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Crown of Slaves | Rating | |
| C | |||
| David Weber and Eric Flint | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The "Honorverse" | Jayne's Intelligence Review: The Royal Manticoran Navy, Jayne's Intelligence Review: The Havenite Republican Navy, On Basilisk Station, The Honor of the Queen, The Short Victorious War, Field of Dishonor, Flag in Exile, Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor, Ashes of Victory, War of Honor, At All Costs, More Than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, The Service of the Sword, Crown of Slaves, The Shadow of Saganami | ||
There's more to the "Honorverse" than Haven and Manticore. Much more. Erewhon rests on the edge of the Solarian League, and is one of Manticore's allies in their fight against Haven. But the new Manticoran government's lousy foreign policy has badly alienated the Erewhonese. They're on the verge of breaking their alliance with the Queen. Worse, they're being actively and quite competently wooed by Haven agents! If they switch sides, Haven suddenly has access to nearly all of the technology that had given Manticore such an advantage in the war.
Queen Elizabeth can't do much about it. Not officially. But she can send an agent of her own, Anton Zilwicki. With him she sends his daughter and her own adopted niece in a prince-and-the-pauper type of switch, and a prominent dimplomat and ex-slave. With a bit of luck and effort, they'll be able to repair the damage done by the High Ridge government. But they'll have to contend with Masadan terrorists and Victor Cachet, a Havenite agent that Zilwicki has come up against before. And nobody's quite sure if the Havenite plan of attack really should be derailed...
This book takes place sometime during book ten, War of Honor, or perhaps just before it. It's a little unclear to me. This is due mostly to the amount of time it has been since I read those books. And, frankly, it doesn't especially matter. The authors are careful to mention the general status of the war, and it doesn't really need to be any more specific than that. Still, I thought it would have been nice to be able to tie it to some specific event so I could put it more accurately on the mental timeline.
A more significant problem with the book was the large cast. And not just that, but there are quite a few factions the reader needs to keep track of. There's the Manticorans, the Havenite agent and his partner, the Solarian League ship's captain and his inner circle, the Masadans, the Mesans, the Erewhonese, Princess Ruth's bodyguards, and a few others get tossed in here and there for a scene or two. It was very difficult to keep track of who was who and where their loyalties lay. Halfway through the book - and keep in mind, this novel is over 700 pages in paperback - I was just getting a grip on such things. Perhaps it was just me, of course, but I still found it a bother having to stop every now and then and ask myself if this character was a Solarian or a Havenite or an Erewhonese. I'll also admit that I'm not sure what the authors could have done to minimize the problem, short of just plain making the cast smaller. But it was a problem, at least for myself.
As is common with Weber's writing, the natural flow of the plot is frequently interrupted by a character's musings, or a bit of exposition about the setting or some analogous piece of twentieth-century history. It seems particularly blatant this time around, though, happening more frequently, going further astray from what is actually going on, and eating up more pages. As a result, two hundred pages in the characters only just begin to notice each other.
As an example of what I'm talking about, consider a scene in which Zilwicki is going to tell others in his party what he was told in private by a member of a rival group on Erewhon. The text goes from Anton entering the room and announcing he'll tell then what he was told, to his adopted daughter's temerpent, to her lack of career choice, to his natural daughter's eating habits, to a miniature flashback of an old dinner conversation, before finally snapping back to now - but only with the help of a space break. It's a remarkably detailed and efficient piece of work, considering it is all done in barely more than two pages, but this sort of thing crops up every five to ten pages, especially at the start of the book. It made the writing seen poorer than it was, not to mention pinballing the plot all over as the authors try to cram into the story every iota of information they dreamed up for their notes.
Luckily, these sidelines become less common about a quarter of the way through the book. Or at least, they become less noticable as the setup ends and the plot itself gets rolling. But between the tangents and the large number of characters and factions to keep track of, it's somewhat hard to start this book.
Crown of Slaves opens up the Honorverse like no other book before it. This includes the "Worlds of Honor" anthologies. Some of those stories took place outside the Manticore-Haven war, true, but they don't go into as much detail as this volume. They can't, since they're short stories and this is a lengthy novel. For the first time I really felt it when a character or the narration stated that their war was only a tiny sideshow in the volume of space humanity has settled. We also get a better feel for the Solarian League, a group of growing importance to the main story of the war, and a new front of conflict opens up, thanks to the issue of "genetic slavery." Though I'm still not sure how this is different from regular slavery, it will still be interesting to see how this impacts events back in Manticore.
And, for the fans, the authors actually included a brief appearance by Honor Harrington about three-fourths of the way through the book. It's a nice way to help keep the fans interested and help tie events back to what they know. It wasn't enough to show exactly when in the main story this took place, but it helped a lot.
The book is really quite good, like most of Weber's and Flint's stories. Manticore must struggle to dig itself out of the hole it had dug for itself, and it was an interesting twist to actually find myself cheering for the Havenite, Cachet. If only that first quarter of the book was better, more easy to immerse myself in, it would surely have gotten a better grade. But it just wasn't a good way to get me interested in the thing. I felt honestly lost for far too long for me to actually give this a thumbs-up.
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