope (already examined exhaustively in the Honor Harrington series and again in Heirs to Empire).
No, this one just doesn’t do it for me I’m afraid. I shall read the Bahzell and Honor Harrington stories again, and wait for Weber’s next series.
