For me it was the Honor Harrington series, I don’t normally recommend David Weber books to people because his writing style could best be described as dense but I picked up the first book right after I read the first two books of The Expanse and it just hit the right spot. For those who haven’t read the books when it comes to technical details the series is pretty hard sci-fi; ships in the same fleet fighting in the same battle in the same system can be completely isolated from one another, because the vast distances mean that whatever communications, radar returns, or light from exploding nukes and dying ships reaches them it’s already four or five hours old. But on the other hand the main meat of the series relies upon Totally Not Space England (it’s the House of Winton, not Windsor, duh) fighting Totally Not Space France (it’s not Robespierre, it’s Robert Stanton Pierre, duh) in the Space Napoleonic Wars, and this is reflected by the fact that the standard tactical formation for all navies engaging in set-piece engagements is the Wall of Battle.
The propulsion for ships isn’t really explained in depth but basically the engines cause two bands of extremely warped space on either side of the ship that are essentially impassable, bumping into another ship with your ‘wedge’ as it’s called can outright destroy another ship if it’s small enough, and warships have almost no armor in these areas because no missile or laser (somehow) can pass through it. So ships try to literally build a wall, closing in tight to protect one another not just with their own missile defense systems but with their ‘wedges’, which is stupid in so many ways but for me that combination of pure fantasy and hard reality goes together like salt and caramel. An outnumbered Admiral is never doomed because they have dozens of ways to manipulate events before the shooting starts, with drones and Electronic Counter Measures, and stealth or decoys, but when all of that plays out there is only one thing left to do. Close in tight with your division and hold fast, because running will just strip you of almost all your defenses, but if you keep formation you just might be able to stop the nukes and slip one of your own through.
This was combined with some cool problems and situations caused not only by developments of the war but from things that happened sometimes decades before that would shape and drive the narrative. For example (not much of a spoiler but for those interested skip this paragraph) the Star Kingdom of Manticore entered the first major war of the setting with a Barbarossa style offensive to try and end the war, but it failed and put them in a bind. Their ships had been out and fighting for months and were in dire need not only of their periodic maintenance but refit with the new weapons and systems coming on-line, but the fighting wasn’t over and they simply couldn’t afford to pull back any units when they really needed more ships in the fight than they even had in their entire Navy so they had to do something to force a stalemate and buy time. This was the driving force behind the plot of one of the books, it comes across as logical and it feels like something that real militaries would talk about and is pretty standard for the early part of the series.
However as the series went on it began to move farther and farther from the elements that drew me in. First it was the actual ship to ship fighting that went away, which to be fair was pretty neat because what made the combat interminable wasn’t the introduction of a McGuffin (mostly), it was the novel application of something else that changed the formula for how battle were fought. This thing was then iterated, modified, and improved upon for over thirty years in the books, so over the course of the series you can literally track the evolution of the way combat in the series is carried which is cool and makes sense because it was done by people wanting to win and not die, but at the end of the day it makes most of the battles just not very fun. In the beginning of the series when a ship went to engage another vessel out of it’s class it was always a *very* serious thing, the crew would be sweating bullets while the captains prayed for a miracle because even if victory was possible the cost would be dreadful. But by the second most recent book, while there is an in-lore justification, you have one heavy cruiser and two destroyers taking on (if I’m remembering correctly) *twelve battlecruisers,* and while the smaller ships are destroyed they destroy 11 battlecruisers in the process. Not to mention that in the beginning battles were grueling events that could drag on for hours and hours as both sides chipped away at each other, until someone finally by guile or sheer attrition someone forced a gap and exploited it to gain the upper hand. And by the most recent books basically two fleets roll up to one another, fire a fuck-huge salvo of missiles, and one side is destroyed to the last ship with maybe some ‘space fighters’ thrown in for some spice (though to be fair these ‘space fighters’ aren’t X-Wings they weigh in at a little over 20,000 tons).
Then there is the fact that the story has gotten quite frankly, more bizarre. In the early series events were determined by politics and logistics, it could get arbitrary to force the plot forward in a particular direction but things always felt grounded and real. And now not only did Totally Not Space France *not* develop a Napoleon (though Tom Theisman is a gigachad) you have an evil corporation (who to be fair is extremely evil) carrying out a four hundred year old plot/genetic breeding program to dominate humanity by assassinating key figures with nanobots injected into unsuspecting persons which then hijack the victim to force them into action, and the only defense the protagonists have to detect these poor souls are psychic cats. Really. Oh yeah and that protagonist you’ve spent over ten books admiring for her tenacity and determination, she’s not good because she is an intelligent hard working woman who applied herself to master a dangerous profession, she’s awesome because she is the product of said breeding program.
It’s just a shame because while David Weber’s writing is a uh…. challenge to say the least, he created (at least in my mind) a living world with places and characters that both seem real and sometimes possess a sort of silliness or absurdity you don’t find very often in stories trying to be serious. When I picked up On Basilisk Station I was hooked and read the first three books of the series and less than a week, but it took me over a month to drag myself through A Rising Thunder and three months for Uncompromising Honor and at this point I don’t know if I’ll pick up the book coming next year. The magic for me, it’s just faded away
by roadrunner036