Just Plain Awesome: Honor Harrington #1: On Basilisk Station, by David Weber

It's time to start a new series that I may or may not continue, given the state of my blog so far. I'm calling it: Just Plain Awesome. I will review stuff that I think is awesome. There you go.

First on my list is the first book in the Honor Harrington series: On Basilisk Station, written by David Weber.

Commander Honor Harrington of the Royal Manticorean Navy (Manticore being a kingdom spanning several planets) is assigned to command the HMS Fearless. It's small and old, but she's excited about it. But then it turns out this ship is getting the majority of its long-range weapons stripped out to be replaced with a weapon that, while devastating, is only good for short range. This is the fault of a certain group of powerful people, who hold a theory they want Honor and Fearless to prove. Honor does her damndest in tactical exercises, and succeeds at first, until her opposition catches on and simply stays out of harm's way.

Embarrassed, the party gets Honor and the crew of Fearless assigned to Basilisk Station and its attached planet Medusa. Basilisk System which has two different wormhole junctions leading towards it (making it vulnerable and useful at the same time) and an abundance of illegal trade.

Basilisk Station, for various idiotic political reasons, is also chronically understaffed and overlooked, and is where the Royal Manticorean Navy send their biggest dropkicks to get them out of the way. Honor is understandably upset, and meanwhile her crew also resent her for being posted out here. Then the only other ship in Basilisk leaves on pretence of badly needing maintenance, because the guy captaining it has a personal vendetta against Honor.

So she's got one ship and needs to police the entire Basilisk System. Meanwhile, the primitive natives of Medusa are getting up to some strange and worrying things...

Honor's response to this mess? She promptly decides to ignore the insult inherent in her posting, take these problems in stride, get herself and her respective crew into gear and do the best damn job she can. And it is glorious to read. (I like reading about people Getting Stuff Done Competently, hence I'm a huge fan of Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice duology.)

Also, treecats!

My overall impression: Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

I loved everything.

I loved the way that female and male people were treated equally. There were just as many, if not more, females in powerful roles, and it was really really refreshing to have it be set in a time when sexism isn't an issue and so we are free to have powerful women who suck and powerful men who suck. Human nature is human nature, after all.

I loved that Honor behaved like a captain, never let her guard down too much, did things the right way, stayed in control--and if that made her seem Mary Sue-ish at times, well--I don't care. I honestly don't. Being good at your job and being awesome is not a crime. It was exhilarating, reading about a captain (and a girl) who gets stuff right and gets stuff DONE. It was so cool to read about the reactions to her exploits by those in positions of power who supported her. They were actively talking about how awesome and effective she was and supporting her. Honor is damn good at her job and it is COOL. She is empowering to read about because I can identify with her and more than that, I love identifying with her.

Put it this way: I think if Kate Beaton were to draw a non-parodic version of Strong Female Characters (warning: link is hilarious but absolutely not worksafe), Honor Harrington is a likely candidate to appear.

Honor herself is likeable: she is not selfish, her goal is to do her duty by any means necessary, no matter how impossible it looks (and this mission was impossible), to get her crew to do their duty by any means necessary, and while she doesn't like having to take a hard approach, if she has to, she does.   Honor is forty years old, and she is mature and secure in herself, unafraid to ruffle a few feathers. It's nice to read. Her goal is not deciding which guy to choose between a werewolf and a vampire or some other nasty beastie. Her goal is not to master some kind of power lying latent inside her that she doesn't really understand. Her goal is not coming of age, or choosing between love and work--both genres of story that I hate. It's just to prove that she is committed to her duty and to her empire--and that due to sheer awesomeness (and a healthy dose of pigheadedness) she is not going to back down when someone sets her up to fail.

After the kind of first person YA garbage I haven't recently been able to escape reading, wherein the main characters don't come off too well, it's a bit sad to have to say that David Weber has a real talent for not making his main characters unlikeable when he writes from their viewpoint. That should be a given, but these days it isn't.

What is exceptional is that he's good at writing from the antagonists' viewpoints, giving every character a good chain of reasoning for why they are the way they are and why they think how they think. They act for their own personal reasons that may or may not be affected by politics or the economy, and their personal lives, irrelevant to the plot, are also discussed a little bit in-story. There's one conversation between two people about a man's sick wife, which has nothing to do with anything. It's just a little segue in amidst the new action. There's even a little bit of exposition in the narration thrown in, explaining that the woman used to be a famous singer. I like that. It acknowledges that the characters have lives beyond the decisions they make which affect the plot. It really builds up a sense of realism and fleshes the world out.

Also of note is that sometimes the bad guys are just the bad guys because they're not on the same side as Honor, which I think Weber notes and plays on. When he writes a ship's captain, frustrated  at the other side who just won't die, he writes exactly that, no matter whose side they're on. Yet, you still want Honor to win.

There was no mention of religion except for the native Medusans' so I would hazard a guess that nobody who matters to the story really has a religion and David Weber thinks that it's unscientific and so would have been wiped out by a race who have the science to travel the stars. But anyway. I'd rather there was no mention of religion at all than have the author just randomly insult Christianity for no reason (as is unbearably common), so Weber gets points and my sincere thanks for bucking that particular trend. And it's not like religion would actually have any bearing on the events of the story, so I suppose he saw no need to include it.

Weber's style of writing is really, really good. A minimum of unnecessary dialogue tags, good characterisation, a good plot, and insane depth in worldbuilding, especially in terms of political, economic and social relations. Interactions between characters were done realistically, given the types of people who were involved. I'm not really one to talk about pacing as I don't pay too much attention to that kind of thing in a novel and if Weber interrupted the story at a crucial moment to explain the development of space travel for a while, well, it was interesting enough to keep me absorbed, so he gets away with it!

A little detail that caught my eye was that these people still use paper at times. As I have written before, I doubt paper is going to go away because of its sheer handiness. I liked this inclusion a lot.

The very final pages are absolutely priceless. Such a brilliant way to end. Anyone who has read it will know what I am talking about. It definitely made me laugh.

As for ratings, I now officially give On Basilisk Station 5 stars because I know I am going to read it again and again, and it's making me hunt down anything else by David Weber. Trivia: On Basilisk Station is also the first book to interest me in space battles.

On Basilisk Station is free to download at Baen here. Try the Baen Free CD site for more free Honorverse titles (most of them are free. In fact, the second in the series isn't currently available to buy, which I find odd...).

Trigger warnings for swearing in heated situations and some non-graphic but not obscured references to  an attempted sexual assault (only mentioned once in the book so if that's a trigger for you, you can skip that part easily). Because of this, I can't honestly say that I think you should give this book to a fourteen year old, but I will note that I would really have enjoyed this book at about age thirteen or fourteen, and I think I'll still enjoy it when I'm thirty.


And now to say this to David Weber himself, because he did something awesome and he needs to know about it. His Twitter account, @davidweber1, looks like the best route to take. I'll let you know if he replies.