That’s the first four novels. Then he got Protection From Editors, and the focus shifted from “story about a single deployment” to “historical record about a period of time”.
I actually stopped reading them about five years ago, and decided to revisit them last year. I was not impressed. I’ll admit, towards the end of what I had, I was hate-reading, just out of “beware the sin of pride” self-awareness.
His major sins as an author, in my opinion, are, more or less:
- Inability to refrain from infodumping more information than is absolutely needed to move the plot along.
- Repetitive infodumping
- Advantage-stacking for his favorites (the Star Kingdom, for example, is given so many advantages that it is rather infuriating to read the assertion that it has the highest standard of living in the human-settled galaxy, not to mention the sheer number of advantages he gives Harrington)
That’s not counting other aspects that are objectionable in his writing, but that’s more due to the fact that he’s an extremely privileged libertarian who depends on writing Straw Characters to characterize political viewpoints other than his own. If not for the fact that he does write semi-decent female characters, he’d be the author of choice for the alt-right, and their adoration of laissez faire free markets under a monarch, because that’s definitely his preference.
