A Sci-Fi Role Model

books:


	• On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington Book 1) David Weber Baen, 2005 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 145 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Brian's review

Necessary to the Honor Harrington series. The technical stuff re: space travel mechanics are distracting.

A Sci-Fi Role Model

This is one of the best "soft" science fiction books I have ever read (soft sci-fi being one not help scientifically supportable concepts found in "hard" sci-fi).

The main character is well rounded, and while somewhat a caricature, manages to break out of that mold. The reader becomes very invested in her. The side characters are what really make this book sore. Unlike most other books of the genre, the good guys aren't all good and the bad guys aren't all bad. Their are shades of gray to the characters and a definitely lack of the white hat/black hat characterizations that most books go with.

The story is well written and paced, never dragging or speeding up to fast. The action is superbly written and can keep the reader on the edge of their seat. The dialog has a real feel to it, usually.

So this doesn't turn into a love fest, there are a few problems. The characters spend a lot of time explaining things to each other that they should know, such as politics. The author also goes into long tangents explaining technical details that does pull the reader out of the story a bit.

Still, a quality book any sci-fi fan should read.

for more information click here

Yes you do

You have to at least give the Honorverse a try.

I haven't tried any of the newer science fiction -- like in the last twenty years. But I definitely picked the right one to try first, and I don't know if any of the rest of it will measure up to this. So whatever you have to do, read Weber's Honorverse books, all of them.

It's dense. It's so dense, when I read Crown of Slaves (which is actually at the end of the series) I almost got overload. But I read it in about 24 hours and I can't remember the last time I couldn't drag myself away from a book like that. You really have to concentrate to keep the characters straight and prevent this alternate universe from overwhelming you, but you'll be glad you did.

After that I started Basilisk Station and then found out there were prequels so I just read some of those and they are so deep. OK, I have my reservations about whether humanity can survive with the same kind of bloodletting, literal or figurative, going on for the foreseeable future that we have going on right now (like the stock market dropping 778 points in one day which happened this week). And being a heavy reader in history, I can catch a lot of his references and they just barely work. YMMV. But the texture is about as dense as my favorites, like Frank (NOT Brian) Herbert's Dune books, Asimov's Foundation series, and Heinlein and that is very very very very good. And while you're trying to keep everybody and everything straight in your mind so that you don't lose your way, your brain is getting power-punched with IDEAS. That is what science fiction is supposed to be about.

Just do it.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Introducing Commander Honor Harrington, here is a major new series from a major new author. The Basilisk System was a place to sweep incompetents, fools, and failures under the rug . . . or to punish officers with enemies in high places. Commander Honor Harrington has enemies, and she's about to make more of them--because the people out to get her have made one mistake: They've made her mad.

hot