David Weber

On Basilisk Station

This is the first novel in the Honor Harrington series.  Honor Harrington is in trouble: having made a Senior Admiral look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out of the way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star conquering, so-called Republic of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system. But the people out to get her have made one mistake, they've made her mad. This special limited edition includes an excerpt from the next Honor Harrington best seller.  The next book in the series is  The Honor of the Queen.

Becky A

I really wanted to like this book, but the good parts were all buried beneath pages of politics and history that didn't advance the plot at all, and pages and pages and pages of technobabble. I've never skimmed so much in my life.

Carlo Zottmann

I bought "On Basilisk Station" a few years back as part of a bundle, and then kind of forgot about it. A few weeks ago I've picked it up in order to "clean up" my backlog, and it started out slow. But, as the story progressed, it picked up steam (plasma?), and the latter half of it was *solid*.

I have to admit: the characters, the story and the whole universe kind of grew on me. Hell, even the ship itself!

Quite an enjoyable read. I'm into military scifi, I liked the whole "Her Majesty The Queen's Navy" theme, and I'm kind of glad I gave the book a shot.

Bryan Alexander

On Basilisk Station is the first volume of a space opera series concerning the adventures of a space navy captain, Honor Harrington. That's what I've learned from the web; this book is the only one I've read.


The plot of On Basilisk Station gets complicated, but the gist is that a benign space kingdom assigns a young captain and her underpowered ship to patrol a seemingly quiet star system. Naturally trouble ensues, and Honor rises to various challenges.

This is clearly an homage to CS Forster's Horatio Hornblower series. We get the cliched transposition of naval metaphors to space, even to the very silly extent of ships having sails and firing broadsides. There are nice and not-nice kingdoms, aristocracies, marines, intrigue, and hard-working jack tars, er, spaceship crew members.

The book is long. Huge chunks of chapters gleefully plunge into exposition, setting far more stage than the novel actually engages. Not only do we get obsessive military tech detail, but political parties, family backstories, national histories... it feels like a role-playing guide at times.

Other reviews have complained about the heroine being too Mary Sue, and there is much to this. Early on we learn she has a couple of flaws, mostly not being conventionally pretty, nor having family connections, but both of those fall away and have no impact on the plot. Instead Honor is ruthlessly competent, insightful, and effective. Bad guys wrong her, then justice asserts itself. Honor also has a special cat friend. It wearies.

One high point is a fine space battle at the end, a running engagement between ill-matched ships. That was well written: exciting, realistic, nicely using details we've read earlier. To that battle my review owes an additional star.

I imagined the ghost of Poul Anderson reading alongside me as I plowed through this. I wanted his passionate style here, with intense lyricism and sincere concern for political evolution. I wished for his more elegant world-building, the way Anderson set up space opera situations then ripped plots across them.

So... I don't know if it's worth following the series. Any thoughts, readers?

On Basilisk Station

Reviews