Space Misogyny
This book isn’t good. I was told it was “Space Opera” but this is more like “Military Space Adventure”. Think Star Trek but with more guns death and jargon.
Did I mention the jargon. If you aren’t into the military, or care about how big people’s guns are then this book will loose you quick with it’s “Falcon-Three-Three to Falcon-Two-One” and stuff like that which takes of pages and pages and offering nothing to the plot at all.
It’s also very noisy. Everything usually has about five hundred words to describe what’s happened and most of this jargon is all pseudosciency that also adds nothing to the plot and muddies the image of what really going on.
Finally let’s talk about the misogyny because this book has it.
Starting off by describing Honor as “not pretty, but no really she’s pretty” all the way to her almost rape back story, she’s a rote “strong” female character. Of course there’s the male love interest that she always seems to need help from that he doesn’t trust her and all that jazz.
The characters themselves are uninteresting and that’s mostly because Weber dumps a whole bucket of them on you before you have even warmed up to the one’s from the last bucket.
Then there’s the part where Weber calls the ship a “bitch” and describes that it was “raped” when it’s armaments were reconfigured. That the part when I wanted to toss the book into a fire. unfortunately it was a library book and thus needed to be returned. Weber being a man, knows nothing about rape to begin with and to call an inanimate object a bitch and described how it was ‘raped’ by having some weapons removed is just sheer and utter cherry-on-top misogyny.
I should probably also mention the psychic cat, but because it doesn’t add to the plot I’ll just ignore it. Really the furball could get sucked out an airlock and nothing of value would be lost on the plot...
All because the plot is that shallow, that I took a few years break from reading it and still I was able to remember what was going on. That’s pretty sad.
NOT TO MENTION part of the plot involves invading a alien planet and drugging and slaughtering the native. WHAT. FUN. As if this book didn’t have that many problem. I almost want to say the Medusans are basically portrayed as First Nations and that their slaughter is more or less written off as necessary.
The last battle is needlessly dragged out, with lots more gore and explosions than a Michael Bay movie aaand more misogyny abound here too. It seems that Weber loves to write women, just so he can horribly kill and torture them. Very unstisfying end to an unsatisfying book.
