The first half of this book is a dead loss. The second half is much
better, but unfortunately it isn’t long enough to stand on its own.

The first half of the book is intended to put Honor Harrington into
a position where she must necessarily be captured by the People’s
Republic of Haven. (Given the book’s title, this hardly counts
as a spoiler.) Further, because Honor is such a paragon her capture
mustn’t be her own fault. It can’t be due to cowardice; it can’t be due
to making a stupid tactical decision; no, it must be pure bad luck
mingled with heroism.

And it doesn’t work. Honor is commanding a squadron of cruisers on
convoy duty. According to her deployment, one cruiser leads; the
remainder trail. The point position is the most dangerous, especially
as the convoy enters a new system–the ship on point will be the first
to see any lurking enemies. If there are any, it will probably be able
to warn the ships the follow, but it will probably not be able to get
away. Weber explains this to us in great detail, and has Honor
reluctantly agree that her ship can’t take the point position. As the
squadron commander, it’s her duty to be where she can best protect the
convoy as a whole.

So far, so good. So how come, a few dozen pages later, we find her on
the bridge of her second-in-command’s ship, in the point position, as
said ship enters a system? Well, she was there for a birthday party,
and there was no time to lose, so instead of returning to her own ship
she stayed where she was and got captured.

Now, really, that’s just dumb. Visiting the point ship while they were
in hyperspace is one thing. Staying on board while the point ship
recon’d the system the convoy was approaching is quite another. No matter
how you slice it, Honor blew it.

And Weber lets her get away with it. Ugh.

Aside from that, quite a bit of nothing goes on during the first half of
the book; there are few scenes that set things up for later books in the
series, but most of it could have been cut without damaging the story.

The second half, now, the second half is why the book was written at all.

Some books back, the People’s Republic of Haven underwent a revolution
led by (for goodness sake) one Rob S. Pierre. (Sometimes I wonder if Weber
regrets having chosen such a cheesy name.) Things have stabilized
somewhat since then, and Haven is now governed by the Committee for
Public Safety, or practically speaking, by Pierre; by Oscar St. Just,
head of the Office of State Security; and by Cordelia Ransom, head of the
Office of Public Information. Yes, our Cordelia is the chief
propagandist of the Revolution; she’s also a True Believer of the most
militant stripe, and a sadist to boot.

As the book begins, Ransom has gone to visit the front lines in the
Office of Public Information’s private cruiser, the Tepes (and isn’t
that a name that’s fraught with atmosphere). Honor has the bad luck to
be caught just after Ransom arrives in-system, and though her naval
captors do their best to see that Honor and her crew are treated decently,
Ransom has other ideas. For her actions in
On Basilisk Station, Honor was tried and convicted of murder (in
absentia, of course). Ransom sees the publicity coup of her
life–Honor Harrington, war criminal, is on the short road to Hell and
death by hanging.

Naturally, our heroine can’t be allowed to end that way…and therein
lies the tale, and it’s a good’un. Once you get past all of the garbage
at the beginning.

When I first read Weber’s Honor Harrington series, I read the first five
and put off reading this one for quite some time. Honor had had quite a
hard time in the last couple of books, and the title of this one Didn’t
Bode Well. As it turns out, it’s one of the more interesting books in
the series.

The inspiration for Honor Harrington and her world was, of course, Forester’s
Horatio Hornblower series; Weber has gone to great (and occasionally
painful) lengths to elaborate the laws of physics such that fleets of
space ships are subject to the many of the same constraints and tactical
considerations as the square-rigged warships of Hornblower’s day. But of
course military technology doesn’t stand still, and in this book we get
to watch innovation in action.

In this book, Honor is called back to active service
in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The political considerations that make her
recall feasible also ensure that she cannot be given the command she
deserves and a place in the front lines. And so she’s given command of a
squadron of Q-ships: freighters outfitted as warships, teeth carefully
hidden to better lure pirates in close.

It so happens that the Star Kingdom of Manticore adjoins a somewhat wild
and wooly volume of space known as the Silesian Confederacy. Manticore’s
wealth stems from
trade, some of it with the Confederacy, and even more with systems beyond
the Confederacy. The Silesian government is weak, venal, and corrupt,
and the Silesian Navy is a joke. Consequently, Manticore has long
patrolled the Silesian spaceways, if only to safeguard her own shipping.
The war with Haven has higher priority, though, and now Manticoran
freighters are getting picked off left and right. To Silesia Honor and
her Q-ships will go; but these are Q-ships with a difference. They
aren’t well armored–no freighter is–but they contain within them the
germ of the technology that will eventually win the war.

As the Havenite task force that’s currently playing pirates in Silesia
will soon discover….

One of the strengths of the Harrington series (and also, sometimes, one
of its weaknesses) is its massive cast of characters. In this book we
first meet several people who will become instrumental in later books,
notably Citizen Captain Warner Caslet and his Tac Officer, Shannon
Foraker. Weber never lets us forget that however vicious the war
becomes, and however evil some of the parties are, there are men and
women of honor on both sides.

You know your house is more than usually chaotic when you have to rummage around among the severed heads to find your watch.

This is the fifth Honor Harrington book, and it’s probably my
favorite…except for certain parts which I skipped.

As a result of the way she settled with Pavel Young in the previous book,
Honor is on the beach; politically, the Manticoran government
can’t afford to give her a ship. Not to worry; she bops off to Grayson,
where (thanks to her actions in The Honor of the Queen) she
is not only a planetary heroine but also Steadholder Harrington, ruler of
the newly established Harrington Steading. She’s a member of the
planetary nobility, and legally has more power over her Steading than any
Manticoran noble–the Queen quite possibly not excepted.

On top of that, the Graysons are expanding their navy as quickly as they
can, and they need experienced commanders. Which is why Steadholder
Harrington soon finds herself serving the Grayson Space Navy as…Admiral
Harrington.

All is not perfectly rosy, of course; Haven is plotting an attack, and
hyper-conservative forces on Grayson itself practically think she’s the
devil incarnate. (It’s some of those sequences that I skipped on this
reading; the characters are thoroughly unpleasant, and so are the things
they do. I know how it comes out, and see no point in subjecting myself
to evil tedium.)

The book has certain features in common with its predecessor, especially
as regards the climax; suffice it to say that Graysons aren’t
Manticorans, and that sometimes this is a good thing.

In celebration of Deep Impact’s successful mission to comet Tempel 1, we had a special event at JPL yesterday at noon: the Comets came and played for an hour in the mall outside the main cafeteria.

The Comets? You know, as in Bill Haley and The Comets? Haley’s dead, but the remaining members of the band have been touring for the last ten or fifteen years. And yesterday, July 5th, they were at JPL.

I didn’t listen to the whole show, but I did hear them play “See You Later, Alligator” and a cover version of Louis Prima’s “Buona Sera” among other songs; had I waited I’d most likely have heard “Rock Around The Clock” as well, but I had to get back to work.

They played extremely well–sax, electric guitar, stand-up bass, and drums–but I have to say, Haley was the lead singer for a reason.

This is the fourth book in Weber’s Honor Harrington series, and in its
original edition it had one of the Worst Covers Of All Time. Picture
Michael Jackson looking down his nose at you over a pistol pointed in your
general direction; this is supposed to be the tall, strongly built Honor
Harrington. Gag. However, the edition that’s in the stores these days
has fixed the problem. Alas, such changes are not retroactive.

Anyway, in this book we get to see what happens when Honor gets really
mad. See, there’s this guy named Pavel Young, the son of the Earl of
North Hollow. He was an upperclassman when Honor was at Saganami Island,
Manticore’s naval academy, and late one night, angry that she’d spurned a
pass he’d made earlier, he tried to rape her. As is all too typical in
such cases, Honor kept that detail to herself (though she pretty well
wiped the floor with him), and so he went on to be a Manticoran officer.

Honor and Young had another run-in in On Basilisk Station,
and then another in The Short Victorious War, after which
Young was cashiered. So Young feels he has a score to settle–and he’s
got his sights on Honor’s beloved Paul Tankersly.

I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that he comes to regret
that decision. For a while, anyway.

This book was rather unpleasant on first reading, mostly because some
very bad things happen to some folks I’d come to like; on re-reading,
though, though, I was fore-armed, and liked it rather better.

JPL’s Deep Impact mission to comet Tempel 1 is a complete success. The Deep Impact spacecraft rendezvoused with the comet yesterday, and released its Impactor; the Impactor collided with the comet early this morning, just as planned. You can see images of the collision at JPL’s Deep Impact page, and there’s an article at Space.com.

Kudos to everyone at JPL who made this happen, especially the Deep Impact development and flight teams, but also the Deep Space Mission System engineers and operators whose work is key in relaying commands and telemetry to and from the spacecraft. The ground system required to support missions like Deep Impact is shockingly complex; dozens of subsystems need to cooperate to process the uplink and downlink data and convey it around the globe so that we can see the pictures on the pages listed above.

I’d like to give special credit to the Uplink and Downlink subsystem engineers, who were on-call all weekend in case of problems–though I trust there weren’t any. Good work, folks!

The People’s Republic of Haven have a few problems. First, they’ve got
Imperial Politics syndrome in a big way–the politics of the capital
dominate the politics of the star nation. And the basic fact of
political life in Haven’s capital is that the majority of the population is
on the dole, and have been for generations–and the Dolists get nasty if
their standard of living isn’t maintained. On the other hand, the
Treasury is nearly empty. What Haven needs, decide its rulers, is a
short, victorious war. They need to go conquer some hapless (but
wealthy) star nation and use the proceeds to fund their social programs.

Honor Harrington has faced Havenite forces twice before. In
On Basilisk Station she faced a Havenite “Q-ship” (a
warship disguised as a freighter); in
The Honor of the Queen she saved Grayson from a
Masadan attack–an attack funded and led by Havenite “advisors”. But
this is the first book in which Haven declares outright war on the Star
Kingdom of Manticore. It’s also the first in which we see a major fleet
action; Honor is assigned to be Admiral Mark Sarnow’s flag captain in the
Hancock system. This is also the book in which she meets the first love
of her life, Paul Tankersley, who’s one of the officers at the shipyard in
Hancock.

So you’ve got some serious politics, fleet maneuvers, and a little romance,
all culminating (as usual) in a slap-bang battle in which Honor has to
make the hard decisions yet still come up roses while making herself some
series enemies. It’s a familiar pattern, but it works.

The July Issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line.