Review: The Latest Honorverse Novels

Once upon a time, David Weber wrote reasonably-sized individual novels concerning a character named Honor Harrington. And then Honor Harrington was captured by the Bad Guys, and the next book, Echoes of Honor, was ever so much bigger. You see, Weber needed to tell us the whole story—not only the years Honor spent working to escape, but also everything that was going on while she was out of the picture. So we heard about what was going on with our continuing characters on Manticore, and with the various sets of continuing characters in the People’s Republic of Haven, and only occasionally about what Honor and her people were doing.

This pattern continued through the next couple of books, and then Weber expanded each new book into three (3) (count ’em) (3) three related and relatively synchronous books. Or to put it another way, he started two new subseries: the Torch series and the Saganami Island series.

The Torch series, co-written with Eric Flint, follows on from Flint’s Honorverse story “From the Highlands”, and concerns the characters Anton Zilwicki of Manticore and Victor Cachat of Haven as they learn to work together to fight the evil Mesan corporation Manpower Unlimited, which specializes in creating slaves genetically optimized to any taste. The first novel in this subseries, Crown of Slaves, first seemed rather like a lark, and definitely out of the mainstream of the series.

And then, Saganami Island is the home of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s academy. The Shadow of Saganami, the first in the Saganami Island series, was meant to be a return to a smaller, less encompassing story, focussing on the careers of a set of midshipmen, fresh out of Saganami Island. The action of this novel also took place far from the mainstream, in the distant Talbott Cluster. In a previous book, Manticoran explorers discovered yet another terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction in the Lynx system, in the Talbott Cluster; and now the planets of the Cluster, looking with concern at the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security, have asked to become members of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. Our heroes and heroines are sent off to Talbott to make sure that all goes smoothly.

So we’ve got three nicely unrelated subseries, yes?

No.

Manticore’s actions in Talbott bring them into conflict with the Solarian League; and it becomes immediately clear that the Mesan Alignment is doing all it can to turn that conflict into a minor conflagration. And as the series (what’s the plural of series? “serieses”?) continue, Mesa becomes the unifying force that draws all three of them together. The main series continues to show how Honor Harrington helps defined Manticore against her foes, which now include the Mesan Alignment. The Torch series show how Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat bring the war to Mesa. And the Saganami Island series (abandoning its putative heroes to bit parts) covers the action with the Solarian League in the vicinity of Talbot.

But though there are three emphases, there’s only one sweep of history. The same significant events form the timeline of each of the series, and appear in each book, sometimes in detail in the foreground, sometimes in a few words in the background. Reading through the books we sometimes see the same scenes, sometimes identically, sometimes from different points of view and in different degrees of detail. And increasingly, the duration of any given volume seems to be driven by not getting too far ahead of its colleagues rather than the by the plot.

It’s all rather dizzying, and I’ve got two things to say about it. The first is that even with the duplication and filler I’ve rather enjoyed the most recent books (A Rising Thunder, Shadow of Freedom, and Cauldron of Freedom); they’ve had some really good bits.

And the second thing is, if you really want to get the whole story—and if you’ve bothered to read this deeply into the series, you probably do—then you really want to read all of the books in publication order, including the “Worlds of Honor” anthologies. It’s less confusing that way.