This "Manticore Ascendant" series is, as mentioned, set early in the history of the star nation that Weber's heroine Honor Harrington will one day serve. And it's a time when Manticore's future is nowhere near assured. External threats and political infighting threaten its three planets, which have yet to discover the wormhole junctions that will make them an economic powerhouse. Travis Long is a young officer in Manticore's Royal Navy and trying to learn how to marry his spit-and-polish standards to the Navy's spit-and-baling-wire reality, His personal struggles mirror his nation's quest to maintain independence while lacking a lot of the resources to do so. Both will collide with shadowy forces that want to add Manticore's resources to their own -- but they'll be satisfied picking clean the corpse if need be.
Pope's attention to research detail helps line these earlier-set books up with the time frame of the main sequence. But it's Weber and Zahn who have to make a reader care about people who are facing a danger that we who read the later books know is not likely to happen. In both books so far they have done so with their focus on Long and gradual broadening the cast into the upper levels of political maneuvering that affect him. Although only the three authors can say for certain how the job is split, Zahn's influence reining in Weber's penchant for over-long stretches of conversation and dialogue is easy to spot, since those narrative-muffling exchanges are kept to a minimum. The final mix keeps us connected to the characters and the unfolding mystery of how the Star Kingdom of Manticore came to be what will bring us Honor Harrington herself. After all, in this case the existence of books set well after this period tells us what happened. So far, Weber, Zahn and Pope have managed to keep us interested in how it did and who was involved.
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But the two nations have found a common enemy after many years of fighting, and are now allied against the Mesan Alignment. This cloak-and-dagger corporation has as its goal the establishment of a genetic caste system throughout as much of the galaxy as possible -- with its own directors as tyrant oligarchs. Master spies Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki, of Haven and Manticore respectively, have been moving against Mesa's backstage shenanigans for some time and have helped uncover enough of the conspiracy to unite their formerly antagonistic governments. Now in Cauldron of Ghosts Cachat, Zilwicki and their team infiltrate the Mesa homeworld to try to gain proof of the conspiracy and perhaps even bring Mesa a freedom its people have never known.
For this series, Weber teams with sci-fi author Eric Flint, who is a well-known name in military-based science fiction in his own right. Again, while it's hard for anyone other than the authors to say how much each one contributed, Flint has less success than Zahn in reducing the amount of "meeting minutes" scenes to which his colleague is prone. The espionage plotline is handled deftly, but the pair telegraph the villains' atrocities with almost anesthetized clumsiness. The Mesans are exploding bombs in their own cities to create a "terrorist threat" they can use to justify harsh measures, and as soon as we meet some ordinary person going about their business in the middle of a chapter, we know what's coming. The replication of these scenes lengthens and deadens the story, and helps make Cauldron one of the weaker entries in its particular Honorverse series.
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