Over the last year I’ve been rereading the Honor Harrington series, those David Weber novels concerning the necessarily prolonged life of one Honor Harrington, an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy. It’s set some few thousand years in the future when mankind has moved out of the Solar System and scattered itself across the galaxy to form their own civilizations. One of these is Manticore, a parliamentary monarchy settled on three habitable planets (Manticore, Sphinx, and Gryphon, love the names) orbiting a binary star system that has its own terminus to one of the rare warp bridges that considerably shortens the distance between farflung star systems.

The Manticore Junction was as unique as the system itself, with no less than six additional termini. That was one more than any other junction so far charted, and the astrophysicists argued that the survey readings suggested there should be at least one more undiscovered terminus, though they had yet to work out the math and isolate it.
In no small part, the Junction explained Manticore’s wealth. The best effective speed in hyper of most merchantmen was little more than twelve hundred times light-speed. At that apparent velocity, the voyage from Manticore to Old Earth would require over five months; the Beowulf terminus of the Junction, on the other hand, delivered a ship to Sigma Draconis, little more than forty light-years from Sol, in no measurable elapsed time at all.
The commercial advantages were obvious, and the Junction’s far-flung termini had become magnets for trade, all of which must pass through the central junction point (and Manticoran space) to take advantage of them. Manticore’s tolls were among the lowest in the galaxy, but simple logistics meant they generated enormous total revenues, and the Kingdom served as a central warehousing and commercial node for hundreds of other worlds.

Naturally this makes the Star Kingdom of Manticore an object of envy and an aspirational target for other, less well-endowed star systems.

Enter Honor, the daughter of a yeoman family on Sphinx with no noble sponsors and only her intellect and talent to help her make her way in life. Both are formidable, and they need to be. As we meet her in On Basilisk Station she has been put to work under the command of a man who has every cause to hate her and who promptly abandons her to her fate. It doesn’t help that her ship’s crew is bitter and resentful of their bad showing in recent naval war games. But Honor boots them and herself out of the doldrums and they do their duty by Basilisk while at the same time save the Star Kingdom from an enemy invasion in an epicly rendered ship-on-ship battle.

Strong world-building and some great characters, beginning with Honor, but I absolutely must mention two more who are my absolute favorites (and I have a sneaking suspicion they’re Weber’s, too). That would be Chief Horace Harkness and Ensign Scotty Tremaine, one of those matches made in heaven but in this case on Basilisk Station.

Harkness had been in the RMN for over twenty years, almost thirty-five T-years, and he’d been up for chief twelve times by Tremaine’s count. He’d actually made it, once. But PO Harkness had a weakness—two of them, in fact. He was constitutionally incapable of passing a Marine tunic in an off-duty bar without endeavoring to thump the living daylights out of its wearer, and he labored under the belief that it was his humanitarian duty to provide his shipmates with all the little things the ship’s store didn’t normally carry.
He was also one of the best missile techs in the service, which perhaps explained why he was still in the service.
But what interested Tremaine just now was what Bosun MacBride had told him before he left the ship. Tremaine liked the Bosun. Even if she did regard him as a none-too-bright puppy, she seemed to feel that someday, with proper training by the bosuns whose bounden duty it was to wipe ensign’s noses and bottoms and generally keep them from tripping over their own two feet, he might, possibly, make a worthwhile officer. In the meantime, her infinitely respectful suggestions usually managed to stop him just when he was about to put his foot in it.

The Honorverse is vast and rich and has been mined by many other authors in novels, spinoffs, and short stories, many of which are excellent. My favorite is Jane Lindskold’s “Promised Land,” the first story in the collection, The Service of the Sword, which is both a freedom narrative about women escaping a society in which they are slaves and a coming of age story featuring Queen Elizabeth’s brother Michael. It will keep you right on the edge of your seat all the way through and have you cheering by the end.

One word of warning: There are large expository lumps involving star nation politics and military materiél in these novels, but if that isn’t your jam all you have to do is skip over them to get back to the plot. I did and it didn’t hurt my enjoyment of these stories one bit.

Book Review Monday Chatter david weber honor harrington jane lindskold