On Basilisk Station
The Honor Harrington series, Book 1
David Weber
Baen
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Classics, Epics, Felines, Girl Power, Soldier Stories, Space Stories, War Games
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Description
Honor Harrington's young career with the Royal Manticorian Navy positively glows, built on a strong academy showing and a fine turn as captain. Given
a new ship - the aging HMS Fearless - retrofitted with experimental armaments, she becomes a reluctant part of a top admiral's pet project...
but, despite her best efforts, the new weaponry proves ineffective in real-space exercises. The crew, humiliated, turns on their new captain, who becomes
the admiral's scapegoat. When the Fearless is reassigned to Basilisk Station, their degradation is complete.
Basilisk, considered of trivial importance to Manticore, is the traditional dumping ground of Naval screw-ups, embarrassments, and undesirables. The
nearest planet is a worthless ball of moss peopled by primitive natives, smugglers outnumber legitimate traders, and politics have left the outpost
virtually stripped of firepower to enforce laws... assuming any of the incompetents sent to patrol the place bothered trying. But Harrington refuses to
turn her back on her duty, or her resentful crew. Her insistence on doing her job properly and honorably - in the face of impossible logistics, skeptical
locals, and deliberate sabotage by her peers - rattles more than a few gilded cages back home... and unearths an enemy plot that might bring the mighty
Manticorian forces to their knees.
Review
I don't often read "big ships in space" books. Long, involved stretches of technobabble give me brain-aches. Convoluted military politics, cronyism, and
backstabbing bore me. But I've been trying to expand my reading horizons beyond my safety net of fantasy books. Perhaps I've misjudged the "big ships" genre
of sci-fi all these years. After all, I managed to read and enjoy Elizabeth Moon's Trading in Danger without significant brain-ache. Maybe I ought to
give those big-ship stories another chance.
Unfortunately, I chose the wrong book to start with.
Honor Harrington's world reads like a jumble of stereotypes, melding peculiarly old-school Earth terms with "modern" (by the story-universe's standards)
references that feel forced. Harrington comes into the book with nothing to prove; she starts out as the Perfect Captain - prodigal career, excellent at
handling even difficult crewmembers, top-notch tactician willing to do anything to get the job done right, complete with an animal sidekick and conveniently
poor mathematics skills (save when calculating complicated maneuvers on the fly in "top-notch tactician" mode) to make her "flawed and human" - and remains so
throughout the book. It merely remains to convince the bigwigs of the Royal Manticorian Navy of that fact.
Her second-in-command spends much of the book wrestling with a deep-rooted resentment of Harrington, stemming solely from her being so much better as a captain
and a human being than he could ever hope to be. Once he accepts her perfection, things go much better for everyone. This sentiment sets the tone for every
character's relations with the captain; supporters sing of her glories across the stars, while enemies shake their fists as she foils their evil plans.
Surrounding Harrington is a blurry halo of names, all of whom spend an inordinate amount of time praising or cursing her while only rarely distinguishing
themselves as characters in their own right. But, then, even her own crewmembers often blur together, and those who do stand out fall into the well-worn ruts of
genre convention (the crack engineer who can do anything under impossible deadlines, the insecure junior officer who just needs a chance to shine, etc.) The rest
of the page count consists largely of info dumps, several of which involve people telling each other things about their own history, technology, and convoluted
Manticorian politics that they already know (or ought to know, though Harrington - whose job seems inherently political, given the rampant back-scratching in the
Navy - has a plot-convenient aversion to politics.) The main thrust of the story becomes obvious before the halfway mark, though the characters take longer to
clue in, no doubt because they must filter absolutely every thought through agonizingly tangled chains of info dumps and allegiances. It all wraps up in a battle
that stretches out far too long as incidental characters are picked off in ostensibly tragic manners. At one point, the author slams on the brakes for a five-page
history of interstellar propulsion and hyperspace travel... all of which, in a long-winded and meandering manner, contributes exactly nothing to the tension of the
interrupted scene. (Supposedly, Harrington "thought" it while ruminating on the conflict at hand, when she ought to have been paying more attention to the
here-and-now.)
At the end, I put this book down with a sigh of relief that it was finally over at long last... not to mention a distinct aversion to trying any more "big ships in
space" books in the near future.