On Basilisk Station (David Weber)

On Basilisk Station
(The Honor Harrington series, Book 1)
David Weber
Baen
Fiction, Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Honor Harrington's young career with the Royal Manticorian Navy positively glows, built on a strong academy showing and a fine turn as captain. Given a new ship - the aging HMS Fearless - retrofitted with experimental armaments, she becomes a reluctant part of a top admiral's pet project... but, despite her best efforts, the weaponry proves ineffective in real-space exercises. The crew, humiliated, turns on their new captain, who becomes the admiral's scapegoat. When the Fearless is reassigned to Basilisk Station, their degradation is complete.
Basilisk, considered of trivial importance to Manticore, is the traditional dumping ground of Naval screw-ups. The nearest planet is a worthless ball of moss peopled by primitive natives, smugglers outnumber legitimate traders, and politics have left the outpost virtually stripped of firepower to enforce laws... assuming any of the incompetents sent to patrol the place bothered trying. But Harrington refuses to turn her back on her duty, or her resentful crew. Her insistence on doing her job properly - in the face of impossible logistics, skeptical locals, and deliberate sabotage by her peers - rattles more than a few gilded cages back home... and unearths an enemy plot that might bring the mighty Manticorian forces to their knees.

REVIEW: I don't often read "big ships in space" books. Long, involved stretches of technobabble give me brain-aches. Convoluted military politics, cronyism, and backstabbing bore me. But I've been trying to expand my reading horizons beyond my safety-net of fantasy books. Perhaps I've misjudged the "big ships" genre of sci-fi all these years. After all, I managed to read and enjoy Elizabeth Moon's Trading in Danger without significant brain-ache. Maybe I ought to give those big-ship stories another chance.
Unfortunately, I chose the wrong book to start with.
Honor Harrington's world reads like a jumble of stereotypes, melding peculiarly old-school Earth terms with "modern" (by the story-universe's standards) references that feel forced. Harrington herself comes into the story with nothing to prove. She starts out as the stereotypical Perfect Captain - prodigal career, excellent at handling even difficult crewmembers, top-notch tactician willing to do anything to get the job done right, complete with an animal sidekick and conveniently poor mathematics skills (save when calculating complicated maneuvers on the fly in "top-notch tactician" mode) to make her "flawed and human" - and remains so throughout the book. Every scene not spent in her head features other people reflecting on her. Supporters sing her praises from across the stars, recounting her many great deeds, while her enemies shake their proverbial fists as she foils their evil plans with her brilliance. Surrounding Harrington is a blurry halo of names and ranks and political allegiences, few of whom distinguish themselves in any meaningful fashion. But, then, even the crewmembers of her own ship often fail to distinguish themselves in any meaningful fashion, and those who do fall into the nicely-worn ruts of genre convention (the Scotty-like engineer who can do anything with anything under impossible deadlines, the insecure junior officer who just needs a little confidence and the chance to shine, the initially jealous second-in-command who becomes one of the captain's staunchest allies, etc.) Between Harrington doing brilliant things and other people commenting on Harrington doing brilliant things are numerous info dumps, several of which involve people telling each other things about their own technology and convoluted Manticorian politics that they doubtless already know (or really ought to know, though Harrington - whose job would appear to be inherently political, given the rampant nepotism and back-scratching in the Royal Manticorian Navy - is given a plot-convenient aversion to politics to explain some of the info dumps.) The main thrust of the story becomes obvious before the halfway mark, though the characters take significantly longer to clue in, no doubt because they must filter absolutely every thought through the long chain of politics. It all wraps up in a cataclysmic battle that stretches out far too long, mostly to pick off incidental characters in manners I gather I was supposed to find tragic. At one point, the author slams on the brakes for a five-page history of interstellar propulsion and the problems of hyperspace travel... all of which, in a very long-winded and meandering manner, contributes exactly nothing to the tension of the scene that was interrupted. (Theoretically, it was part of Harrington's ruminations on the conflict at hand, but for some reason I found it difficult to believe that she actually would stop to think about such things at such detailed depth at a moment that required far more attention to the here-and-now.) At the end, I put this book down with a sigh of relief that it was finally over at long last... not to mention a distinct aversion to trying any more "big ships in space" books in the near future.