My intro to Honorverse

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, military fiction, space opera

Many years ago, when I first read Foundation by Isaac Asimov, I was halfway through before I realized that it consisted almost entirely of dialogue. I slowed down for a while and took notice. Asimov was a master of writing dialogue. I have found nobody similarly skilled at writing stream-of-consciousness. I quickly tire of interior monologues.

I had not got far into Torch of Freedom, by David Weber and Eric Flint, before I realized that this is another book that is very heavy on the dialogue, but with less skill than Asimov (maybe that isn't saying much). It also contains lots of interior monologue, as the authors depict at least seven facets of a multilevel intrigue and attempt to bring a reader "inside the head" of at least one protagonist from each facet. I've made it sound like I didn't like it. Let's say it is an acquired taste, and with nearly 600 pages to acquire it, I did find myself enjoying the book.

I admit I got it because of the cover, which depicts a spacecraft approaching "Fun City", a combination space station and roller coaster with a partly blacked-out marquee. It was a rather "splash in the pool" introduction to David Weber's Honorverse series. Fortunately an appendix lists and describes the dramatis personae and their allegiances, because you really do need the playbook to follow this game.

Honorverse is set in the 4000's, some 19 centuries "post diaspora"; presumably starship travel via hyperspace and wormholes was discovered in the 2100's, and star travel became as cheap, relatively speaking, as traveling to the New World via caravel in the mid-1600's. In some ways, the Honorverse milieu is similar to the 1600's. Slavery (of the genetic variety) is rampant in a large part of human space, the settled portion of the Galaxy is balkanized to an extent similar to Europe during the Enlightenment, and a new planet-nation of freed slaves has just been set up. This is Torch. Its freeing is the subject of an earlier novel in the series.

This novel focuses on and climaxes with the Battle of Torch, a space battle with laser-tipped missiles and giant warships that can accelerate at rates that make this old physics junkie shudder (hmmm: 200G of acceleration, with "inertial dampers" so the crew can survive, for a 2-million-ton craft… let's just say that you have to annihilate the mass of a small star to supply the energy needed for an hour's run)

I am less interested in the military aspects, though, compared to the social settings: one near-totalitarian state called Mesa that uses eugenic tinkering to produce its alpha, beta, and gamma "star lines"; the vastly powerful, but largely unaware Solarian empire; a slave-production "corporation" known as Manpower, Inc., which practices a kind of reverse eugenics and is allied with Mesa; and several smaller "star nations" with various allegiances—and two of them are at war; in addition to Torch. Once the pace quickens, about halfway through the book, the reader has seen the point of view of at least a couple of people from each of these constituencies.

The human stories focus on Queen Berry of Torch and several of her staff and allies, on "Ganny El" and her gypsy band that occupy the roller-coaster emporium, on two agents, Anton and Victor, who carry out intelligence-gathering on Mesa, and on a family with a brilliant but doomed foster daughter, a victim of eugenics that has overreached its limits. Interestingly, I can't recall a specific portrayal of any of the Manpower folk; that's probably on purpose.

Space opera fulfills its role best when events are too large for one planet to contain. This is such a case. Torch is not just a super-Liberia and Mesa is not just a super-Reich. The events of a book like this might have fit on Earth in the 1600's but cannot now, with every battlefield within a day's airplane ride from anywhere. In a faster-than-light setting, it takes plenty of space for travel to take days rather than hours, and for a Napoleonic sense of timing to bring together the forces for a dramatic climax. The Battle of Torch retains the freedom of the emerging star nation, setting the stage for as many novels as David Weber can write.