A Call to Arms by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

And once again we return to the story of (mostly) Travis Uriah Long, a young officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy who is constitutionally incapable of breaking the rules, and who manages to get into trouble, mostly political, when he tries to make sure they're always applied, even to the politically connected.


It's rather interesting to visit Manticoran prehistory, to learn about events taking place before the wormhole in the system is opened up and Manticore becomes a major power in the area. There's a constant struggle in the halls of power between the royal family and their loyalists in the Navy who know that the best defense is a strong offense, and the opposition who believe that limited resources must be spent domestically, not chasing mythological creatures like pirates, nor threatening aggressive neighbors by patrolling too strongly in their back yards.


There's a plot afoot by secret agents employed by the Axelrod Corporation, who have come to suspect the existence of the Manticore Junction, and who are determined to control it and the system surrounding it, so they've hired a fleet of mercenaries to invade, just at the time when the Navy has grown weak.


The story jumps around between various POVs, as we've come to expect from a Weber book, and can be a bit confusing sometimes, moving from cliffhanger to cliffhanger.


Taking an awful long time to get from point A to point B. Glad we're not paying by the word.


By the way, though I've probably not reviewed any of his stuff here, I'm a big fan of Timothy Zahn, Weber's co-author. I eagerly snatched up the first half dozen or so novels he wrote, back in the eighties. He's a powerful writer all on his lonesome.

A Call to Duty by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

 A Call to Duty takes a chronological leap backwards, to the time before the Star Kingdom of Manticore's wormhole junction was discovered, when it was still at peace with Haven, the Solarian League was far away, and the Andermani Empire mere rumbles of thunder on the horizon. It is more of a young adult novel than most in the Honorverse assortment, and has also taken a step back in the magnitude of the multi-POV Weber style, and a step forward in comprehensibility to one who is not steeped to geeky goodness in the lore of Manticore.

Like many a story of the same type, it follows the journey of Travis Uriah Long, a man on the cusp of adult life, directionless, who decides to join the Royal Manticoran Navy for structure and discipline. As you might imagine, he finds a surfeit of both in the rigors of boot camp and beyond. Long gains the nickname of "Stickler" for his obstinate obedience to rules, regulations and procedures, but his career in the Navy is destined to give him a far broader education in the reality of how things work when the battle plan meets the enemy.

There's still plenty of good political machinations, but we actually get introduced to each of the players in this new series, rather than having to consult a monstrous compendium like The Book of Steel to remember the particulars about them, so it seems far easier for me to follow, much like the first handful or so of the original Honor Harrington novels. One faction of Parliament wants to dismantle the Navy, now that they are at peace, so the money can be spent on education and job creation, of course, while the others are not so sanguine about the continued stability, and want to expand the fleet to meet future threats. The downsizers have the upper hand at the moment, so morale in the fleet is not great as maintenance is deferred, and corners are cut.

Young Long gets up to plenty of adventures here, from rescuing damsels in distress fighting space pirates. Hopefully Zahn and Weber can continue to keep it simple for his old easily confused readers, who simply enjoy a well-spun yarn.

Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber and Eric Flint

The multi-POV just got even worse...or better, if you like that sort of thing. It just came to me that this book actually serves in a triad of books with A Rising Thunder and Shadow of Freedom as a multi-novel semi-simultaneously multi-POV telling of the tale Weber started, and which madness other worthies like Flint have bought into. Cachat and Zilwicki finally deliver their news back to the PRH and Manticore, and almost immediately take off on another hare-brained adventure to gather more intelligence on Mesa, managing to sucker a few other fools into their scheme, as well, including Thandi Palani, head of Torch's military.

Queen Berry and her friends decide to form the Royal Torch Navy, mostly consisting of commando-like teams whose first assignments are to be attacking the Mesan slave trade wherever they find it, and they are improbably allied with a family of vagabond space traders we encountered in SoF. Eloise Pritchard and Queen Elizabeth of Manticore meet and decide to bury the hatchet and to ally against the Mesan Alignment. The Sollies still haven't a clue and are basically waiting to get their butts handed to them when the inevitable war comes.

After bouncing around like crazy, though, the story finally settles in on the Mesan thread, and we get to enjoy watching Victor and Anton stirring things up in the seccie underworld there. At first it appears that Victor is going to become a crime boss, but he seizes the opportunity to ally with a powerful one, instead, to prepare the underclass for the battle which is to come.

Operation Houdini is in full swing, and the Alignment kills multiple birds with many stones when they stage a series of "Audubon Ballroom" attacks on civilian targets, both to stir up a massive distraction and retaliation against the seccies who are implicated in aiding the terrorists, and to cover up the disappearance of the members of the Alignment who have been hiding in plain sight in Mesan society. They're headed for a bolthole somewhere, and it should be entertaining to see the deadly duo of Cachat and Zilwicki ferret them out in a later book.

I really need to find a good plot diagram of this whole saga somewhere. It remains confusing to me, even as I enjoy the quality of the storytelling and plot twists.

Shadow of Freedom by David Weber

Weber is one of very few authors who can carry off the MMPOV (Massively Multiple Point of View) novel, and make me like it. Things bounce back and forth between the main protagonist, Michelle Henke, in command of one branch of the Manticoran fleet, and her various subcommanders, the heads of the Mesan Alignment, a brief cameo by Victor Cachat and Zilwicki, and the leaders of various rebellions on planets controlled by the Solarian League's Frontier forces.

Most of the action takes place concurrently with A Rising Thunder, I think. For the most part, the Sollies haven't really learned anything from their defeats at the hands of Manticore's latest military hardware, and Henke and her captains handily destroy even more antiquated fleets, usually allowing the opposing personnel to abandon ship if they aren't too stubborn. But there are some hints that the stupid admirals are being weeded out, and that some of the more intelligent ones are about to give Manticore a better battle at some point.

Waiting to see what happens when the PRH and Manticoran alliance really gets going.

A Rising Thunder by David Weber

It seems as if there's a particular recognizable formula to the recent Honorverse stories by Weber. He hops around from one location to another, eavesdropping on the conversations between influential people in the Solarian League, the People's Republic of Haven, the Beowulf system, the Maya sector, and the Star Empire, and begins to build up the tension towards the big space battle that is to happen at the end of the book. In this case, the Sollies have sent a massive fleet of over four hundred ships of the wall to attack what they believe is a Manticore defenseless in the wake of the Yakawa?? attack from the previous novel. In fact, when I began reading a description of the climactic battle at about the midpoint of the book, I became confused, wondering why Weber had bumped up the timetable - but was relieved to discover that it was, after all, only a simulation being run by Honor and her cohorts.

After so many years of reading the Honor Harrington novels, it may be time for me to put some of the fan sites on my favorites bar - I think I'm beginning to need a scorecard to keep track of the players. When there is some mention of Honor's father grieving over the deaths from the Mesan strike on Manticore's home system, I couldn't for the life of me remember who in his family had been killed. I can't really expect Weber to refresh my memory every time, either - the "what has gone before" would be encyclopedic at this point.

Key points in the macro action, however, include Zilwicki's and Cachat's return with evidence of the Mesan long term plotting, President Pritchard and Empress Elizabeth's historic peace agreement and mutual defense treaty, which triggers a massive alliance between Manticore's formerly lukewarm allies and the long term loyal partners. Views of the Mesan side of things are sparse, aside from some scenes giving us the foreboding that they're ready to set the next portion of their evil plot moving forward, and it may involve even more casualties than have already happened.  The Solarian League may end up with a constitutional crisis, to accompany the economic devastation that is set in play by Manticore's boycott of their shipping, and takeover of jump termini.

Weber said, a few books back, that things were going to get much worse before they got better in the Honorverse, and there are some aspects of the situation which are at long last getting better - I hope things get no worse in the next novel.

In Fire Forged by David Weber

In Fire Forged is the fifth in the shared world Honorverse anthologies subtitled Worlds of Honor. This one contains three substantial stories and one compendium of "factual" information about space armor.

The first story, Ruthless, by Jane Lindskold, tells the story of an attempt by some political enemies of the Winton royals to disgrace Crown Prince Michael. They arrange to have his friend, Judith's daughter, Ruth, kidnapped and then threaten to return her to her father on Masada. Judith was one of his wives who was rescued by Honor and her crew in one of the earlier novels dealing with the Grayson alliance, The Honor of the Queen.

In a manner eerily reminiscent of Harrington's usual tactics, Michael decides to head directly into danger with only his personal Armsmen to rescue the child. The chase is interesting, the final crisis short and not terribly bloody, and the end of the story is just flat anticlimactic. Perhaps Weber is reserving the writing of Judith and Michael's tale to himself, so that Lindskold couldn't do it justice.

Timothy Zahn of Cobra fame pens a story, An Act of War, that is as twisty as a snake. An apparent arms smuggler, Charles Dozewah, is captured by State Security on Haven, and has to improvise a plan to avoid being tortured and put to death by them for an earlier swindle in Peep territory. He proposes a plan to Oscar Saint Juste that will use a captured and rebuilt Manticoran battleship to convince the Andermani Empire to side with Haven rather than the Star Kingdom.

The plan begins to go astray when the captain of the false-flagged ship has some plans of his own, and tries to turn it from a suicide mission into one that he and his crew will survive. In the end, the plots of Saint Juste are foiled, by a bit of legerdemain of Charles' engineering, and his former allies - and the reader - are left wondering just what happened.

Weber contributes Let's Dance to this collection. The terrorist forces of the Audubon Ballroom, anti-Mesa and anti-slavery fanatics, are heavily involved here, thus the title, their battle cry. The story takes place prior to the first Honor novel, when she is captain of a patrol vessel in Silesian space, hunting for pirates and slavers. When Honor is made aware of a space station that is being used as a waypoint for the slave trade, she must decide between obeying orders and saving her career and doing the right thing by capturing the installation, freeing the slaves and prosecuting the slave traders.

Well, if you've read any of the Honor novels, you know what her answer is going to be, don't you? Her creative solution, allying with a large force of Audubon Ballroom soldiers, leaves us cheering for the underdog (Is Honor ever really the underdog, though? I'm betting with a proven winner).

A couple of good quotes:

"That's the true measure of an officer - of a human being. Right or wrong, popular or unpopular, he has to know where duty, moral responsibility, and legal accountability meet the honor of his uniform and the oath he swore to his monarch and his kingdom. When that time comes, an officer worthy of that uniform and that oath and that monarch makes the hard decision, in full awareness of its consequences, because if he doesn't make it, he fails all of them...and himself."

"When that happens, when there's no choice but to kill evil, then kill it. It's your responsibility, your duty, and if you flinch, you fail - not just yourself, but everything important in your life. But if it must be done, if there truly is no choice, then do it because hou must, not because you want to, and never, ever exult in the doing. That's the price of your soul, Honor - the ability to do what has to be done without turning yourself int the very thing it is that you're fighting against."

This collection is worth reading for Weber alone.

A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber

A Beautiful Friendship serves as a prequel, of sorts, to the Honor Harrington series. On the downside, it seemed a little familiar as I began reading it, and so I went to the shelves to determine that it had been previously published in the first of the Worlds of Honor shared world anthologies, More than Honor. I really hate it when publishers repackage old stories like this without a blazing disclaimer. However, there was a second half of the story that was added to this book, so I did get to read some fresh (to me) material after all.

If you've been following Honor's exploits, you will be familiar with her treecat, Nimitz. Throughout the series, we learn that Nimitz can sense the emotions of his person, and as time goes by, we find out that his species is a bit more intelligent than most people think, and eventually, he as able a) to pass the emotions and intentions of other people around Honor back through their link, making her a wonderful negotiator for the Queen, and b) to learn sign language and use that to communicate more effectively with humans.

In A Beautiful Friendship, we move back in time to the early days of the settlement of Sphinx, one of the Manticoran worlds, and Honor's family home. Her ancestor, Stephanie Harrington, is the first person to discover the treecats' existence and to bond with one of them, Climbs Quickly. The treecats are highly intelligent, tho pre-agricultural when the humans arrive, and are able to communicate sophisticated thoughts telepathically among their own kind, even over a distance. They find the "mind blind" humans puzzling and perhaps threatening to their way of life, and Climbs Quickly's clan is not happy about his bonding with Stephanie or getting involved with the "two-legs" further.

When the scientists come, inevitably, to study the treecats and attempt to learn how intelligent they really are; whether they deserve sentient race status and accompanying rights, there are also some people who would rather either exploit the treecats or wipe them out entirely. Stephanie and her treecat, of course, fall right in the middle of this conflict, and she and her family and friends have to determine the right way to reveal to the world how intelligent the treecats are, and keep concealed their telepathy, so as to keep them from being consigned to laboratory studies.

This is somewhat of a young adult novel in tone, without a lot of the whiney teen angst that often accompanies such. Light on the politics, with planetside action instead of space battles, it's a good companion piece for Honorverse fans.

War of Honor by David Weber (Honor Harrington #10)

Review written 2003

I'm not particularly fond of novels written with too many shifts in point of
War of Honor is not as action-packed as most of the previous novels in the series, but rather tells the tale of the deadly political game behind the action. The Star Kingdom of Manticore and the empire formerly known as the People's Republic of Haven are in an uneasy truce as the story begins. The Havenites are desperately trying to restore a semblance of democracy to their formerly totalitarian government, and the story of the political struggle of President Esther McQueen and her ally, Defense Minister Thomas Theisman, with her Secretary of State, who desires power for himself, is the main focus of those scenes set in the Republic.

Theisman's people have labored hard in secret to restore technological and numerical parity with the Manticoran fleet, and they must decide exactly how to use their new ships and equipment. In the Star Kingdom, the North Hollow government and its liberal allies have been busy disassembling the machinery of war to support their domestic social and economic programs. Harrington and her allies have been rendered nearly powerless, and are further hindered, as the story develops, by orchestrated attacks on their personal and private reputations.

While the Star Kingdom focused on the war with the Peeps, the Andermani Empire has grown ambitious, and piracy in the Silesian Confederacy has gotten out of control. This one slowly builds to a burn. Duplicitous behavior by McQueen's Secretary of State derails the peace negotiations, and the fiscal policies of the Manticoran government erode its ability to defend itself, when the Havenites launch a preemptive strike. The book is quite long, around 800 pages, but should provide you with many hours of enjoyment, as the tension builds to a climax. The way it ends, I expect we'll be seeing more of Honor fairly soon.
view. Occasionally, however, I find one that is written well enough to keep my attention despite the changes. War of Honor, the latest in the Honor Harrington series, is one of those.

The Honor of the Queen by David Weber (Honor Harrington #2)

Review written December, 1999

Once more we return to the universe of Honor Harrington and the Royal Manticoran Navy. This is the second book in Weber's series, and he's done a good job once more. Honor has been assigned command of a squadron of ships accompanying a diplomatic mission to establish a treaty with the planet of Grayson. Grayson is a world with a mildly repressive and very male chauvinist culture, which provides Weber with some interesting plot devices.
 
Grayson men are very protective of their wives and daughters and would never allow them to serve in any military capacity, so they are shocked and appalled by Honor's high position in her space navy. The officers in Grayson's navy treat her and other female officers rather shabbily, and she decides to leave the system long enough to escort a convoy of Manticoran freighters to another star system.
 
While she is gone the remaining Manticoran forces and Grayson's orbital defenses are attacked by Masada's forces and their PRH advisors. Masada is a planet in the same star system where a radical splinter faction lives which is dedicated to totally destroying their "apostate" brethren on Grayson. The ensuing battle kills the head of the diplomatic mission, formal admiral Raoul Courvoisier, who has been one of Honor's mentors for a good many years.
 
The real "meat" of the story involves Honor's return to Grayson, her reaction to the crisis, and her rather novel problem solving approach. Once again, Weber delivers another fast-paced, fun space operatic adventure.

Torch of Freedom by David Weber

This was the first book I got to read on my new Nook, so I'm not sure whether it seemed a little slow at the beginning because I was still getting used to the e-reader or whether it was a true perception of the pace of the tale. I'd missed this one somehow when it came out, and when I read Mission of Honor, there were some events from Torch that were referenced, so I had to go back and catch up.

As you might guess from the title, most of the story has to do with events surrounding the new star kingdom of Torch, which was wrested from Manpower's control by former slaves, and now is ruled by Anton Zilwicki's daughter, Berry. Manpower has gathered a fleet of former Havenite state security fugitives and is getting ready to attack the planet, and massacre its populace. Much of the novel bounces around between the various forces in play, setting up the final battle scene.

There is a major plot line involving Victor Cachat and Zilwicki's infiltration of the Mesan home world, to try to gather information and figure out what's really going on behind the scenes with Manpower and Mesa. If you've already read Mission of Honor, you know the outcome of that. If not, I won't spoil anything for you.

There's only one brief cameo appearance by Honor Harrington in this book, when Cachat and Zilwicki meet with her to tell her what they believe is happening. All of the other Manticoran characters we've come to know and love remain mostly off stage, as well. A good read, and now I feel like I'm up to speed once more.

On Basilisk Station by David Weber

Here is the book where the whole Honor Harrington saga begins. We first meet Honor as she assumes command of HMS Fearless, a refitted cruiser in the Royal Manticoran Navy which is testing new weapons design in mock battles. When Honor and her ship fail to live up to the expectations of the admirals in the R&D ministry, they are sent in disgrace to the backwater planet of Medusa and Basilisk Station.


The commander of Basilisk station is a political hack named Pavel Young, who has a score to settle with Honor from their days at the academy together. He takes the opportunity to set her up for failure by leaving the entire system under her command, woefully undermannned. However, he hasn't reckoned on Honor's determination to do the job, whatever it takes.

Under a series of incompentent commanders, Medusa and Basilisk Station have become a haven for smugglers and a center for subversive activities of the People's Republic of Haven, Manticore's enemies. Honor's creative use of the technology and personnel at her disposal soon brings smuggling activities to a crashing halt, earning her the enmity of powerful merchant princes whose ships are carrying contraband.

The PRH's tactics prove a little tougher to unravel and thwart, however. There's plenty of tricks, traps, and interesting twists that set the stage for all the Honor novels to follow.

Echoes of Honor by David Weber

I waited for this book to hit paperback for a long time, and was just mildly disappointed when it did. I'm not partial to the whole plot mechanism of jumping back and forth between characters and POVs, as you may have gathered from some of my other reviews. Weber spends, IMHO, far too much time on developing the action in areas other than those that our heroine, Honor, is directly involved with.

However, as with all of Weber's stories, it is well written and fairly rapidly paced. As you may or may not recall, through having read earlier Honor novels, Honor narrowly escaped being executed by the Peep department of State Security and is stranded with some of her loyal crew on the prison planet of Hell (or Hades) in the novel just prior to Echoes. Weber picks up the story line perhaps a couple of weeks later. The Peeps, as a propaganda ploy, broadcast a faked version of Honor's execution across the galaxy, discouraging some of the Manticoran Alliance's allies and enraging others.

Also, due to some bold new strategies on the part of the new head of the Peep department of War, the conflict begins to go quite badly for the RMN and allied fleets. In the meantime, Honor and her crew are busy conquering the prison planet and liberating the POWs as well as the Peeps' political prisoners held there. Did you expect anything less from Admiral Harrington?

Stay tuned for the next installment. Bottom line - all the Honor Harrington novels are worth waiting for, but not worth paying hardcover prices.


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Mission of Honor by David Weber

Over the years, I've spent countless hours reading and sometimes re-reading David Weber's novels. I've been following the adventures of Honor Harrington from the beginning, and so I was eagerly awaiting this installment. I have to admit I somehow missed Torch of Freedom, so I wasn't completely up to date on happenings in the Honorverse, but even taking that into consideration, I wasn't as thrilled with this book as I had expected to be.

A great deal of the action takes place out at Spindle, where in a previous book, Admiral Michelle "Mike" Henke forced the surrender of a group of Solarian warships after destroying their flagship. Predictably, the Sollies decide to not let this provocation from a bunch of "neobarbs" stand, and send another fleet to teach the upstarts a lesson. As Star Empire fans might expect, Henke's small fleet totally wipes out the reprisal fleet, and the Solarians response is to escalate further with an undeclared declaration of war upon Manticore.

Meanwhile, back in the Empire, Honor has been sent as an ambassador plenipotentiary to the Peeps, to try to negotiate a peace treaty. Despite her previous experiences with the forces of Haven, she is bound by her sense of honor and her deep personal knowledge of the results of the carnage the war has wrought to negotiate fairly, and she even finds herself coming to like President Pritchard and Secretary of War Theisman. Of course, there are forces within the People's Republic Congress that are trying to wring all the personal advantage they can out of the negotiations, and so hammering out a treaty proceeds very slowly.

Unbeknownst to the Star Empire, but made transparent to the readers throughout the novel, the Mesans are planning a surprise attack on the war infrastructure of both Manticore and Grayson. We can see the hammer about to fall all along, and can only wonder if our friends will see the blow coming in time to do something about it.

Weber warned us in a preface a couple of novels ago that things were going to get much much worse before they got better for the Star Empire of Manticore, and he's certainly delivering on that promise. I just think the pacing of this one is much slower than the early novels that I really enjoyed, the action seems sparse, and WAY too much of the book is spent describing the political calculations and discussions by the Peeps, Manties, Sollies and Mesans. Maybe it's just giving us the background for what is yet to come, but I just didn't find it gripping. It is, however, a must-read in the series, for all you followers out there.