I excavated ‘On Basilisk Station‘ from my TBR pile, where it’s been languishing for eleven years, in the hopes of starting a Space Opera Military SF series that would provide me with comfort reads that I could relax into. I had fun with the book and made my way through all fifteen and a half hours of the audiobook in a couple of days. It was entertaining but it was also a little disappointing.

So first, the entertaining things.

‘On Basilisk Station’ has a good Space Opera plot told from a strongly military mindset. It has interstellar intrigue, internal political strife, a navy rife with nepotism and petty rivalries, baddies you can hiss at for their misogyny, narcissism and incompetence (amazing how often those three come as a set), military tactical problems with innovative solutions, lots and lots of hardware, space battles and ground battles, a brave Captain doing her duty against all the odds and slowly winning over her crew. Good, swashbuckling stuff.

The book didn’t confine itself to a cosy, bloodless view of conflict and military life. It has an attempted rape, what amounted to a massacre of the (drug-crazed and armed) indigenous population and a huge number of deaths in a space battle. All of these things seemed to be taken for granted as regrettable but normal.

What disappointed me about the book wasn’t the violence or ethos of armed imperialism, it was the writing.

David Weber has thoroughly thought through Honour Harrington’s universe from the physics of space travel, through the structure, protocols and weapons of interstellar navies, to the history of the centuries-old Human Diaspora and the diverse political and social forms that have evolved as humans expanded into space. Unfortunately, he tends to share that knowledge, at length, through passages that read like Civil Service Ministerial briefings which get dumped so clumisly into the narrative that it feels as if the story has been interrupted by a lecture. Towards the end of the book when the tension was high as one military ship chased another, the narrative screeched to a halt as I was treated to what felt like a fifteen-minute essay on the history of the discovery of gravity waves and their impact on the speeds at which spacecraft can travel. The content was interesting but the presentation was uninspiring.

I was also disappointed in the thin characterisation of Honor Harrington. I liked her leadership style and the way she thought problems through but I learnt very little about her and what I did learn didn’t make sense to me. Harrington can apparently plot complex routes and velocities through space with minimum computer assistance while under pressure but is unable to do more than scrape by in maths exams. I find this hard to believe. I also wonder at David Weber’s intention in giving this omnicompetent character such an unlikely weakness. Throughout the book, Honor demonstrates an ability to read and influence the reactions of the people around her yet, in her internal monologue, she repeatedly describes herself as ugly, although no one around her seems to see her that way. So, Iam supposed to believe that Harrington suffers from body dysmorphia as well as selective descalulia. Why? I’d have no problem with the idea of Harrington being ugly and bad at math. What I struggle with is her belief that these decriptions apply to her when her actions and the reactions of others portray her as good at astrogation and having at least average goodlooks. It feels like a con.

Finally, I was deeply disappointed in Honor Harrington’s Treecat, which came across as a docile companion animal that occasionally helped Harrington control her anger but showed no signs of sentience. So what was the point? Why did David Weber want Harrington to be a cat lady? My disappointment was sharpened because I’ve read ‘A Beautiful Friendship‘ and ‘Fire Season‘ which Weber wrote a decade later as part of a Young Adult prequel series starring one of Harrington’s ancestors, in which we got inside the (alien but complex) minds of the Treecats.

‘The Honor Of The Queen‘, the next Harrington book, has also been on my TBR for thirteen years. I’m sure I’ll get around to it sometime but it will be behind reading more by C. J. Cherryh, Tanya Huff, Joel Shepherd and James Corey.