Title:
On Basilisk Station
Author:
David Weber
Publisher:
Brilliance Audio
Rating:
worthy!
You can read this novel online for free at Baen books.
This novel is the first in a long series, and if you've noticed that I already rated it worthy, it’s because I already read this novel. I'm going through it again via audio disk so I can start documenting this series, and from a personal perspective, I'm curious to compare how the audio version matches up to my own recollection of reading the print version. I like this character, but it’s been a while since I read this novel, so listening to it will be interesting and fun.
This audio is by Allyson Johnson. Johnson's reading is passable, but not brilliant. Her cadence is odd at times and her voice for Honor Harrington is completely wrong, but other than that she does a decent job (although her pronunciations are a bit adrift to me at times). She turned 'malaise' into mah-lezz rather than ma-lays, which I found odd. I think that was an American thing; a British reader, for example, probably would have made it sound more French, as its origin dictates. I have to wonder why, given that this is quite obviously rooted in the British Navy of the 19th century, why they didn’t get a British reader for the series. Johnson also says Man...tickoran, hurrying through that last bit. I have no idea how Weber pronounces it (another problem with letting a third party get between you and your reader! Why don’t authors read their own novels for the audio versions?). I have to wonder why, given that this is 'Manticore' and not 'Manticor', it’s 'Manticoran' and not 'Manticorean' and why it's Man...tickoran and not Manti-coran, but the name of the people has often been inconsistent with the name of the country from which it hails even in reality, so it's hardly a surprise when you think about it.
I have to ask, ninety-nine tracks on each disk? NINETY NINE? Each one is a minute or less long. What the heck inspired that bizarre arrangement? I found the dramatic music at the start and end of each disk rather laughable, but it was short. I did appreciate the announcement at the end of the disk that it’s the end of the disk. As pedantic as that sounds, there is method to my madness! On my car player, the disk simply recycles back to the first track and starts over, so if I'm not watching - which I'm not when I'm driving of course - it sometimes takes a few seconds to realize what's happened.
As I mentioned in other reviews on this blog, a reader has to choose, sometimes, whether to overlook the writer's peccadilloes and short-comings for the sake of enjoying what is otherwise a good novel, or to simply reject the thing as a waste of time and not read it at all. From the writer's perspective, the trick is to tell your tale without pissing-off your reader, of course. But readers are very flexible. They will forgive a lot of bad material if the underlying story is engrossing enough. It doesn’t mean they're idyllically happy with it by any means, but it does mean they will put up with it. This is where critics come in, and why writers need to pay attention to valid criticism. This is especially true of a series. If you write book one and find it sells, but there's criticism, it’s foolish to ignore those comments when writing book two, but you have to tread the fine line between the complaints which book one generated on the one side, and both retaining what was good from book one and telling the story you want to tell in book two on the other side. And of course, if you've already got book two in the bag by the time book one catches on, it can be a bit hard to go back and address criticisms there!
However, if you persist in failing to do this, then you end up with readers like me who put up with what they consider to be the crap in the early books for the sake of enjoying what they consider to be the benefits, only to ditch the series after a while as they see that nothing is changing, or worse, the gold-to-dross ratio is declining. In the end, that's why I ditched it because the only thing which changed in this series was the increased level of tedium and frustration on my part with the stories. I have to tell you that while the first half-dozen books were really engrossing and rewarding, for me the series went to hell in a hand-basket somewhere around volume six or seven (I forget which) and became one of the dullest and most uninteresting series ever at that point. I will touch on the reasons for that in this review. Note that while I am reviewing book one in the Honor Harrington series (or the Star Kingdom series, whatever!), the criticisms come from a wider perspective of having read several of this series.
I started out really liking Commander Honor Harrington, "captain" of the HMS Fearless, almost adoring her as much as David Weber himself quite evidently does although, unlike Weber, I baulked at complete prostration, worship, and shrine building! At the start of the novel there is a prologue which I may well actually have read when I first picked up the paperback, but which I skipped this time as I routinely do with prologues - considering them to be a waste of time. If it's worth telling, it’s worth putting in the first chapter. The hell with prologues! The one here is bit tedious, and serves only to explain why Basilisk Station is the target chosen by the bad guys. In short, it’s a pointless exercise which could have been worked into the text.
The situation in this fiction that there are some really big kingdoms, or empires, or republics in space, one of which is the belligerent Haven, which seems to be a cross between post-revolutionary France, and cold-war Russia. The good guys are supposed to be the Manticoreans, based around a planet called Manticore, and which has a monarchy. All the combatants are human, coming, originally, from Earth ("old Earth" as it’s stupidly called, like there is some other, newer Earth somewhere around!). Haven, because it isn’t a Weber-approved political or economic system, is short of cash and therefore needs to take over Basilisk Station, which is a warp hub - there is a wormhole there which permits quick passage to distant stars, but it's controlled by Manticore which derives an healthy income from it. See? I did it in one paragraph!
I have to inject here that this business of space empires has always seemed to me to be appallingly juvenile and short-sighted, not to say uninventive and brain-dead. It blindly disregards how massive space is and how pointless it would be to imagine that anyone could "conquer" it or administer any kind of oppressive or coercive system over such huge distances. it relies on the patent fiction that it's economically viable to spend billions to "conquer" another system in order to extort millions from that system.
Weber modeled this series very closely (far too closely IMO) on the early nineteenth century seaman Horatio Hornblower - which is why his main character has the double-H initials. I have never read that series, but the impression I have is that the stories parallel the Hornblower series in many regards, particularly insofar as it reflects the commander's travel through the ranks. Harrington has worked hard to get her command, but she faces some people in a strong position to derail her. The first of these is the chief on her own command, who detests her for no good reason. The second is more a case of circumstance than of a person: her new ship has been pretty much stripped of weapons in favor of a new-fangled pet project of a clueless woman who somehow has risen to the rank of admiral, with the emphasis on rank.
The "grav lance" is a powerful weapon, but it's useful only at short range, so Harrington can strike with it successfully only once before her opponents in the exercise realize what both her power and her limitation is, and take her out before she can get close a second time. So when she fails to make a roaring success of Admiral Hemphill's toy, Harrington is going to be very effectively banished to a piss-ant backwater "command". The name of that command? Basilisk Station. The problem with Weber's space fights is the same problem which all space battles have, which is that although we call them ships, and dreadnoughts, and cruisers, like they're ships at sea, it's the mind-set behind this which is actually all at sea. These are not ships of the line, they're space craft and they operate not on the two-dimensional surface of the ocean, but in 3-D and black and white.
That's why Weber's stories so annoyed me in the long-run, because he obsesses so dedicatedly over his space-faring vessels and the pitched battles between them that he risks blowing a vessel in the space between his ears. He would have us believe that space battles will be no different in any way, shape, or form from sea battles (and sea battles of Horatio Hornblower's era, to boot!), and he depicts each and every one exactly as though it were at sea, all participants steadfastly conducting themselves as if they were ocean bound and constrained. Even within the context of his own framework, this makes no sense.
For example, he talks about a "line of battle" or "wall of battle" (just as if this were a sea battle), completely ignoring the fact that no enemy with any brains is going to line-up all their ships on a two-dimensional plain neatly facing their opponents when they have all of three-D space in which to operate, and when they can make micro jumps as well as come in on literally any vector. Weber bemoans the massive dreadnought's weakness: having an energy weapon fired "up the dreadnought's skirt" (i.e. between the energy barricades set up by the spacecraft's impeller drive, which offers a massive shield on two sides, but not fore or aft). Yet he later goes on to talk about the space fortresses guarding the Basilisk worm-hole and states clearly that they have all-around coverage (and they are capable of moving). So, too, could the battleships have 360 degree coverage if they didn't rigidly get in line, but had other ships out of line, perpendicularly positioned so as to guard those skirts!
But none of this is actually relevant because the whole thing is nonsense. Here in 2013 we're already awash with robots and drones, and I'm not talking about that pissant little Honda Asimo, or those robot puppies, I'm talking about industrial robots and space-exploring robots. No civilization worth its salt is going to waste billions upon billions in building and crewing massive battle ships (the real-world navies had already abandoned that plan back in the twentieth century!). The future, and the future of warfare, is going to be be entirely in the hands of robots and AIs, so all of Weber's antiquated bullshit about having the right man for the job and how inhumanly dedicated and skillful Harrington's crew is - is obsolete. The reality is that humans aren't going to be allowed anywhere near astro-navigation and fire-control systems when we have AIs and robots to run them. Now there would be a story.
Yet despite the prevalence of robots here and now, Weber takes the same dishonest tack which Star Trek took, and blindly pretends that robots and AIs were never invented. I have a few salty words to say about that, but I'll drop anchor right there and grant Weber his fiction, and let him get on with his story! As I said, I really do like the first few novels, so I was willing to let him get away with emitting these irritants like so much pollution for the greater reward of seeing Harrington in action.
So when Harrington gets to Basilisk, she has another shock awaiting her in the problem of a specific person with whom she had a really, really bad experience (if you want to tart-up near-rape and make it sound like nothing more upsetting and debilitating than a stomach-ache) when she was in "naval" college. Captain Lord Pavel Young is a dilettante, a bully, a slacker, and an abuser of women. He got away with assaulting Harrington because of her weakness and her fear, and the fact that she had been attacked in a very male-oriented service where there were male senior officers and everyone was expected to be super-tough and to hide their weaknesses and feelings of being badly treated. It's hardly surprising that when we cultivate a system like this, real-life abuses of women and real rapes are not rare. But why Weber thinks the military will be just as male-oriented and oppressive of women several hundred years from now as it is right now is a mystery; however, this is his fiction, so let him tell it how he wants.
Young takes off to get his ship refitted as soon as Harrington arrives, but this isn't the blessing you would think, since she is now solely in charge of this crucial station, yet she has nothing worthy of the name with which to defend it! Harrington buckles down and starts doing her duty despite these setbacks, and she really makes a difference. In process of properly enforcing the rules and laws, she discovers that Haven has infiltrated a nearby planet and plans on using illegal drugs and weapons to foment a crazed rebellion amongst the rather primitive alien inhabitants of Medusa against planetary rule. Haven hopes to be able to slip in as a 'stabilizing' party, thereby taking over the planet; they can then use this as a forward base of operations for an invasion of Manticorean space.
The Havenites have a stealth ship lurking locally, but this is discovered by Harrington, and after a drawn-out knock-down fight, Harrington gains the upper hand and thereby thwarts (yes, thwarts, no other word will suffice!) the Haven plan for taking over in the area. Harrington now becomes a real captain and takes over a brand new cruiser, all ready for her next impossible mission in The Honor of the Queen. Yes a good many of these novels play on Harrington's name.
Since I already knew what I was going to rate this novel going into it, I was less hesitant to read others' takes on this novel, and I found some interesting and amusing criticisms, Including humorous remarks about how important Harrington's white captain's beret was! That didn’t bother me. There were also comments about Nimitz, her tree-cat. This is not a pet, it’s a companion, and while I normal vomit profusely over cute animals in stories, in this case, I was quite intrigued and fascinated by Nimitz, so I had very little problem with him. I can see, without a back story to support him, how his relationship with Harrington might seem bizarre, but that didn’t bother me and was one of the very few parts I found worthy of reading in one of the later books: perhaps the very last book I ever read in this series, where I believe I skipped everything but that part of the novel! Nimitz (which I think is a great name for him) really comes into his own in book two where there is a stunning passage about a fist-fight Harrington gets into, not by choice, and against several opponents who are assassins. That was one of the best action sequences I've ever read in any novel.
An issue which didn’t seem to be raised in other criticisms is Harrington's planet of origin: Sphinx. In the Manticore system, there are three Earth-like planets (Manticore, Sphinx, and Griffin), which is why it was settled so readily, and also why the Manticoreans did not get into expansionism: they already had everything they needed in this one system. Sphinx is described by Weber has having noticeably greater gravity than Earth, and a shorter year, but he says nothing (that I recall) about whether the higher gravitational pull is because of increased size, or simply increased density. He does say this is why Sphinxians are generally taller and stronger than other inhabitants of the system, but we never (or almost never) meet any other Sphinxians for comparison with Harrington! (And why Sphinxians instead of Sphinxans?!)
I have to wonder at Weber's interpretation of how the greater gravity would influence growth. I can see that it would, without having to require an evolutionary change (evolution, very simply put, is a change in allele frequency in the genome of a population). Since humans have a large variability, it wouldn’t require a mutation, merely a favoring of certain already-existing body types, but it’s this that's the problem for me. Weber assumes that the favored body-type would be tall and strong, but I'd have to argue that maybe it would be short and stocky, and strong instead. Weber offers no good reason to buy into his chosen type. It does grant Harrington a certain statuesque authority, however, so this didn’t seem to me to be worth bothering with given what he was doing with this character.
The other thing which is odd about Harrington is her age, and this business of Weber trying fruitlessly to reconcile years between planets with differing orbital periods I found truly irritating. Everyone in the Manticore (and the Haven for that matter) systems is ultimately from Earth deep down in their roots, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with Earth in this entire series, and it hardly garners a mention, yet Weber would have us believe that everything needs to be translated to "T-years" (Earth years), so while Harrington is actually forty, she's really only 25 in Earth years which explains why she's such a newbie in terms of her schooling and graduation at that age. Weber needs to dispense with 'T-years' and just talk about 'years', only mentioning the actual length of the year if it's vitally important. Mostly it’s not at all important, but it is really annoying when he keeps on doing it!
I have to agree with other critics that Harrington is too much of a Mary Sue (in the traditional sense). She reminds me very much of Janeway, the captain of the Star Trek Voyager spacecraft - always immensely moral, unarguably correct and proper. How did Rex Harrison put it (of men) in My Fair lady? "Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; eternally noble, historically fair."! It’s like Harrington is trying to live up to that absurd appellation I couldn't stand Janeway, but for some reason I found Harrington much more acceptable, if nauseating on occasion. Her extreme perfection is quite annoying. A few character flaws or imperfections (other than stroking her nose, which seems to be the extent of Weber's idea of a character flaw) would be nice. Her internal monologues are also annoying at times - all info-dump and quite pedantic.
Weber also has his peccadilloes. His exclusive employment of Scotsmen in key support and fatherly positions is highly amusing. If Harrington is going to have a fatherly figure take her under his wing, he inevitably has a Scots -sounding name - such as Hamish Alexander. If she's going to have a right-hand man, he inevitably has a Scots-sounding name, such as Alistair McKeon. Weber has a lot of ethnic-sounding last names (not that, a thousand years into the future, and light years out into space, those names really mean anything), but the names seem to be invariably Japanese or Hispanic. I don’t recall reading many if any names which sounded like they had, for example, an African origin, or a Middle-Eastern origin. Weber inevitably becomes boring whenever he's talking of the Havenite Republic, or about the evil plans thereof. He invariably becomes long-winded and often dull whenever he gets into military technical talk, or into political, economic, or aristocratic deliberations. It's harder to skip the boring parts on an audio disk because you can't see where you're going!
I also found that this business, a trope in all space operas, of trade between star systems to be unutterably absurd in the extreme. I can see that certain high-end items - such as archaeological artifacts and "native" crafts might find rich buyers on other systems (that's kind of the premise behind The Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt), but to suggest that people are going to spend billions on building space-craft and on financing interstellar travel to bring in common or garden raw materials, or manufactured products from star systems which are scores of light years away is pure bullshit. It’s not even remotely economical.
I'm not sure where Weber gets his physics, and I honestly do not require any details about how some fictional concept works, especially not in sci-fi. I can hardly imagine anything more pointless than a lecture about something which doesn’t exist! It’s like sitting in church and listening to some ignorant clueless so-called holy man pontificate about his god when he actually knows no more about any god than you do. I really don’t care about how much research you've done, nor do I need to be drilled on this by having extended sections of the novel devoted to expounding your back-story. I sure as hell don’t need an info-dump on the topic, but if you're going to put some sort of an "explanation" into your fiction, then please accept these two pieces of advice:
- Don’t put it in the form of a three-thousand word essay in the middle of a chase scene.
- Do make sure it doesn’t defy long-established principles of physics!
Weber starts in about 'grav waves', by which he means gravitational waves (not gravity waves, which is something else entirely), but he erroneously believes it's possible for these to move at "...two and a half or three thousand times the speed of light". BullSHIT. Once he's made a blunder like that (so large that it probably has its own gravity!), then everything he says subsequently on the topic isn’t worth wasting your time in reading. Having said that, let me note the possibility of an out here: Einstein's (or rather, this universe's) speed limit applies to physical objects in space-time, not to the fabric of space-time itself. Since gravity waves are 'ripples' in that fabric, perhaps there is a way for them to (at least apparently) 'beat' the speed limit. Whether they're actually beating it in any meaningful sense is another issue, and these are questions for the physicists! To the best of my knowledge, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (or near as 'damn-it' is to swearing) and not any faster; certainly not three orders of magnitude faster. There is evidence that gravitational waves exist, but none have been detected to my knowledge, at least as of this writing.
This revelation of Weber's, that Einstein was completely wrong about the speed of light being the universal limit, comes in the middle of Harrington's trying to run down a disguised Havenite warship, which is a decently exciting chase (had it not been interrupted by info-dump!), but all of it is nonsense. The reason for the ship's trying to escape, so we’re given to understand, is the fact that it must reach the Havenite incoming fleet to warn them that their invasion plan needs to be shelved. In that case, why send a ship at significantly sub-light speed to deliver the message, when a simple radio signal would carry that same information very nearly at light speed itself? Hence the chase is all revel without a cause.
Being a warship rather than the merchant vessel it's disguised as, the Havenite ship can fire missiles at Harrington in her inevitably out-classed vessel, but this poses some really interesting problems. I'm not going to get into them because it would take a real physicist to figure all this out, but allow me just to confine myself to saying that if you're going to write about missile exchanges between vessels traveling at significant percentages of the speed of light, I rather suspect you cannot treat everything in exactly the same way you would if this exchange had taken place at every-day speeds. Yes, they're still bound by the universal laws of physics, but would we see, at those velocities, the same things we would at the speeds with which we’re familiar in everyday life? Would we be able to react to what we see in any useful way? Maybe. I don’t know. Nor do I know of anyone who's written about this in sci-fi and addressed these issues, either. I’d love to read it, if anyone has!
On this same subject, I have to note an appalling lack of computerization. This always amused me in Star Trek, where robots and AIs are non-existent despite their already being in extensive use in real life even in our day and age! This makes no sense. It makes even less sense with Weber's pally old-boy network of characters like "skipper", and "guns" doing manual calculations for intercept vectors and missile defense. Weber is too bogged down in Horatio Hornblower and paying very little attention to the fact that he's moved this whole thing from the ocean to the low-gravity vacuum of space while essentially changing nothing of his approach towards any of it. For example, he seems to forget (as indeed do most space operas, Star Wars and Star Trek included) that when you set something in motion in space, it tends to keep on going regardless of whether it runs out of fuel. The whole concept of "out of range" is meaningless in space. Yes, it’s relevant if a missile loses its own power, and is therefore not maneuverable; its target can then conceivably move out of the missile's path, but if the target remains immobile in relation to the incoming missile, there is no such thing as range!
Amusingly, it’s still the "Navy" to Weber, which technically has nothing whatsoever to do with space ships! He still talks about "Naval Intelligence" which shows little intelligence, and tosses in cute catch-words like "buships" (boo-ships) for Bureau of Ships and bupers (boo-pers) for Bureau of Persons. None of that works for me, which makes it strange that I even liked the first few novels in this series! That still amazes me, but doesn’t surprise me that I ran out of steam as he allowed more of the kind of nonsense I've detailed here to pervade the novels, consequently shutting out the stuff which actually did keep me interested.
So to bring this amazingly long review to a close, yes, I enjoyed this story just as much in audio as I did originally when I first read it, and I'm now tempted to move onto volume two to read again or listen to it! So yes, I had a lot of issues and I can see how others could have a lot of issues with this, but despite those, Weber did provide me with enough to keep me coming back - until he didn't, then I ditched the series and never looked back. I recommend this volume, though.
