Jenny Dolfen

Inktober #18: Honor Harrington

Added 2017-10-18 10:03:03 +0000 UTC

The Honor Harrington series by David Weber entered my life in 1998, after I'd read my way through all the then-available Star Wars books, and was looking for some other space opera to fill the waiting time until Episode 1. (We will forget quickly that I said that.)

The Honor books fascinated me greatly back then. It was the first military SciFi I'd ever read, and it remained on my mind and in my sketchbooks for years. What really intrigued me was the fact that David Weber had created a universe in which gender and race were completely inconsequential. In many books, I came across a character who made me think, "In any other book, this one would have been the other gender." I absolutely loved that idea. It felt to me as if the author had created a fully fleshed-out character first, and then rolled a die for gender and another for race. I loved that.

Especially the first handful of books was excellent, really suspenseful, and most of all, I fell in love with the characters. Not so much with Honor, interestingly (though I love her six-legged treecat Nimitz, who in turn loves celery). My favourites were Scotty Tremaine, Alistair McKeon, Thomas Theisman, Shannon Foraker, and of course, Andreas Venizelos. When he died a hero's death in book seven, I pretty much gave up the series. The Honorverse just wasn't the same without Andy. So here he steals the spotlight, as a young lieutenant serving as tactical officer on HMS Fearless in the first book, On Basilisk Station. A lot is made of his sex appeal throughout the series (though he himself seems totally unaware of it) and I think it's hilarious that his first command was HMS Apollo.