On Basilisk Station, The Honor of the Queen, The Short Victorious War, Field of Dishonor, Flag in Exile, Honor Among Enemies, In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor, Ashes of Victory, War of Honor, More Than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, by David Weber: a review. References are to the electronic editions, all of which are available free online.
Is Buck Rogers dead? Flash Gordon? James T. Kirk? Are we still allowed to have stories about unselfconsciously-heroic manly men singlehandedly overthrowing space dicatorships? I haven't seen any for a long time now, though admittedly it's not a genre I follow. Or particularly enjoy. Nowdays they're all brooding antiheroes, violent ex-con antiheroes, revenge driven antiheroes, incompetent-but-accidentally-successful antiheroes, satirically overblown mock-heroes, and so on; I'd just assumed that the old school of heroics had been swallowed in a mire of irony.
Honor Harrington is a manly-man action-space-hero-adventurer of the highest order. Or at least she would be, if only she wasn't a woman. I probably sound like a chauvinist pig at this point, but I'm not, really; it's just surprise, or maybe the spectre of some subconscious sexist prejudice: why do I find Honor Harrington so easy to accept, when a male version -- achieved almost perfectly by judicious pronoun-reshuffling -- would seem like a serious copy of Zapp Brannigan?
I should stress that, despite by apparent obsession with it, her gender is a non-issue. Aside from a very few plot elements requiring a female protagonist -- the sexual prejudice of the Graysons, for example, which with genders reversed rings too loudly of "planet of the Amazon women" -- the characters might as well be androgynous. Weber scrupulously avoids a G.I. Jane-style "woman making good in the man's military" scenario: he's so scrupulous with regard to gender equality, in fact, that at times it seems he must be keeping a tally to ensure an even balance among the characters. It's only a problem if you go in for difference feminism, but it's worth noting -- this isn't feminist science fiction.
Calling it "mindlessly self-indulgent wish-fulfilment science fiction" is a little better, I think, since the series as a whole is a rise-to-glory epic, modelled on Forester's Horatio Hornblower. On Basilisk Station begins with Commander Honor Harrington boarding her new commission, the light cruiser HMS Fearless of the navy of the Star Kingdom of Manticore; by Shadow of Saganami, the most recent spinoff, she's Admiral of the Red Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Steadholder and Duchess Harrington, beloved far and wide. It pains me that I can be completely serious when saying that she even has special powers:
The 'cats had always been able to sense human emotions, but as far as she knew, she was the first human who'd ever been able to sense a 'cat's emotions—or, through Nimitz, other humans' emotions—in return. (Honor Among Enemies, paragraph 252)
Yes, it's that kind of story. If she's not winning battles against impossible odds or escaping impenetrable prison planets, she's single-handedly saving Christmas. She's beautiful, though she doesn't realize it, one of the few to have bonded with one of the mysterious treecats, an eighth-level black belt and an expert marksman. She does have flaws, of course, but they're sympathetic flaws -- physically attacking smarmy economists, say. She executes three people in cold blood, but it's okay; they weren't very nice. There may be more, but they tend to be swept away by the tsunami of her magnificence -- I think I could forgive you for thinking of her as Mary-Sue Harrington.
[W]hen a single, foreign-born woman could walk into a theocratic, male-dominated society and win the personal devotion of a group so disparate that it contained not simply that society's navy but old-line Grayson male supremacists like Howard Clinkscales, Harrington Steading's regent; reformers like Benjamin IX, the planet's reigning monarch; religious leaders like the Reverend Jeremiah Sullivan, spiritual head of the Church of Humanity Unchained; urbane and polished statesmen like Lord Henry Prestwick, Grayson's Chancellor; and even ex-Havenite officers like Alfredo Yu, now a GSN admiral, she had to be something quite out of the ordinary. (In Enemy Hands, paragraph 84)
That the characters are wholly flat -- and possibly ridiculous -- isn't a real problem, because the focus is on battle tactics, pseudo-science and intergalactic politics. It's military science fiction. Political science fiction, maybe. Weber takes his universe more seriously than most authors: the anthology More than Honor even contains a twenty-thousand-word novella called "The Universe of Honor Harrington", describing in meticulous detail the science of hyper-physics. It might be nonsense, but it's consistent and believable nonsense, which is really all you can ask for. It's also required reading if you want to understand what the hell is going on in the battles:
In the military sphere, it was soon discovered that although the bow (or "throat") and stern aspects of an impeller wedge must remain open, additional "sidewall" grav waves could be generated to close its open sides and serve as shields against hostile fire, as not even an energy beam (generated using then-current technology) could penetrate a wave front in which effective local gravity went from zero to several hundred thousand gravities. The problem of generating an energy beam powerful enough to "burn through" even at pointblank ranges was not to be solved for centuries, but within fifty years grav penetrators had been designed for missile weapons, which could also make full use of the incredible acceleration potential of the impeller drive. (More than Honour, paragraph 1539)
The actual combat is fairly compelling, but there's not much to say about it. It's exciting, and the tactics vary enough -- as a result of new technology introduced during the series -- that it stays interesting.
Political wrangling occupies a lot of the time between explosions. The wars are just one facet of the various interplanetary political games, and there's a not-inconsiderable amount of infighting too -- ah democracy, how we love thee. Haven suffers a rebellion or three, and Manticore seems cursed by a plague of politicians unusually stupid and malicious. Harrington's group is, of course, the voice of reason; and when they're not in power, it's quite infuriating to read about the enemy making so many obviously bad decisions. It makes it easier to like Honor and hate her opponents, but it's rather unfortunate in that it sometimes resembles a crude satire.
I've got nothing against flat, caricature-like characters -- or maybe I do, if you put it that way -- but Weber has a tendency to deride any political stance other than social and economic liberalism. It's easy to take when he's attacking the Grayson's fundamentalist patriarchy; it's harder when he portrays the left-wing Liberals as soft, conciliatory and essentially blind. In On Basilisk Station, their half-hearted indigenous protectionism results in a massacre of the natives. They snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when they take over the war. Another example is the People's Republic of Haven, the enemy throughout the early novels. It's an autocratic state bearing more than a little resemblance to the Soviet Union, though the explicit comparison is to revolutionary France -- the first time the chairman is referred to as "Rob S. Pierre" is a memorable low point. The decline of the once-prospeous Republic is blamed on the introduction of the dole, which led -- apparently inexorably -- to an autocratic welfare-state; combined with Weber's alleged confirmation that Haven is actually an allegory for the United States, it's easy enough to read as a fairly ridiculous attack on the concept of welfare. I may be overstating things: the later novels are notably less pro-war, some sympathetic social liberals are introduced, and the blame is shifted more onto malicious individuals than particular ideologies.
But a reader less prone to overanalysis is unlikely to even notice, so why did I bother typing that? What really matters is that the books are fun. The good guys are easy to love and the bad guys are easy to hate. You get vicarious action -- with corresponding real adrenaline -- and, of course, vicarious success always brings a thrill. Honor Harrington is nothing if not successful, so the books make for addictive reading. You can't have just one.
Star ratings are pointless, but let's say four. A guilty pleasure.