My kind(le) of story – The Honorverse

I made short work of Hood and my early impressions held through. As I mentioned before the fact that everyone will have prior knowledge of the outline of the story provides and interesting part of a readers experience of the book. Lawhead even plays on this fact by introducing a legend from before Hoods time into the story that one character believes Hood (the character) will follow. This gives the feeling that Hood (or Bran as he is named) is both pushed from the past (via the prior legend) and pulled by the future (via the legend we all know) into fulfilling his destiny.

Since everything I read these days seems to be part of a series or trilogy I decided not to immediately follow Hood with it’s sequels Scarlet and Tuck. Instead I returned to another series that I am already invested in: The Honor Harrington novels by David Weber.

The first four Honor Harrington books. Yeah, I mention the cover art below...

The Honor Harrington novels can most quickly be described as Horatio Hornblower in space, and indeed this was Weber’s goal. The novels follow the career of Harrington as she makes her way through the Royal Manticorean Navy.

As you can see the “Honorvese”, as it is called, is quite expansive. Spanning 12 (soon to be 13) Harrington novels and 10 spin off novels set in the same universe, the amount of detail the Honorvese is rendered in is quite outstanding now.

The stories themselves (at least the Harrington ones) contain a large amount of what can be described as “military space porn”. Missile velocity, ship tonnage and armour thickness values are thrown around frequently, but this is saved from being tiresome by an amazing level of internal consistency coupled with some very complete world building.

Where other authors are content with giving the reader a picture of how things are in their fantasy worlds Weber does not stop there – he wants the reader to know why things are as they are and how they got there. This world building is, for the most part, wrapped into the internal monologues the characters frequently share with the reader as they think and reason about the past, present or future.

This style has the slightly curious effect (to me at least) of making what would be short conversations in other books be expanded into multipage information packed monologues on a characters internal thoughts and reasoning. It sounds overly long and boring but in actual fact Weber makes it work.

The books themselves are never horrendously long, and manage to balance this world and character building with a healthy amount of plot. In fact, the books themselves are fairly quick reads – they slide down the gullet of interested readers quickly and smoothly. Sharing this property with works such as those of Pratchett (although not the content), you can often find yourself burning through a couple of Harrington books quickly, when you had only really meant to have read one. Indeed my first stint reading the novels resulted in me reading the first four back to back.

There are however two things that I think any potential readers of the Honor Harrington books should know:

1. The covers are… “of a style” shall we say. To my eyes they are not particularly attractive and I’m glad I can get all the books on my Kindle, rather than have to buy each one from a store!

2. You will feel silly when explaining about Honors six legged tree cat Nimitz. There is no way around this – it sounds terrible. In the context of the books however it works perfectly.

I am currently reading the 7th Harrington novel, “In Enemy Hands”, and returning to the universe is comforting, like sitting down in a comfy armchair. I can understand how not everyone who reads science fiction is going to enjoy them, but I think that you do yourself a disservice if you dismiss them without at least trying them.