On Basilisk Station [Mass Market Paperback]

David Weber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2001 | Series: On Basilisk Station (Book 1)

Exiled to Basilisk Station by a superior out to ruin her, Commander Honor Harrington must battle corrupt merchants, dangerous smugglers, and aborigines whose drug of choice is a homicide-inducing hallucinogen.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

On Basilisk Station (or "HH1" as it's known to the faithful) is the first installment in David Weber's cult hit Honor Harrington series, which has charmed the socks off schoolgirls and sailors alike. Honor--the heroine of this fast-paced, addictive space opera--is a polished, plucky bulldog of a naval officer, part Horatio Hornblower, part Miles Vorkosigan, part Captain Janeway, and with a razor-clawed telepathic cat thrown over her shoulder for good measure.

The series' kickoff puts a giddy Commander Harrington at the helm of her first serious starship, the HMS Fearless. But her excitement quickly fades--political maneuvering by top brass in the Manticoran navy has left her light cruiser outfitted with a half-baked experimental weapons system. Against all odds (just the way Honor likes it), she still manages a clever coup in tactical war games, a feat that earns her accolades--and enemies. The politicians she's offended banish her to a galactic backwater, Basilisk Station. But that outpost soon proves to be a powder keg, and it's up to Harrington and the Fearless crew to thwart the aggressive plans of the Haven Republic. A perfect mix of military SF and high adventure--if you enjoy your tour, re-up with HH2, The Honor of the Queen. --Paul Hughes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-Move over gutsy female detectives-here's a daring woman spaceship commander waiting to claim a place in readers' hearts. Honor Harrington is sent in disgrace to the forlorn outpost of Basilisk Station, where military authorities hope she will be forgotten about. Instead, with her woefully under-armed vessel, the Fearless, she executes incredible flying manuevers in an attempt to stop foreign takeover of a major space station.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Baen; First edition (February 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671721631
• ISBN-13: 978-0671721633
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (189 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,300,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #50 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Weber, David

More About the Author

David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs".

Previously the owner of a small advertising and public relations agency, Weber now writes science fiction full time.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

143 of 160 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A series you may like, February 20, 2001

By 

Andrew X. Lias "http://andrewlias.blogspot.com" (Colorado Springs, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington #1) (Hardcover)

Rather than review this particular book, I thought that I'd give a capsul review of the series, as a whole. Given that, if you do like this one, you're in for a long haul, I thought that this would be fair.

First of all, the Harrington series stands at the intersection of two genres: space opera and military SF. Space Opera is a style of story with interstellar vistas, larger than life characters and situations, and (typically, and especially in this case) more than a dash of melodrama. Military SF is a sub-genre of science fiction that concentrates its focus on the details of high-tech conflict -- think Tom Clancy in space. The first warning is that if either of these styles of fiction turn you off, you probably won't like these books.

The writing style of Mr. Weber is servicable for the type of story he's telling. He's very good at writing action sequences, and providing you villains to hate, and jerking a tear or two, and at compelling you to keep turning the pages of his stories. His work, however, does not constitute high art. It's not what I would call low-brow, either, but I think that it is fair to describe it as relatively unsophisticated. In particular, he writes characters that are, on the whole, somewhat flat, often substituting emotional charge for true characterization. If you want more than that out of a book, these aren't for you, either.

I should note that the books are deliberately written to echo the Horatio Hornblower stories and that there are many clever parallels between the future kingdoms of the novels and the historical conflict between France and the allied nations during the Napoleonic era. History a literature buffs may get a kick out of this, but it should be noted that it isn't an exceptionally sophisticated set of parallels. It's more of a light spice for those who like such things.

What you can expect is a very fun and action oriented set of stories. One co-worker aptly described them as "airplane books" (that is, books that are good to read during a long flight), and I'm inclined to agree. For them, they've been a slightly guilty pleasure, but a pleasure all the same. If you want something that is manifestly enjoyable and unchallenging, or if you simply hungry for something to fill your reading time, I can't think of many series which would fit the bill quite so well. They aren't high art but they do a good job of being everything that they are intended to be.

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kicks off a truly magnificent series - read this one first, November 16, 2006

By 

Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington) (Mass Market Paperback)

"On Basilisk Station" is the first book in a truly wonderful space opera series about a space navy set three thousand years in the future and featuring David Weber's best fictional heroine, "Honor Harrington." The books are best read in sequence and I strongly recommend that you start with this one.

Despite the futuristic setting, there are strong parallels with Nelson's navy. The assumed technology in the Honor Harrington stories imposes constraints on space navy officers similar to those which the technology of fighting sail imposed on wet navy officers two hundred years ago. Aand the galactic situation in the novels contains strong similarities to the strategic and political situation in European history at the time of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

This seems to be quite deliberate: a number of thinly veiled (and amusing) hints in the books indicate that they are to some extent a tribute to C.S. Forester, while the main heroine of the books, Honor Harrington, appears to owe more than a little to C.S. Forester's character "Horatio Hornblower."

In this first book of the series, the newly promoted Commander Honor Harrington takes up her first command of a significant fleet unit, the old light cruiser "H.M.S. Fearless" which has just been rebuilt with a very unusual armament.

Honor Harrington comes from a middle-class family with no naval tradition - both her parents are doctors - and has worked her way up the officer ranks of the navy of the Star Kingdom of Manticore on pure ability with no influential family friends to support her. At times it seems that her only friend in the navy is her "Treecat" Nimitz.

Treecats are six-legged creatures similar in size and shape to terran cats, who are fully telepathic among themselves and empaths with humans - e.g. they can read a human's emotions and sometimes form a unique bond with a specific human within which the exchange of emotions is two-way. Some people make the mistake of assuming that Nimitz is just Honor's pet cat: it will become clear during the series just how much more than that he is.

After a short spell with the fleet, HMS Fearless is assigned to Basilisk station. The senior officer on the station turns out to be an enemy of Honor's going back to their time at Naval academy, and promptly takes his ship back home for repairs leaving her with orders to look after the Basilisk system and the completely inadequate force of one light cruiser with which to do so.

As if that were not bad enough, a powerful and unfriendly neighbouring star nation, the "People's Republic of Haven" is casting greedy eyes at Basilisk and looking for an opportunity to grab the system.

This is a really clever story with wonderful and believable characters, brilliantly described space battles, and a well crafted set of explanations of how the tactical situations which the characters find themselves in relate both to the technology their ships use and the political dynamics which set up the conflicts they find themselves in. Because this is the first book of the series Dave Weber has to devote a fair amount of time to explaining the how faster than light travel and space weapons work in the series, but the explanations are reasonably interesting, internally consistent, and not too hard to follow.

Many people read Weber for the space battles, and this book scores very highly here. In some of the later books of the series when describing major fleet battles, Dave Weber somtimes writes a bit too much like the wargame designer he once was, but he is superb when describing single-ship or small unit actions and never better than in "On Basilisk Station."

If you like this book, you can go on to the rest of the series. At the time of writing there are thirteen full length novels and four short story collections in the "Honorverse" as the fictional galaxy in which these stories are set is sometimes known. The main series which tells the story of Honor Harrington herself currently runs to eleven novels; in order these are

On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
The Short Victorious War
Field of Dishonour
Flag in Exile
Honor among Enemies
In Enemy Hands
Echoes of Honor
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs

The four short story collections set in the same universe, not all of which feature Honor Harrington herself, are

Worlds of Honor
Worlds of Honor II: More than Honor
Worlds of Honor III: Changer of Worlds
Worlds of Honor IV: The Service of the Sword

The two spin-off novels are "Crown of Slaves" (with Eric Flint) which is a story of espionage and intrigue featuring a number of characters first introduced in earlier Honor Harrington books or short stories, and "The Shadow of Saganami" which is a kind of "next generation" novel featuring a number of younger officers in the navies of Manticore and her ally Grayson.

For amusement, if you want to try to look for the parallels to nations and individuals from the French revolutionary period and the Hornblower books, one possible translation would be:

People's Republic of Haven = Revolutionary France
Star Kingdom of Manticore = Great Britain
Gryphon = Scotland

Prime Minister Alan Summervale = Pitt the Younger
Hamish Alexander, later Earl White Haven = Admiral Edward Pellew
Honor Harrington, = Horatio Hornblower
Alistair McKeon = William Bush

Crown loyalists and Centrists = Tory supporters of Pitt
Conservative Association = hardline High Tories
New Kiev Liberals = Whig Oligarchists
Progressives and traditional liberals = Whig radicals

Anderman Empire = Kingdom of Prussia
Silesia = Poland
Solarian republic = United States of America

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Success is its own Punishment, April 28, 2005

By 

John A Lee III "jal3" (San Antonio, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington) (Mass Market Paperback)

What happens when you are given command of a ship that has been "gutted" in a naval experiment and are sent out to wargame against the big boys? Furthermore, what happens when you use your new system to take them all by surprise, ONCE, and then get demolished each time after that because everyone is now ready for the trick? Just to make matters worse, you embarass the admiral who came up with the one time gimmick. The answer is that you get sent off to a post no one wants where you will be out of sight and out of mind. That's what happens to Honor.

Honor's task is virtually impossible and her enemies want her to fail. She dissapoints them in that she succeeds magnificnetly. Along the way, she becomes a naval hero in the tradition of Horatio Hornblower.

Weber does a great job adapting the institutions of the Royal Navy from the Napoleonic wars into space opera. This is true in terms of politics and culture as well as in strategy and tactics. In its context, it is believable and fun.

No one should expect a lesson in physics. That is not what this story is about. Instead, it is about, courage, leadership and, yes, Honor. It is a fun read and I am looking forward to the reset of the series.