You'd be surprised. ^-^
Far Country has much better characters. I like Dakodo, a damn alien bird, much more than any single character in Hour of the Wolf. The Tetatae are more useful and defined than the "lovable" tanker crew in Hour. Takuda, Seagroves, Vost... all somehow have more personality than any character in Hour. These characters are pretty cut and dry and accomplish so much more.
I stand by it. I challenge anyone to read Far Country and find out. Peter Rice did a better job with a quirky one-off book.
Ugh. I'm tempted to read Star Lord and find out if it's worse than Hour.
I don't disagree, that's why I'm saying, it's rather sad. There have been a few apologetics for Hour, but not many. And it might be the cool thing to bash on Far Country, because it was bad
as a BattleTech book, but on the literary merits, if you were a teacher grading the writing, Far Country would come in at probably a solid B, maybe an A-, while HotW would be covered in red marks and get an F.
As for Star Lord, remember who has "additional writing credits" on that one. I haven't read it in a long time, but I can't imagine that as lampooned as it is, that certain people "editing" it would have made it any more palatable as a novel. Although, it was 25 years ago, so the slide into...whatever hadn't quite begun yet. I have a physical copy of it that I snagged about 6 months back, but haven't managed to actually force myself to read it.