The Honor of the Queen

I’ve read On Basilisk Station to pieces, so I decided to start my Honorverse reread with the second book. In The Honor of the Queen, Honor has to secure an alliance with the backwards but strategically important planet of Grayson. This book has Weber’s milSF at the top of its game, with rapid deep-space ambushes, Space Marine assaults, and the required slugging match between Honor and a more powerful ship. Fortunately, it avoids the ‘war of large numbers’ excess that characterizes the later books (a combined broadside of 8000 missiles, 63% of which were fooled by ECM, point defense shot down 2500, which left 460 missiles to detonate against the Manticorean battle wall…).

What elevates this book is the surprisingly good gender politics. Honor is one of the stronger female characters in fiction (aside from her disastrous love life), and she deals with the chauvinistic Space Mormons of Grayson sternly but fairly. There’s a little bit of “bless their hearts” kindness towards Grayson society in Weber’s writing, but their sexism is obviously an anomaly in the setting, and one which will be corrected. They come off positively good looking next to the Space Taliban of Masada, who are a simply delightful enemy to crush. Finally, on the politics side, Weber is a little bit pro-Authoritarian and anti-Democratic for my tastes, with a fair amount of ‘we could just fix everything if this stupid political process got out of the way of our wise leaders’, but his liberals are such pathetic strawmen that it’s hard to feel insulted.