To End in Fire, David Weber and Eric Flint

To End in Fire presents an interesting question to fans of David Weber's "Honorverse" novels centering on the intrepid Honor Harrington and now expanded to hundreds of characters across dozens of storylines. The question: Is one of Weber's zero-discipline, meeting-minutes-on-steroids doorstops worse when nothing happens? Or when something (but not as much as you'd expect given the page count) happens?

Fire is the fourth in the sidecar sequence called the Torch novels, following the backstage fight against the evil and shadowy Mesan Alignment that's trying to bend the star nations of humanity to its wishes. Weber co-writes this series with Eric Flint and it's mainly focused so far on Republic of Haven spymaster Victor Cachat and the Star Empire of Manticore's top agent, Anton Zilwicki. It picks up the story on the planet Mesa itself after that world was devastated by the Alignment's escape and Manticore's conquest. The Mesan storyline focuses on the way that its former citizens and serfs are forced by circumstance -- and orbiting Manticore dreadnoughts -- to pick up the pieces of their society and rebuild it on a more just and egalitarian footing. On Old Earth, recently brought to heel by the Grand Alliance Fleet commanded by Harrington herself, the Solarian League works its way through a constitutional convention designed to sweep out previous corruption, both Alignment-related as well as ordinary. The convention winds slowly -- overseen by, among other observers, orbiting Grand Alliance dreadnoughts -- and ties in with Cachat and Zilwicki's primary goal: Find out where the scampered Alignment members escaped to.

Unlike a few other recent Honorverse outings, Fire has a real, live discernible Point B as a destination and a real, live journey towards it. It clearly leaves room for more novels in this particular sequence, although Honorverse event threads are bundled closely together enough by now that whether or not the story advances through one set of novels or another is mostly a matter of emphasis.

But Flint and Weber take an exhaustingly long time to get to that point B. We first see Victor and Anton figure something out. Then we meet some Mesans who meet with our main cast and they figure that something out. Then the Manticoran occupying officers figure the same something out. Then we go to Earth and meet some Solarians who figure the something out. Every discovery happens with little or no variation in style or dialogue. Every character speaks in the same dry, wry, witty ellipticisms and few, if any, meandering asides are actually set aside in order to choose brevity over the chance for a quip.

Fire is just more than 700 pages long and should be about a third of that. It's filled with chapters that should be pages, pages that should be paragraphs, paragraphs that should be sentences and sentences that should be left out. The suffocating length dampens all but the last dregs of enthusiasm for attempts at whimsy -- such as the ruler of one planetary system insisting her title will be Her Mousety rather than Her Majesty, or the running gag of characters being brought up short wondering about the origins of common phrases dating back to the ancient days of our era. One of the latter is actually funny -- probably not the one Weber and Flint think, though -- but the humor has been leached away by the other dozen times the joke shows up.

Reading Fire is indeed a chore, but because actual plot development occurs, it's a necessary one. Is that worse than laboring through something like 2016's Uncompromising Honor and its grand total of almost zero plot development? Hard to say.

But neither of them is as much fun as reading some good, fast-paced military science fiction with solid world-building, just enough technical detail to be interesting and real stakes where you wonder if some of the characters you're following will make it all the way through. Like, say, this one.