Book Log 18/2011 - David Weber: On Basilisk Station

[jacey]

I confess this isn't a book I'd have been naturally drawn to because I'm neither a great lover of military SF, nor widely read in the sub-genre, however I'm going to Eastercon next weekend and David Weber is one of the guests of honour, so it seemed reasonable to read something of one of his best known (and best loved) characters Honor Harrington.

By the time I was halfway through this I was grinding my teeth. All the reasons that I don't read mil-SF were coming back to haunt me – way too much technical information for starters, which I guess is exactly the reason some people love this stuff. It certainly had a authoritative ring to it. If the tech stuff was bollox it was clever bollox and well thought through.

I read for characterisation and plot not technical details, so I appreciate Honor Harrington as a character. She captains a starship in the equal-ops Manticorian navy, an elegant mixture of discipline with a dash of intuition and some well covered up insecurities. I'd have liked to have seen her being something a little more than a star ship captain, but this book only concerned itself with Honor on duty.

In this novel – the first published – Honor is given her first command of an elderly and badly modified light cruiser, the Fearless, and after a single brilliant move in strategic war games, her controversial ship-board modifications prove such a disadvantage that she's given an assignment in a virtual graveyard posting. It's made even worse by the fact that her new boss, Pavel Young, is someone she made an enemy of whilst still at the academy. He sets her up to fail and then leaves her to (he thinks) sink – the best move he can make because 'fail' is not a word in Honor's vocabulary. Honour pulls her demoralised crew together and sets about not failing and in doing so shows Young up for the incompetent he is by figuring out that there's an invasion plot underway which he's missed completely.

Does she foil it? What do you think?

I can't say that I'm rushing to read any more Honor Harrington books, but as I said, I'm not a mil-SF fan, so that's not to say there's a fault in the book (the Honorverse's popularity says otherwise) rather there's a basic incompatibility with this reader's tastes.

Comments

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

I don't remember which Honor Harrington novel I tried to read, but it wasn't the techspec (which in other people's MilSF I quite enjoy) that drove me mad, it was Honor. I kept wanting to squirt her in the face with one of those trick lapel flowers. I don't remember whether I finished it or not (it was years and years ago) but I have a low tolerance for angst even when I don't dislike the characters. I was interested in the political setup, but not enough to read another volume.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I have a military character who puts in a very brief appearance in my magic pirate novel Though he's from c.1800, he strikes me that he would translate quite well to the Honorverse. His subordinates refer to him as Lieutanant Buckram-Britches. Entirely to stuffy for his own good.

Translating into Honorverse

[wswears.livejournal.com]

He would translate pretty well. Honor is part Lord Admiral Nelson, part Captain Thomas Cochrane, part Horatio Hornblower. The enemy characters are straight from the French Revolution. Robespierre = Rob Pierre.

The correlation was not only intended, but heavily flagged throughout the series. I still didn't get it until I read a post by David Weber about it. Tiny pea brain, again.

Bill