Subject: David Weber: The Armageddon Inheritance (some spoilers)

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1993 03:43:48 GMT

"The Armageddon Inheritance" is the sequel to David Weber's "Mutineer's Moon".
Honor Harrington it isn't.  Readers who have not read "Mutineer's Moon" should
avoid the sequel.  Readers who have will find this book disappointing, but
worth reading if you desire to find out what happens next.

What does happen next?  Well, the BEMs who've been destroying all life
in the galaxy for the past seventy million years are making another
excursion.  Earth is in their path, but if they can just hold off the
first wave of a few thousand ships and the second wave of a few million
ships, everything will be fine.  Meanwhile, the original moon-ship goes
back to the Imperium, to find out why there's been no response to their
messages -- and finds out that there isn't going to be as much help from
that quarter as was hoped.

This being a David Weber novel, we know there are going to be major battles
in which most of the good guys die.  Actually, the most irritating thing
about this book is the extent to which Weber has cooked the numbers to
make his plot come out:  Change his figures by a few light years here,
a few ships there, a few months or years elsewhere, and most of the tension
disappears.  It's very contrived.  (As is the secret of the BEMs, which
was partly foreshadowed in the first ten pages.)

In sum, a book for David Weber completists.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope