He watched his display, noting the cool professionalism with which Fearless had held her counter-fire until she had perfect targets, and filed that away with all his other data on Commander Harrington’s capabilities. A dangerous, dangerous woman, he told himself as two of his missiles were decoyed off course and exploded harmlessly outside Fearless’s sidewalls. But not dangerous enough to make up for the difference in firepower.
- Title: On Basilisk Station
- Author: David Weber
- Genre: Space Opera/Military Science Fiction
- Year: 1993
The Honor Harrington franchise is huge, with something like ten or more books in the principal series, numerous spin-offs and anthologies featuring other Baen authors, and other assorted media like role playing games. Somehow this ‘Honorverse’ hadn’t really registered on my radar until recently, and I bought the first few of David Weber’s books secondhand with the intention of getting to them someday. Well, I’m glad ‘someday’ finally rolled around, because On Basilisk Station, the first book of the series, is such a completely engrossing and entertaining read that I can see exactly why it has spawned the tremendous following it has.
The Honor Harrington books are a ‘Horatio Hornblower in space’ (the first book is in fact dedicated to Forester) series of adventures revolving around a brilliant female starship captain of the Manticoran Royal Navy. The backdrop is the far future, with space empires and FTL and superdreadnoughts and power armor — in short a space opera universe. But this is space opera with a difference, for Weber instills his universe with enough good physics and plausible technical detail that even a cynic who rolls his eyes at E.E. “Doc” Smith and chortles with laughter during Star Wars will be won-over by Weber’s meticulous and well-realized detail . (Though I doubt this would have much effect on the staunch ‘Mundane SF’ coterie) Much of the appeal of this type of story is just how interesting these details can be — whether it’s the ship’s chief engineer trying to figure out a better way to modify missiles into scanning beacons, marines discussing the tactical load-out for a planned campaign, or Honor herself pulling off a ballsy maneuver that uses the ship’s systems in unexpected ways — it all makes for compelling reading.
But it’s Honor and her travails that truly capture the reader’s attention and make this book the page-turner that it is. We join Honor just as she is to assume her new command, the Fearless, an aged light cruiser. The Fearless is being refitted with new weaponry that Honor has little confidence in, but she does her best to utilize it in fleet-wide war games. A dominant faction within the navy, for whom this proto-type weapon system is the exemplar of their radical new combat doctrine, don’t care for the results of the simulation, and Honor and her crew are packed off to Basilisk Station — a remote outpost of the Manticoran Republic were the navy sends its screw-ups and those it would prefer to forget. Honor, left on her own by a superior that wishes to sabotage her career, ignored by the top brass, under-equipped and under-staffed, and with a crew that resents and distrusts her, has to somehow find a way to do her duty. Of course she does, and does so brilliantly.
That’s one of the chief appeals and immediate draws of the story, as initially it’s Honor (and the reader) against the world. One of the big, but overlooked, aspects of ‘military science fiction’ — which is often dismissed by snootily insecure critics as mere tales of battles and jingoism and melodrama — is the focus on leadership and group dynamics, as well as creative problem solving. On Basilisk Station has this quality in abundance, as Honor wisely steers her crew toward the results she needs, shepherds her resources or deploys them to maximum effect, and works effectively alongside local authorities to bring a semblance of order to Basilisk Station. The nuts and bolts quality of all this is powerfully immersive, and the reader feels every new threat and every minor triumph right alongside the protagonist.
The book culminates in one hell of a starship battle, and special mention should be made of Weber’s smartly balanced approach to something that is often a bone of contention for sci-fi fans. Weber manages to combine the needs of realism with the demands of exciting action with his development of the ‘impeller wedge,’ a device that activates an impenetrable gravity field above and below a starship that enables extreme acceleration. A simple premise with big ramifications for the shape of naval encounters in the Honorverse, as it both permits engagements across huge, multi-million kilometer distances at tremendous speed, and re-introduces the concept of the broadside to space battles. Since the wedge is impenetrable, ships behave in profile a bit more like their ancient sea-going counterparts, and thus all manner of maneuvers are necessary to bring one’s firepower to bear against the vulnerable part of one’s enemy — a brilliantly done transposition of the tactics of the age of Nelson into a space opera format.
It’s a good feeling to know that there is so much more to this series left for me to discover, as I can say without doubt this was the best book of its kind I’ve read in over a decade.
