DAVID WEBER

Without question SF's most popular military-themed series, the Honor Harrington novels are also among the genre's most intelligent, exciting and rewarding. On Basilisk Station, the series' premiere volume, is a spectacular piece of action storytelling that does virtually everything right. It gives you flawed heroes that you come to respect and feel for without the book's having to resort to sentimental hokum. It sets its action in a believable — both militarily and politically — far-future milieu that is, of course, a reflection of our present. It holds your attention through the tribulations and sacrifices of real people rather than by the use of Lucasfilm clichés. And it spins a suspenseful and compelling yarn, whose slow buildup leads to a hair-raising climactic showdown that will drive you right up the wall. The series' success is no mystery. Weber takes everything that fans could possibly want to see in their space opera epics and puts it together so well that other writers are left in the unenviable position of either using these books as a model or packing up their gear and going home. Bravo!

On Basilisk Station introduces Honor Harrington as she assumes command of the Royal Manticoran Navy's light cruiser HMS Fearless. The Manticoran system is prime cosmic real estate; boasting not one but three inhabited planets, it also is smack in the middle of the busiest wormhole junction in space, a fact that has boosted its economy considerably while also catching the envious eye of the expansionist (and broke) Republic of Haven a few systems down the road. There is as much political discord in Manticore as there is on Capitol Hill today, but things are more or less in check at the time Basilisk opens, as the Centrists and Crown Loyalists are in power, staving off the extremes of both liberals and conservatives.

But sharp ideological convictions even trickle down to Navy leadership, and Harrington's first assignment is to test a new weapon that is the brainchild of an admiral whom she happens to dislike. Dutiful to a fault, Harrington's first test — involving executing a brilliant and wholly unexpected attack maneuver — succeeds with flying colors, but in subsequent trials she's pounded so heavily that the admiral in question takes her humiliation out on Honor and reassigns her to a backwater wormhole junction, the Basilisk Terminus. Her crew is demoralized, and her own executive officer practically shuns her. What's worse, Basilisk is currently under the command of Captain Pavel Young, a sexist asshole who's gotten where he is by pure nepotism, and who once tried to sexually assault her while they were at the academy together.

Once at Basilisk, Honor finds the station and the system it protects (including the aboriginal world Medusa, run by a civilian Manticoran commissioner though Manticore itself does not actually own the world) in utter disarray. Young not only has blown off his responsibilities regarding properly searching merchant ships for contraband, but once she arrives, he dumps his entire workload on her and returns with his ship to Manticore for a refit. Ever beholden to duty, however unpleasant, Honor whips her crew into shape and ends up doing the job Young always should have done. In fact, she does it so well that the Navy begins getting complaints about her back home, especially from pissed off merchants who have been getting a free ride for a while (and whose vessels have in fact been shipping contraband with impunity). Young, who hoped to break Honor with an impossible task, is now the one looking embarrassed.

It is on Medusa that the interesting trouble starts brewing. There is a growing problem involving hallucinogenic drug use among the primitive native Medusans, and though there isn't any hard proof, it appears the the Havenites might be involved. But no one can figure out why Haven would bother, since the natives have no real industry or trade, nothing to offer Haven or any advanced society. Digging deeper, Honor learns that there is indeed more than meets the eye here, and that the drug activity might well be a decoy disguising a much more insidious plot, one that could threaten Basilisk, and in turn Manticore itself.

There is much that is impressive in this book above and beyond its first-rate execution of space opera adventure. Admittedly, in the first few chapters, things are rocky. Weber relies on infodumps to fill you in on how his "Honorverse" works, and for the first hundred pages you do feel at times like you're just poring through textbooks and tech manuals. But once things get rolling, they roll.

One thing I admired in particular was Weber's avoidance of the cliché of making Honor some hard-done-by feminist messiah. A lesser writer would have made all of the hardships Honor suffers to gain credibility as a captain solely about gender politics. In Basilisk, Young is the only sexist; overall, Honor finds she has to prove herself on her merits. Case in point: the disrespect she initially encounters from her XO, McKeon. When Honor takes command of Fearless, McKeon resents her because of her youth and relative inexperience, and because he feels the command should have been his, but he doesn't resent her because she's a woman. Weber doesn't make gender an issue in his Navy, and he pulls it off in such a natural way that you never once think he's just being PC. The respect Honor ultimately earns from her crew, and especially from McKeon (who goes from hating her guts to almost risking his career for her) stems entirely from her merits as a captain. Well done.

While most space operas give us one or two traditional baddies, in order to make the black hat/white hat distinctions most easy to grasp, Weber spins his yarn against a completely believable political landscape in which we understand that Honor has as many enemies at home in the corridors of power as she does hiding in the Medusan hills. But she has allies too, pulling strings behind the scenes. Smart space opera like this, rooted in socio-political truths and peopled by real human beings, would be refreshing enough on its own. But it just so happens that Weber is one of the best action writers in all of SF.

I honestly must admit that, having been exposed to so much pedestrian, formula storytelling over the years, I was convinced to the core of my poor black cynical heart that I could never genuinely be excited by anything as quaint as a space battle. Color me surprised. The final battle in Basilisk is one of the most phenomenal such scenes ever put to paper. Weber ratchets up the tension until you're crawling the walls, and he drives home the human cost of everything that is happening with gut-wrenching power. All at once it dawns on you how invested you are in the whole scenario, and how much you care about all that's going on and everyone involved. You realize with a start how Honor, who begins the novel fairly cold and aloof, with a wall around her to protect all the bombardments her credibility as a captain will endure, has since blossomed into a full-blooded human being before your eyes. Not surprisingly, you turn into a Dave Weber fan right around this time.

This is space opera as it should be written. And the Honor Harrington novels are a saga that will endure after so many others have been forgotten.

Followed by The Honor of the Queen.