this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
175 points (96.3% liked)
Science Fiction
13734 readers
88 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The Honor Harrington series actually has some interesting tech disparities, besides being pretty good/exciting military science fiction.
In the first book, there are Bronze-Age-ish aboriginals.
In the second book, you see several human polities. Harrington interacts with less technologically/culturally developed groups of humans, and there are frictions and opportunities coming from the more advanced polity.
Harrington's polity generally remains the most technologically advanced group. There's later interaction with human polities who had thought they were the top dog, in terms of military power.
Just to note, it's a big series that gets somewhat too sprawling in the later books. The earlier books are Age of Sail (IN SPACE!!!) adventures, which transforms into a wide-ranging interstellar war driven by technology change. Weber's analogy is sailing ships -> steam ironclads -> Dreadnaught battleships -> WW2 radar directed gunnery / aircraft carriers. Not everyone is at the same tech level.
I ended up hating the books by the end. It felt like no one was keeping Weber's need to info dump in check. He also let his tendency to write bad guys with no redeeming qualities get out of hand. It felt like a complete drag at the end as when the political situation escalated the tech gap meant that there wasn't as much risk for Manticore.
Age of Sail (In space!) is an apt description since Weber directly paid homage to the Horatio Hornblower books he modeled the initial books off of by giving his main character the same initials.