In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
David Weber is one of today’s most popular military science fiction authors. Fans of this sub-genre like their stories not only full of action, but rich in detail and background information, and that’s what Weber delivers—especially in his Honor Harrington series, which follows a space navy officer clearly inspired by an earlier fictional creation, C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. The series has been extremely successful, and readers can look forward to spending a long time immersed in this fictional universe, or “Honorverse,” which now spans over thirty novels and story collections.
Horatio Hornblower, the aforementioned creation of author C. S. Forester, is a character who rose through the ranks of the British Navy in its glorious prime, during the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th century. The first three novels, Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line and Flying Colors, were written immediately before World War II, and centered on Hornblower’s days as a Captain. In the following decades, Forester revisited the character in short stories and novels, and over time, filled in the details of nearly every stage of his naval career. In addition to invigorating the genre of naval adventure stories, Forester’s approach to the character had a definite impact on science fiction, as well. A couple of years ago, when I reviewed some of Poul Anderson’s Captain Sir Dominic Flandry stories (you can read it here), I referred to him as a space-based version of Horatio Hornblower, because Anderson wrote adventures featuring the character at each stage of his military career. In the comments resulting from that review, a number of other characters were also offered as being influenced by Hornblower, including A. Bertram Chandler’s John Grimes, and Star Trek’s James T. Kirk. But one of the clearest heirs to Hornblower is David Weber’s Honor Harrington, a character unabashedly modeled on Forester’s creation.
This is not the first time Honor Harrington has been discussed on Tor.com. On Basilisk Station was reviewed here by Nina Lourie. Liz Bourke discussed Honor in this article on women in military science fiction and reviewed an Honorverse spinoff novel here. And David Weber himself discussed Honor and her motivations here.
Moreover, Honor is not the first female character who saw combat in a science fiction book. One of the first portrayals I remember is David Drake’s Forlorn Hope (which I reviewed here), a book that appeared in 1984, and created a stir because of the way it put women into front-line combat roles. In 1993, when Weber wrote On Basilisk Station, the portrayal of women in science fictional combat was not as rare, but his decision to center an entire series on a female officer was still innovative.
About the Author
David Weber (born 1952) is a prolific author who has written extensively in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. He entered the field through gaming, with his first novel, co-authored with Steve White, set in the Starfire gaming universe. Another early work was Mutineers’ Moon, an entertaining book almost impossible to summarize without spoiling it.
One of Weber’s greatest creations is the “Honorverse,” which now consists of fourteen main novels centered on Honor herself, six Worlds of Honor shared world anthologies, the five-book Crown of Slaves sequence written with Eric Flint, the four-book Saganami Island sequence, the Star Kingdom series, three books written with Jane Lindskold that center on the treecats; and the three-book Manticore Ascendant sequence, written with Timothy Zahn.
Honor Harrington has also been featured in in comics and graphic novels by Image Comics, under their Top Cow imprint. There have also been discussions of possible film or TV incarnations of the character.
Weber is also the author of the Safehold Series, currently up to nine books, which started with Off Armageddon Reef; published by Tor, these books have frequently appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. For centuries, the planet Safehold repressed industry and science in order to escape the attention of the alien Gbaba, who’ve destroyed all other human colonies. But an android awakens with the goal of changing that status quo, and in doing so, transforms the world of Safehold forever.
A full bibliography of Weber’s works can be found here.
On Basilisk Station is published by Baen Books, who cannily endeavor to entice readers into series fiction by offering early books for free, and you can find the electronic version here.
Navies in Space
One of the most popular settings in science fiction is the space navy ship, a large vessel with a large crew, similar to the destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers that ply the sea today. Major media franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars are full of such vessels, along with many a novel. But the existence of these vessels requires some major leaps in technology to be possible (and some squinting at, if not altogether ignoring, physical laws). If you are going to have immensely large vessels, you are going to need some sort of reactionless drive to power them. If they are going to move at speeds that get them around solar systems quickly, they could easily generate accelerations that would crush their crews, so some sort of artificial gravity is also in order. Then you’ll need some sort of shields to protect them from both energy and projectile weapons, as a ship in space is hideously exposed, and very vulnerable. Existing modern weapons could be scaled up to use in space, but some sort of advanced weapons would be needed to penetrate those shields the enemy is using. And you’ll require some sort of hyperdrive unless your battles are all going to take place in a single star system—a hyperdrive that doesn’t work in close proximity to stars and planets, or attackers will have all of the advantage, and defense would be impossible. You also need either an instantaneous communications device (like an ansible), or you’ll have to do a lot of calculating to figure out how long messages take at the speed of light. And that speed of light issue would affect sensors as well. Plus while everything else gets more advanced, if we want those big crews on board, then we need to be relatively modest about improvements in computing power and robotics.
To summarize, when we tell stories about space navies, we have to do a lot of handwaving to make those scenarios seem possible. We need to admit to ourselves that many of these fictional universes have been reverse engineered to fit the stories we want to tell.
Other space navy stories I have reviewed in the past include the tales of fighter pilots in space found in the Star Wars X-Wing novels (you can find the review here), and the capital ship combat of Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series (you can find that review here).
On Basilisk Station
Unlike many military science fiction books, there is no opening battle scene in this novel. Instead, Weber is content to start building this new universe brick by brick. Some readers (including myself) can find his exposition-heavy writing style a bit sluggish, but there are many fans of military fiction who appreciate this approach. And I have to admit, when you do get to the battle scenes, knowing exactly how the propulsion, communications, and weapons systems work, and having the background on key crew members, makes those scenes even richer and more realistic.
Weber presents the leaders of the People’s Republic of Haven as utterly unsympathetic characters, explaining how their sluggish, Soviet-style planned economy could collapse unless fueled by future expansion. They plan to attack the star nation of Manticore, a rich system with three habitable planets and many hyperspace junctions, via their newly annexed system of Basilisk. Then we join Manticore’s Commander Honor Harrington as she takes command of Fearless, only to find that most of its weapons are being removed to make room for a gravity lance: an unstoppable weapon that unfortunately needs to be deployed at what is, in space combat, point-blank range.
Weber then pauses to explain how the impellers that drive these ships create a kind of impenetrable wedge above and below a ship. While shields called sidewalls can be used to protect the ship’s flanks, these are much weaker, creating a situation where ships battle one another with broadsides, comparable to what we would have seen in the Age of Sail. We learn that the Executive Officer wanted the command for himself, which sets him in a conflict with Honor, setting up a scenario similar to what readers might find in a romance plot—a misunderstanding that has you wishing the characters would just talk it out and express their feelings so they can move on.
Honor achieves one initial victory in war games with the lance, but as soon as the other ships figure out what they are facing, her crew has to deal with defeat after defeat. Blaming her for the failure of their weapon system, senior officers soon transfer her ship to the backwater system of Basilisk. The move gives Weber a chance to explain how these ships use a kind of energy sail to catch the currents of hyperspace (another high tech parallel with the Age of Sail). Honor finds that the only other ship in the Basilisk system is commanded by an officer who tried to rape her when she was at the Academy, and is relieved when he finds an excuse to take his ship back to a yard for work. But in doing so he has set her up to fail, as her single ship could easily be overwhelmed by the challenges she now faces.
Buy the Book
A Memory Called Empire
Honor’s primary mission is customs enforcement, and despite the prosaic nature of this task, she takes to it as if she had Coast Guardsman’s blood coursing through her veins. She splits her forces, augmenting the local law enforcement agencies, and putting all her small craft on patrol. And she quickly finds problems. She angers some of the most powerful merchants in Manticore by uncovering illegal activity among their employees. There is a lot of smuggling going on in the system, and not all of it makes economic sense. While the Manticore forces have been trying to leave the native population of the one habitable planet undisturbed, someone is selling them drugs that drive them to uncontrollable rages. Fearless’ crew begins to rise to their huge task, and their successes begin to bring the crew together. They start to realize that the forces of Haven are working against them, and without seeing the whole picture, begin to see signs of the impending invasion.
When they find that someone has been arming the natives, the narrative quickly begins pick up its pace. And all that useful background information that Weber has given us comes into play as they face a ground war to contain a native uprising, and then a fierce space battle. Honor and her crew will have to use every tool at their disposal and work seamlessly as a team if they are even to survive these challenges, let alone overcome them. The book might start slowly, but it builds into a narrative that is hard to put down. (I was reading it while my car was being repaired, and found myself disappointed when the repairs were completed before the book was.)
I had drifted away from following Honor’s adventures sometime in the early 2000s, during a period when I had less time for reading in general, and diminished enthusiasm for reading military science fiction. But this re-read of Honor’s first adventure has whetted my appetite for the character, and I now plan to dig through my old books in order to pick up where I left off.
Final Thoughts
Fans of military science fiction will certainly appreciate what Weber offers in the Honor Harrington series, stories that are full of action and rich in detail; those who don’t delight in exposition might find all that detail oppressive. But the action, which includes some of the most gripping battle scenes I’ve ever read, will be appreciated by all.
And now I’ll shut up, and give you a chance to chime in: If you’ve read them, what do you think of On Basilisk Station, or the other tales set in the Honorverse? And what other fictional space navy stories do you enjoy?
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
Honor is not the first female character who saw combat in a science fiction book. One of the first portrayals I remember is David Drake’s Forlorn Hope (which I reviewed here), a book that appeared in 1984, and created a stir because of the way it put women into front-line combat roles.
…A mere 29 years after Starship Troopers put women into front-line combat roles as naval officers, with one of the characters remarking in passing that women are better at space combat than men. Better reflexes and so on.
Two thoughts on OBS and the series in general:
The “simple superstitious natives lured into an uprising by mischevous outsiders peddling firewater” plotline seems to have wandered into the book from a passing John Ford Western. It wasn’t great in the mid 1990s and hasn’t improved with age.
Nevertheless this book is probably the best in the series, because Weber got too fond of his heroine and, in the next book (The Honor of the Queen) completely spammed her with honour and glory. She gets ennobled twice by two separate governments, becomes a landed peer, gets the highest possible award for valour and is promoted to admiral.
In the second book!
Hornblower, whether you read them in publication or chronological order, has a much slower and steadier progression; a book as midshipman, one as lieutenant, one as commander, six as captain including one as commodore, and finally one as rear-admiral. Lots more room for small-scale adventure, clashing with superiors etc. Honor goes straight to shaping the destinies of entire solar systems in book 2, and, really, where do you go after that?
This has been on my to-read list for years – I may finally bump it up. I love space navy books, and one of my favorites is Tanya Huff’s Confederation series. It starts with Valor’s Choice, and while the main character is technically a space marine, she still needs the space navy to get around and it plays a major part. Torin Kerr is one of my favorite characters.
It’s worth noting that David’s infodumping is harder than it looks. Especially when you want to appeal to readers who don’t feel like doing calculus. I usually translate the numbers to fast, very fast, unusually fast and similar sorts of qualifiers. Especially in the last arc, whole paragraphs of numbers can be reduced to “oh ****, they’re doomed.”
If you want jarhead Space Marine competence porn with a female lead, I recommend the Confederation books by Tanya Huff, starting with ETA: Valour’s Choice. And damn, someone beat me to it.
@2 It takes a while for Honor’s Grayson rank to have much impact outside of Grayson. It’s a bit like a British officer being a Commodore in the RN while being an Admiral in the Royal Canadian Navy. She’s going to have clear opinions on which one is her “real” rank. Still, Honor does spend most of the series being more or less responsible for multiple ships.
The early books feature plenty of courageous space battles against impossible odds, hammy villains discussing their evil plans, and a main character who is essentially Space Nelson if Admiral Nelson was also a karate genius, a brilliant marksman, and an expert swordsman.
I loved the books when I was in high school. Looking back with a more experienced eye, I can see that Honor is the best at everything ever, the heroes constantly have better technology and training than the generally incompetent villains, and the author never allows Honor to be wrong in any meaningful way. That said, if you like stories with lots of explosions and naval heroism, read the early books. Skip the later ones, though, as Weber starts adding more and more infodumps and giving his protagonists one-sided victories; it’s a sad shift away from the glory days of death rides against larger and more powerful enemy ships.
@5 Never meaningfully wrong except for the part where she has to be physically restrained from blowing a prisoner’s brains out. Which would be in the same novel she assaults the Queen’s representative, runs away from the misogynist locals, and fails to press the attack home after scoring a critical hit on the enemy warship.
I really enjoyed this series as a history major his extensive and detailed set-up of why the conflicts occur in it, is compelling and impressive. As to the rapid rise of Honor in the series that is sadly explained by the author’s original plan to only feature her in the first 3 books and kill her off before moving to other characters. He then found that he really liked her and that she was quite popular with his readers and changed course but because of this she was a bit ridiculously over powered early on and he spends a lot of later books trying to remove her power or otherwise shoe horn her into be the underdog role again. That said it’s still a fun read for the most part and as stated the battles are always tense and well written.
To zannah42,
If you ever do read the Honor Harrington novels, may I suggest you binge read them, so you really get immersed into the Honorverse? Just read the novels dealing with Honor herself, at first, and read the ancillary novels later for lighter reading.
For all other readers of these comments, please be aware that Baen Books offers a monthly package deal of several books for a really great price. Just go to baen dot com and look for the Monthly Bundles section in the blue part of the wide head banner. All will be explained there. But then few readers of this newsletter would not be aware of baen dot com, would they? So please spread the word to your friends who love science fiction, and mention the monthly bundles wherever appropriate. It seems to me they have fewer monthly sales recently and that could be bad news for the foreseeable future.
Thank you
@6 noblehunter
Feeling righteous anger at war criminals is not a real vice. It falls in the same category as another Honor “vice” shown later in the series, where she isn’t good at politics because she’s just too honest and honorable to deal with all the lies. These are fake flaws that reveal virtues like righteous wrath and a strict code of honor.
As for hitting the Queen’s representative, he’s portrayed as an incompetent coward, and the ambassador in the room with her actually shows approval of her action. “She glared at him a moment longer, then turned to Langtry. The ambassador was a bit pale, but there was approval in his expression and his shoulders straightened.”
Honor is never charged with, say, assault. She’s given a slap on the wrist, a promotion, and a noble title.
Running away from the misogynist locals is a genuine mistake, but I think her ship was too damaged for her to press the attack.
This is the novel where Honor not only destroys a battlecruiser with a light cruiser, but defeats a team of assassins with her bare hands. She is absurdly capable not only in her own field, but also in an increasing number of other fields, with less and less justification.
Al, thanks for the binge suggestion! It’s always nice to start a new LONG series.
I loved the HH series at first. But the later books are almost unreadable. Chapters and chapters and chapters of tertiary characters who have no real connection to the overall plot discussing how awful a group of secondary characters are, while the main characters all but invisible.
@11 John
The first books show us heroic characters fighting impossible odds. Later books give Manticore a bigger and bigger technological advantage, to the point that there’s almost no opportunity for ship captains to be heroic. If David Weber could resist the tendency to give his protagonists stuff that will make their lives easier, the series would be much better.
@10: I’m with you zannah42!
(I just wish they didn’t block my access to Baen here where I work. I have to remember to check when I get home, which doesn’t always work. ;))
Last I checked at least the first two books were available from the Baen Free Library, so anyone who wants a sampler doesn’t need to spend money on them.
Special thanks to the publisher who made this available for free download way back when, so I didn’t have to spend any money to learn to avoid Weber’s books.
I like the Honorverse books quite a bit, and I re-read them frequently (did one over the past couple of months). Others have alluded above to the complexity of the verse – with books focused on Honor as the main character, others focused on Manticore’s activities in a different star system featuring Honor’s best friend and where Honor plays at most a supporting role, and another focused on a Manticore superspy and one of his daughters, the latter of whom ends up playing a leading role in fighting widespread slavery across the galaxy – and with all of these pieces coming back in and influencing the main plot lines in the Honor-focused books, It’s quite an architectural achievement. I find it fun, others may find the mass of books overwhelming and overly detailed.
EDIT – I should note that I have a “thing” for immersive SFF worlds, including Wheel of Time, ASOIF, Hobbs’ Realm of the Elderling, Vorkosigan….Your mileage may well vary.
@14,
Lately, baen dot com has been releasing the HH books in their monthly bundles so while you’re paying for the bundle you stand a good chance to get an HH book you maybe do not have yet.
Plus, if you regularly buy the bundles (currently at $18 ea.), you get excellent SF from one of the best publishers on the scene. Best of all, you buy the bundles you want, so you may skip a month, if you wish.
What’s even better, you can troll their authors’ pages and get all their books you may want if you’re into finishing your library.
Did I forget to mention all Baen books are DRM-free in whatever format you decide to use?
And no, I do not work for them. I am a regular buyer of the monthly bundles, though.
One weird quirk of the Honorverse is that gravitational waves propagate at 64x the speed of light. From a physics standpoint, this is nearly inexplicable (in the real world, gravity propagates at the speed of light, which is what causes there to be gravitational waves), and David Weber never does try to explain it.
@16,
Yes, the books individually go all over the place. But if you figure where in the Honorverse timeline the book fits, you will come to understand what their place in the ‘verse is.
For example, the Manticore Ascendant books take place at the time where the king of the Manticore system realizes the system needs to be able to defend itself, or they will eventually fall prey to pirates, as have so many other star systems not all that far from them, given that Manticore is near to star junctions (read wormholes) which reduce interstellar distances to only a few days’ travel time.
Some other novels and short stories take place at the time of Honor’s several times great grandmother who was the acknowledged first adoptee of a treecat, several hundred years before Honor’s time.
There’s a lot to read from all over this universe. Please don’t let one book throw you off the others.
Alan Brown,
You wrote, “(I was reading it while my car was being repaired, and found myself disappointed when the repairs were completed before the book was.)”
Glad you were that much into the book. I hope you’ll read the others in the series and enjoy them as much, then go on to the other story lines of this universe. It tells the story of this star system from different times and different viewpoints.
Hmmm… I somehow remember the main foes as being analagous to Revolutionary France (with strong socialist/communist leanings) and not necessarily Soviet, while the plucky Manticorans were, of course, British/Anglo Saxon.
I agree with other posters that the early novels are the most enjoyable, except that Honor levels up way too far, too fast. Contrast with poor Hornblower, who in one story is worried about being able to afford his great coat!
I didn’t enjoy On Basilisk Station itself all that much though. I think, like the Dresden Files, it’s probably best for new readers to skip the first book. And then once the story splits, everything goes off the rails.
@18 something something something hyperspace. The grav waves are actually ripples in the alpha wall of hyper. Not to mention when he invented the tech, we didn’t have experimental or observational data of gravitational waves.
Though there’s a number of things in the running for most egregious violation of physics in the Honorverse.
One of my problems is that Weber promoted Honor right out of the series.
I loved HH when I was a teenager/young adult (like a lot of people in this thread). I even introduced the series to my dad (a former Marine), who loves them as well. But even apart from the Mary Sue-ism of the later books, he spends way too much time having his thinly-veiled French Revolution villains twirl their mustaches and cackle about how the welfare state they’re building will crush the spirits of the weak-willed populace, let them eat cake, bwuahaha. eye_roll.gif. If I remember right, one of the antagonists is even named something like Robert Spierre? Something like that. Anyway, if I wanted to read didactic political screeds dressed up as a novel, there’s plenty of competition (looking at you, Ayn Rand).
Military SF isn’t really my thing; there are only a few takes on it that I like. The Honorverse; I like quite a bit.
This was also the book in which the desire to make space combat most strongly analagous to broadside-vs-broadside age-of-sail was the most egregious, to the point where it was (if I remember correctly) a plot point that a ship pursuing another ship couldn’t fire most of its missiles at it because the missile tubes pointed to the sides of the ship, so it had to wiggle back and forth. Apparently programming the hyper-accelerating smart target-seeking missiles to, say, actually turn 90 degrees a few seconds after launch was too complicated. (In later books missiles did learn how to turn).
Of course later books do have equally silly ideas, including free-floating “missile pods” that let ships launch vastly larger number of missiles than they can somehow fit in their ordinary hull. Initially these are towed as a way to boost firepower, but eventually there are ships that carry missile pods inside their hull and then eject them so that the pods can then launch their missiles – roughly equivalent to equipping a WW2 destroyer with hold full of torpedo-covered rafts that are thrown overboard so that they can in turn launch their torpedoes.
And of course, for Weber, conservation of energy was just something that happened to other people.
Arguing real-world physics in a super fictional universe is kind of an exercise in futility. Arguing internal consistency is not. Weber does very little handwavium in the Honorverse and I’ve found his explanations of the physics and technology to be major pluses.
As far as the antagonists go, they get better later on in the series, at least as far as the one-note moustache twirling variety. One in particular becomes a protag or at least an ally later on.
@27 yeah, probably the conservation-of-energy bit is a cheap shot.
But I don’t think making fun of the missile pods is – one really have to bend very hard to explain why loading missiles into a self-contained pod to toss them overboard makes them take less space than they would on their own. It’s a very gamey mechanic, which isn’t surprising given Weber’s background.
The Honorverse series is one of those things that tends to spark polarized reactions; either readers bond really strongly right off the bat, or bounce off hard. There is not much middle ground — which is a shame, because for all the flaws, the universe in which the books take place is a remarkably large, interesting, and increasingly complicated milieu. (As I type this, I’m suddenly struck by the parallels between the Honorverse and Velgarth, the world in which Mercedes Lackey’s sprawling cycle of Valdemar novels takes place. Both feature subseries set all across a long historical timeline, with a lot of underlying worldbuilding holding up the overall superstructure.)
Weber and Lackey are also similar in having intensely readable prose styles that tend to keep readers hooked despite what ought to be serious structural issues in the individual books (for Weber, it’s the infodumps; for Lackey, it’s a really odd notion of what constitutes plot conflict).
But to focus properly on David Weber for a moment: novels aside, “A Beautiful Friendship” (the original version from one of the anthologies, not the expanded-to-YA-novel edition) is for me one of the half dozen best first-contact stories I have read in four or five decades of SFnal addiction.
That version of the first book cover is mostly ok, excpet that is a terrible looking Nimitz. Does he even have the right number of legs?
@bmac
I didn’t see the missile pods as implausible. Any launcher attached to a ship has to be just that, attached. That means all the apparatus that allow the missle to fire has to be included in the structure as well. You can have 1000 missles in the cargo hold but if the missile magazine only has room for 10 of them at a time, if you only can fit 7 firing platforms into your vessel, then all those missles don’t really matter as much. Missile pods on the other hand, are one-shot deals. Missle, firing apparatus and telemetry data are in one contained package. You fire then you drop.
@1 Good point about Starship Troopers. While the female naval officers were in the background in that Marine-centric novel, I shouldn’t have overlooked them.
@2 Actually, I think the John Ford westerns had a more nuanced view of the Native Americans than this novel had of its aliens. The world-building was definitely thin in that area.
@30 Nimitz should have six legs. In that painting, if he has six, he has an especially long torso that continues outside the frame. My main objection to that depiction of Honor is the uniform. I wore those “choker” tunics in my youth, and after an hour on the parade field, you can’t think of anything but stripping them off. I can’t imagine a Navy that would use them as attire on the bridge. Those portrayed on the sequels shown above appear much more practical.
As I said in the column, I decided to look for the series in my local used bookstore (http://www.fantasyzonecomics.com/) so I could pick up where I left off. But those next three books turn out to be THICK books. Of the three I bought, Echoes of Honor is 1 1/4 inches thick, Ashes of Victory is 1 1/8 inches thick, and War of Honor is a whopping 1 1/2 inches thick. I’m beginning to remember what scared me away back when those books first came out!
Horatio Hornblower In Space! used to be the model for this sort of thing. Roddenberry based Kirk on Hornblower.
More recently we are also seeing Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin In Space!, with David Drake’s series Leary/Mundy in the Royal Cinnabar Navy being explicitly inspired by the series.
(If you haven’t read O’Brian, I recommend that series from the beginning for people who like SF. The past is a different planet and so is the sea.)
And you have Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. Which is a fresh and original take on Aubrey/Maturin In Space! in the sense that it is actually set on Earth during the Napoleonic Wars. (Also, the Maturin character is a dragon.) Quite enjoyable, especially if you liked O’Brian. (Although her two more recent books that are not part of the series: Uprooted and Spinning Silver; are much deeper and better.)
Man, these novels (esp. the first seven or eight of them, say through Echoes of Honor) are like kettle corn to me — I just can’t get enough of the melodrama, and some of the scenes just get me right … there in the heartstrings.
@21 – Oddly enough, I started the series with the second book (and Weber always recaps things enough, sometimes at length, that I didn’t feel I’d missed anything). When I eventually found a copy of the first book, yeah, it was more than a bit rough in places.
@24 – Yes, the People’s Republic of Haven starts off as a quasi-Soviet oligarchy, where the ruling class is rich but worried about how to conquer enough worlds to get enough money to keep paying free welfare to the restless proles. (Weber wears his politics on his sleeve at times.) They are, in relatively short order, overthrown, by a quasi-French Revolution of new oligarchs that institute a Terror to establish control — and, yes, that includes a leader named Rob S. Pierre, along with other characters whose names (and organization — the Committee of Public Safety) recall the French Revolution.
@32 – The books get progressively longer over time — and not always for good reason — but they remain fast reads.
Ah, the Honorverse. I read and very much enjoyed the early books. I still read and enjoy the later ones, but not quite as much. (I got the leatherbound edition of On Basilisk Station, despite having a still perfectly serviceable paperback. For the new ones, I wait for the the mass market paperback and sometimes it sits on my bookshelf for weeks before I start it.)
Great space battles. What stitched them together has been called military procedurals, in analogy to police procedural crime stories.
Where it all came apart are the overly political schemes, and the way his political opinions seemed to sledge-hammer the plot. In a way that was inevitable as Honor progressed from ship command to fleet command. But compare the pre-revolutionary Havenite leadership with what we see in the Solarian league. Both thought they’d get a “short victorious war” against Manticore, both were wrong, but the Havenites were not presented as total morons …
. Apparently programming the hyper-accelerating smart target-seeking missiles to, say, actually turn 90 degrees a few seconds after launch was too complicated.
He does actually address this by saying IIRC that the missiles are launched from mass-drivers to give them a head start, they don’t just swim out of their tubes under their own power, like modern missiles. Having them swim out without the head start means that they have a much lower chance of catching their targets.
There aren’t many modern missiles that can do a hard 90 degree turn on launch, but there’s one – Swingfire, a UK anti-tank missile. The idea is that your launch vehicle hides behind a ridge, and launches at right angles to the target; the missile flies along behind the ridge for a bit, does a hard turn towards the target, pops up over the ridge and goes for it. The idea is that the enemy will assume that the launcher is immediately behind where the missile is coming from, when in fact it’s way off to the left or right. Clever.
Swingfire’s other memorable feature is that it comes in boxes of five. The logic there is that they did simulations and found that it took an average of two launches to destroy an enemy tank, and a Swingfire team would be able to destroy an average of two and a half enemy tanks before being killed. Two times two and a half is five. So they wouldn’t need any more than five rounds, because they wouldn’t survive long enough to use them.
I have always enjoyed these books. They are blatantly political, but then in this age it seems like everything has some political component. I would highly recommend them anyway, particularly because, even aside from Honor Harrington, there are numerous strong female characters, both good and moustache-twirling villain types (I’m looking at you Cordelia Ransom).
What are the other two books of the Crown of Slaves sequence? I thought there were only three?
@29 John Bunnell: I completely agree with your praise of the original “A Beautiful Friendship.” Would you by any chance be willing to list some of the other top half-dozen first contact stories from your personal list? I love a good first contact story.
I enjoyed reading the first three Honorverse novels, but once they get outside the cool spacefleet battles, they have … issues.
I mean, there’s this weird thing going on in which morality = competence. The bad guys are REALLY bad … but also pretty stupid and moustache twirlingly evil.
The other thing that got me was the whole space-monarchism angle. Which, again, Weber’s directly inspired by Horatio Hornblower, so “God Save the Space Queen!” kiiiind of fits? Though as an American I can’t help but look at it askance. Especially since the background basically boiled down to “Hey, this doctor cured a plague– LET’S MAKE HIM KING OF SPACE!”
But hey, at least it’s better than a lot of other cheap Mil-SF that’s been cranked out over the years.
First of all, no one writes a space battle better than David Weber. No one.
Second, though, the problem with Honor (I read these a long time ago, so my memory may be sparse) isn’t so much that she’s perfect, it’s that even her enemies hate her because she’s just so competent. Miles Vorkosigan is brilliant, but he can also be an ass sometimes. Honor’s “flaws” are thinly-disguised strengths—she doesn’t tolerate assholes, IIRC, although I admit I can’t cite an example.
I started with a later Honor book (Maybe “War of Honor”) that started with a mysterious ship coming out of nowhere, which was intriguing, then went into endless chapters of committee meetings where something seemed about to happen . . . and then everyone went to another meeting. Fortunately I got “On Basilisk Station” from the Baen Free Library, printed out a couple of chapters (Yeah, this was a long time ago), then went and bought the book. And several more. Enjoyed them all.
The politics were fairly obvious, but I could ignore that. The “people hate Honor because she’s so perfect” got annoying, but I could even ignore that for a while. The thing that killed it for me? The damn treecat. And I like cats. But it got to be too much for my taste. I remember reading one that went into talking about Nimitz in an early chapter, and I skipped ahead, and saw that it was another couple of pages about treecats. I don’t think I hurled the paperback across the room—but I was tempted.
#39: Oh, sure — though let’s be careful not to let the discussion here drift too far afield. Let me give you three more:
• Uhura’s Song (Janet Kagan) – I am among those who count this as one of the all-time best of the entire Star Trek line, and one of the reasons is that it’s a particularly good first-contact yarn.
• After Long Silence (Sheri Tepper) – I consider Tepper an uneven writer; when there’s a visible thematic or sociological agenda, a Tepper book tends to be too heavy-handed for my taste. But when she’s more focused on the pure SFnal or fantastic idea, she can be extraordinary, and although it’s been a really long time since I’ve read it, I recall thinking that this novel, in which first contact with especially strange aliens figures strongly, might just be her single most fascinating book.
• StarBridge (A. C. Crispin) – First in what turned into a first-rate collaborative series whose central theme was first contact. When I first read and reviewed these, I drew a strong parallel between Crispin’s work and the Andre Norton YA canon; in light of Judith Tarr’s thoughtful Norton reread here at Tor.com, I may have done Crispin a disservice. With benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I gave her enough credit for re-inventing space adventure for a diverse readership.
“there’s this weird thing going on in which morality = competence. The bad guys are REALLY bad … but also pretty stupid”
That’s fairly true to life, though, don’t you think? Evil and incompetence go together more often than not. Look at military history. Look at general history. Look at current politics, for that matter.
One of my earliest comments on the Honorverse was that reading Weber taught me how to read Tom Clancy: don’t sweat the jargon, and skim over the numbers. Works surprisingly well for both series; as long as you have a general feel for the scales involved, the precise details are skippable.
Unfortunately, both authors are prone to what I call the “Clancy’s logs” problem. This comes from one of the Jack Ryan books, in which the book (typically) opens with an array of disparate scenes which establish the subplots that will eventually come together and factor into the resolution of the core conflict. One such scene is of some trees being cut down. Throughout the book, we keep coming back to those logs for no apparent reason, witnessing them seasoning in the woods, being bought as lumber, and being lashed to the deck to be shipped to their overseas destination. Why do we see all this? Because, during the inevitable submarine battle, there’s a storm which pitches the logs into the sea, where they become a navigation hazard. Seriously, that’s their purpose in the book.
Now, I generally happen to like a good deal of detail, but others find it excessive and would prefer a bit more handwaving in that respect. I completely understand that; I felt that way about Clancy’s logs. The later Honorverse books are positively laden with such subplots, to the point that entire subseries exist to detail what’s going on in other parts of the setting that the main Honor-focused books can’t reasonably show. (I’m looking at you, Torch and Saganami.)
I happen to be reading what is apparently the penultimate book in the Honor-era series right now. Much of it is about the impact of one villain who goes around encouraging rebellion on several planets. A big chunk in the middle describes in detail an event which was described in more removed, clinical terms in an earlier book. In truth, I could probably have skipped the entire book and gone straight to the concluding volume without losing much in terms of key timeline events.
I love it, though. The rebellions which could’ve been sketched out as background events and covered in a couple of paragraphs instead have fully fleshed-out characters with understandable motivations and genuine stakes. It’s background detail with respect to the main sequence, but I find it compelling regardless. I’m here for the people, not (primarily) the lavish descriptions of massive militaries and big numbers of death-dealing missiles.
Speaking of those missiles, it’s worth noting that a strength of this series is the way it doesn’t forget about its innovations. The missile pods mentioned upthread weren’t invented because somebody in R&D thought they’d be swell. Nope, they were lashed together out of desperation, they worked, and when word got back to R&D, that idea influenced ship design and battle tactics for the rest of the series.
Go with your gut on this one. If what I’ve described sounds like a boring slog to you, you probably won’t enjoy the series and should skip it. If you’re intrigued, though, there’s a lot to love. (Literally; just these last two books weigh in at about 1800 combined pages.) Remember, the first couple of ebooks are available at no charge – you literally have nothing to lose except for the time spent reading them.
@44 Shadow of Victory is a weird creature that’s a lovely novel but an absolute shit entry of a series.
“The whole space-monarchism angle… as an American I can’t help but look at it askance.”
A non-American writes: looking at your government for the last twenty years or so, it isn’t glaringly obvious that Americans have a problem with people getting into power because of who their father is, rather than because they got a majority of votes in an election.
@45:
I’m almost done with Shadow of Victory now; I’m in the middle of chapter 72’s battle between Tremaine and Tamaguchi. Honestly, the two things that annoy me most about this book are the Polish language (unfamiliar to me, with weird diacritical marks that I have no idea how to pronounce – nice accomplishment, and I admit the issue is on my end) and the sloppy editing. (Honestly, “Battle Feet” for “Battle Fleet”? Then there’s Myers/Meyers System, with both spellings occurring on the same page multiple times, as well as the character whose name changes from Breitbach to Breitbart and back again…)
As a story and as the next chunk in the series, though? Like I said, I’m enjoying it. It may help that I’ve been away from the series for a while, such that pieces which might otherwise seem redundant are instead useful reminders that helped me get back up to speed.
@31
I didn’t see the missile pods as implausible. Any launcher attached to a ship has to be just that, attached. That means all the apparatus that allow the missle to fire has to be included in the structure as well. You can have 1000 missles in the cargo hold but if the missile magazine only has room for 10 of them at a time, if you only can fit 7 firing platforms into your vessel, then all those missles don’t really matter as much. Missile pods on the other hand, are one-shot deals. Missle, firing apparatus and telemetry data are in one contained package. You fire then you drop.
So the mechanism that carries a big box full of 50 missiles, plus the firing apparatus and the telemetry, from the interior of the ship to the exterior is lighter/easier than the mechanism that would carry 50 individual missiles?
@36
He does actually address this by saying IIRC that the missiles are launched from mass-drivers to give them a head start, they don’t just swim out of their tubes under their own power, like modern missiles. Having them swim out without the head start means that they have a much lower chance of catching their targets.
The missiles and ships are accelerating at hundreds of Gs for tens of seconds and going a measurable fraction of light speed. Those must be some pretty impressive mass drivers…
Analogies aren’t perfect, but doing the naval-warfare-version thought experiment about imaging VLS-equipped seagoing guided missile cruisers carrying rafts tthat they throw overboard kind of highlights the weirdness of the situation. You can invent finicky technology constraints that makes the pods work, but it was clearly retconning, and requires some very careful fine tuning, just to make sure that the Good Guys get to have yet another brilliant idea that for some reason no-one ever thought of before, thereby demonstrating through superior intellect (as others have noted) their moral superiority.
I’ve seen articles in naval journals that point out that sensors, fire control and missiles don’t necessarily have to be on the same vessel. If the missiles are launched from a platform that doesn’t emit any signals, that platform would be a lot more survivable.
@49
Which is an argument for putting the sensors on disposable pods/drones (since sensors attract attention) and the missiles on the ship (which can stay quiet.) but of course that only works in a stealth-in-space universe, which is a different set of laws of physics than the universe we live in. (Avoiding discussion about the “let’s accelerate by thousands of km/s with our incredibly hot high-temperature-plasma fusion drives rather than our reactionless gravity drive, because that’ll be stealthy” bit from one of the books here…)
Anyway, I’m probably at the Beating Dead Horse level of discussion, but was originally just pushing back a bit at the idea that Weber writes highly accurate self-consistent naval combat. It’s definitely exciting, but the weird hybrid of age-of-sale and modern naval exists to allow plot things to happen, rather than letting consistent rules drive the plot. Which isn’t actually a bad thing!
@50 You raise good points. As I said in the article, pretty much all of our navy in space stories reverse engineer the technology to fit the plot. And to replicate tactics from the age of sail, the Honorverse has stretched things even further.
Frankly, the space combat in the Honor series goes to garbage after HoTQ at latest, because it just devolves into cut & paste descriptions of how a bunch of missiles get fired and how the defenses try their best but don’t quite work. Mix in some shrapnel killing random crew and maybe some gem-hard eyes to taste and you’re done.
The Mutineer’s Moon series suffers the same problem.
I have to admit that I enjoyed On Basilisk Station less on first read then most here. And because of that, I didn’t finish the universe as is. I’m thinking of revisiting that decision.
As far as I’m concerned, Jack Campbell’s Black Jack Geary books are the top space navy books on the market right now. (and his fantasy ain’t half-bad either). Like others, I applaud the Tanya Huff Valor books. Oddly enough, Campbell names his partner character to Geary, Tanya Desjani. Campbell works hard on the space battles portion of the books and there’s a through-line to O’Brien that’s obvious. The whole Lost Fleet and Beyond the Frontier books are page-turners despite the necessary jargon. The tenseness that is the WAITING for the battle to commence is portrayed vividly. Campbell also published a strong series of books featuring space JAG lawyer Paul Sinclair under his real name, John G. Hemry. A different take on the goings on of a space navy, but a good one nonetheless.
I’m also in accord with the recommendation for the Naomi Novik-penned Temeraire books. I disagree about her fantasy being better, but then I’m saying her dragon-infused re-telling of the Napoleonic Wars on a global scale are some how not fantasy. Sure seems like the books meet the ‘well, it COULD happen …’ standard for an idea. Impossible of course. But well done.
As are the Leary/Munday books. Both David Drake and Novik capture the manners of the era, however filtered through their takes on the O’Brien books.
Lastly, I have to say that I find much enjoyment out of the Mike Shepherd books centred around (Princess) Kris Longknife. The space battles are aplenty, although super computers and technomagical shape shifting ships are an acquired taste. Call in Honor Harrington-light. But it doesn’t take an experienced reader long to again, see the O’Brien influences.
Military Space fiction is thriving in these days of self-publishing on Amazon. There’s new authors awaiting to be found. At the same time, it’s good to have old classics to grab from your dead tree library to read on a blah day with nothing else on your calendar.
@53 I have to admit, I also prefer the Jack Campbell tales. The exposition is used more sparingly, and you get just enough detail to make things feel real, without bogging down the narrative. I admire the way he describes huge fleet actions with such clarity.
@53 & 54
Yeah, the space action (not just battles) of Jack Campbell are much more interesting, IMO. Though I wish he fleshed out his universe with a little more detail. Even in the Lost Stars the world felt a little bland.
Currently I’m reading through the Honorverse, at At All Costs right now. Around the point where it splits into 2 other series which feed into the main series. Really annoying. Not too keen on them but it feels like something’s missing when reading the book from the main series- it was so at least from the previous one.
So far I’m having to rely on Weber’s exposition to follow what’s happening- seems to be working so far :) But because it’s not clear cut whether I should or shouldn’t read the additional series I’m faced with a torturous dilemma whther to read them too or not- whether I’m missing out..
#55: As it’s turned out, the attempt to create distinct sub-series in the main timeline was pretty much aborted at least on the marketing side (in part, I suspect, because it got too difficult to coordinate the pace of plot development among all the players).
Also, frankly, the ur-series has now morphed somewhat — what Weber is doing is writing what amounts to a comprehensive account of a particular period in interstellar history, which necessarily changes focus from volume to volume as events unfold. (It’s like one author tackling the whole run of the actual Napoleonic wars instead of just writing the British version….) I am not sure there’s anyone else in or out of the genre who’s tried to create something quite that big, save perhaps Ed Greenwood’s monumental world of Faerun aka the Forgotten Realms for the AD&D game.
@@@@@ 56
Thanks for the additional insight. The problem I’m having is trying to decide which books to read and when, whilst trying to avoid spoilers.
I’ve decided to pass on the Crown of Slaves (ironicaly I have much bigger issues on this subject with Flint’s 1632).
The Saganami series looks like more directly relevant to the main series and the events in the 1st book in it occur at the same time as those in At All Costs so I’m wrestling with the dilemma right now. But it is a big commitment, 4 hefty books so far… I’ll read the first 5 chapters on Amazon’s preview and then decide, I think.
ValMar – yes, read the Saganami books. They are very good, IMO. They focus on big political and military issues in a huge star cluster that just became part of Manticore. Lots of good characters, including several we know well from the main series.
Howdy RobM- watched GoT 8×2 last night and just read through the articles and comments on Tor ;)
Yeah, as I am about 50 pages into At All Costs and having taken a careful peek at The Shadow of Saganami I have very general idea of the events.
Basically, I am wondering whether the Saganami series is worth it on its own and how much it is interwined with the main series. Like Lost Fleet and Lost Stars by Campbell. Which (Lost Stars) was very much worth my time, despite the later books struggling to keep up with the earlier ones. In fact, the occasions when the two series merge are my favourite ones- reading from the different sides and how they see and evaluate each other.
Anyway, if you say it’s good then I’ll give it a go.
PS The title (Saganami) was very misleading for me- it appeared to imply that the plot revolves around the academy and/or it’s a prequel about the man who it’s named after.
Hey Valmar – the first book starts with a focus on some of the kids graduating from the Saganami military school as they are assigned on their first tour to a ship heading to the Talbot Cluster. You also get to know well the Ship’s Captain and officers, the Admiral assigned to the Cluster and other political figures. Big things happen along the way. Most of the team then continues in the Cluster as action accelerates even more the later books, and are joined by additional Manticoran military talent, many of whom we know from other books (including a certain cousin to the Queen who usually hangs out with or near Honor). The Saganami reference is mostly a loose metaphor for the Captain for whom the military school was named who sacrificed himself to save numerous other ships.
Thanks RobMRobM, I ordered the first one so now I have to read it ;)