2nd Experimental Book Post: Honor Harrington
Entry posted by Clephas
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First, I should mention that I'm a huge fan of David Weber. Even his crappiest book is still interesting to read (the crappiest book being Out of the Dark, an Independence Day-style story where the world is saved by Dracula, lol). However, the Honor Harrington series is my favorite series written by him.
Beginning with On Basilisk Station, this military sci-fi series begins focused on the character known as - obviously - Honor Harrington, a young warship captain getting command of a new light cruiser.
Honor is the post gender-disparity female of the feminist movement's dreams, a woman born and raised in a society where gender limitations were nonexistent and nothing is thought of women going into the military. Weber, for all his faults as writer, has never shown the prejudices a lot of male sci-fi writers tend to have in this area, and Honor is by far his most popular and powerful character. She begins the series as a commander, the lowest rank in the Royal Manticoran Navy allowed independent command of a starship, and, as she takes trip after trip though the fires of war's hell, she gradually climbs the ranks of her star nation's military, suffering pain and loss, as well as joy and glory in equal amounts.
Honor doesn't go through life unscarred... she is a rare individual who can't use regen therapies and can't accept her own cloned tissues, so her tendency to get her ships shot to hell around her has definite permanent consequences to her body and life. This isn't some two-dimensional warrior who slays enemies in one-sided competitions and comes out the other side covered and glory and only possessing superficial scars. Honor is the type of person who, because of her integrity and essential strength as a human being, continually manages to put herself in the worst kind of situations. She doesn't always win, more of her people die than don't, and she suffers from all the guilt you could possibly imagine a morally upright young woman could suffer in such a situation.
In fact, that is David Weber's brilliance with this series... Honor definitely climbs the social ladder during the series (even by the third book, she is already pretty high up there), but her essential humanity and her growth as a person gives true life to a series which could easily (and often threatens to) turn into a dry recitation of destruction and death on a literally interstellar scale. Weber freely admits he intended to kill her off in the seventh or eighth book, but the fans kept her alive through petitions against that decision, lol.
All in all, that has turned out well. What was originally a simple and direct conflict between a constitutional monarchy and a socialist expansionist empire gone mad has expanded to a fully galactic scale story, opening up several side storylines (the Crown of Slaves being the most beloved of those). While Honor still remains a central individual in the series, things have long-since grown too complex and grand in scale for any individual to control its flow.
I can say straight out that I love this series and don't regret investing the hundred dollars or so it took to get all the books currently released. There have been a few poor entries (the most recent one is widely disliked for being a rehashing from a different perspective of events in the previous book), the series as a whole is one that any military sci-fi fan should at least try to read. The societies involved, the events, and the characters make it worth it, even if it is obvious Weber has no intention of concluding it any time soon, even after over fifteen books.
- Kenshin_sama, Zakamutt and fun2novel
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