Books: The Honorverse, and a Passed Master...

I've just finished Weber's The Shadow of Saganami, and I wasn't disappointed. Weber's series in the "Honorverse" trades on the two things that make fiction compelling: Characters you give a darn about, and an internally-consistant fictional setting. He draws his characters with a deft hand, giving most of his heroes human flaws, and making most of his villains more three-dimensional than the standard cardboard cutout eeeevil characters that populate less-deft fiction. His world is internally consistant and richly detailed and, when combined with a cast of believable characters doing believable things,gives a level of plausibility that falls short of nothing less than Tolkein's Middle Earth or Anne McCaffrey's Pern. The best part? By holding off until Shadows came out in paperback, I'm less than a month away from the hardback release of At All Costs.

Now I'm re-reading Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars. Once in a while it's enjoyable to pick up a book from the Golden Age and be reminded why it was so all-fired Golden. No lasers, no space opera, no superdreadnoughts of the spaceways, just a few regular people as the characters and the laws of physics as the bad guy. Schweet.