So, getting back into the Harringtonian swing of things, I polished off David Weber’s More Than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, and Service of the Sword collections. Or rather, I polished off the parts of the contents that were actually written by David Weber. In the first volume, I made the mistake of reading a David Drake story, and regretted it deeply. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible story, but it sure as heck wasn’t one set in the by-now-familiar Honorverse, no matter how many proper nouns attested otherwise.
So sticking just to the Weber stories, here’s how the line-up goes. More Than Honor is wholly skippable. There’s one story, and it’s about treecats. Read it online if you want to read it, but unless you really really like telepathic cats, it’s definitely not worth the $8 that a modern paperback costs. Worlds of Honor has another treecat story, as well as a story featuring one of the mainline characters as a kid. Both stories are readable, but even together it’s hard to say the book’s worth a purchase.
Changer of Worlds is a bit of a different animal. You get “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington”, which I’d read in the Big Book of Spopera. It’s a very good story, important to mainline continuity, and fairly long. It’s worth picking up the book just for this, even if you don’t care about the apparently-obligatory treecat story. (The book also purports to have a third Weber story, but as far as I could tell, it was just an excerpt from one of the novels. This sounds weird, so I have to assume there was some additional content in here that wasn’t in the novel, but it was deja-vuing me too bad, so I quit reading.)
And finally, there’s The Service of the Sword. Only one story here, featuring a Grayson naval officer who appears in mainline continuity; while it’s moderately good and moderately long, I don’t think it’s quite so much either as “Ms. Midshipwoman”. Probably not worth an actual buy, but it’s sort of borderline. Hey, it’s your $8, you make the call. There’s no treecats, so that should be worth something right there.
(And if you don’t know where to go to read these online, just ask Wikipedia Pete, for he knows all knowledge. Note that there are links there for the novels and other Weber books, too. So if you’re really super-cheap, but want to check out this Harrington stuff, you now know where to go, entirely legally.)
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