House of Steel

A short story masquerading as a book.

Love most of Weber's books, but this is a thinly fleshed out version of a lot of history that we've already read and know. It also suffers from "prequelitous", in which a lot of the story consists merely of moving characters like Hamish Alexander and Sonja Hemphill into place. Hamish? Check. Sonja? Check. Creation of WDB? Check. Development of the phaser? Check. Luke's father? Check. (A little hyperbole there, but you get the point.)

King Roger's death, of course, was already covered in greater detail in one of the World's of Honor collections. In fact, this story probably would have been better suited to one of those collections. And it suffers yet again from Weber's recent habit of pulling chapters from previous books and dropping them wholesale into other novels in order to fill out the story. Here, it's the attack on Barnett from Ashes of Victory.

All while major plot elements like the fall of Trevor's Star to the Peeps gets a build up... and then we're told, "Oh, yeah. The Peeps grabbed it." It also lacks Weber's fondness for showing us what's going on behind the scenes in Haven. This makes House of Steel a one-sided, watered-down, monochromatic view of history.

And to make matters worse, the short story only takes up about a third of the book. The rest is dedicated to a reference that covers information about the Star Kingdom, ships, uniforms, insignia, and so on. Look. If I wanted a Star KIngdom encyclopedia, I'd buy one as a separate book. If, of course, Weber actually wrote it from scratch and not pulled much of the information from the afterwards and glossaries of previous books.

So. Final verdict? If you're a fan and you have to have it, just get the iBook or go offline and get the cheaper paperback version and don't reward David with a hardback sale. This time, unfortunately, he just doesn't deserve it.