First exposure to Honor Harrington

As a long time ago (1950's)reader of E.E.Smith and the Lensman series (and I still wish that there were more of them) I was used to nosing around in used book stores, as I couldn't afford anything else. Somehow, some years and many, many boxes of paperbacks later, I too ran into Mutineers Moon.

Liking the story a lot, I started searching for other works by RFC and am still doing the same. I think that Honor of the Queen was the first HH book I found and the rest is history.

2004. The airport at Rio De Janeiro.

Just finished my Explorer Belt Challenge (UK scouting award) and wanted something to read on way home.

Browsed bookshop, wanted either War of Honor or the novelisation of Hulk.

I'd seen Hulk on screen. WoH was completely fresh and new to me. Plus it had a cool cover (although that should never be the basis of buying...).

From there I found out about the rest of the series, and the existence of Baen... and now most of my books purchased are Baen titles.

After finishing the first four Starfire books (I was a very late comer to the series and finding Crusade took forever)I picked up The Shadow of Saganami at a local book store than Crown of Slaves a copule of weeks later. I found At All Costs in a local wal-mart about a month after Crown of Slaves and grabbed that than Found SWV at the grand opening sale of the second halfprice books to open in my area. Next I got AoV than OBS followed by HAE than SotS and IEH together. After that the order gets hazy and somewhere in picking up the Various Honor books I picked up the Dahak trilogy and In Fury Born.

In a bookshop in Boston in (I think) 1996 - I started having to travel to Boston MA for work on a regular basis, and found that the downtown bookshop had a great collection of science fiction that hadn't yet made it to the UK. Eagerly devoured pretty much anything I could find, which included the first three of the Honorverse novels. Subsequent visits to the US saw me catch up to what was then the most recently published in that series, and then to all the other DW books - ever since I've been haunting both this site and that of Baen and Amazon for release dates of each new book; and then getting desperately frustrated waiting for the release date to finally arrive

First exposure, first post, seems fitting. For starters, I was in the Canadian navy for over 20 years, starting in 1977. At that time there weren't anything like dvd's or vcr's around. One ship had a video machine but it used ginormous tapes that lasted only an hour. Entertainment and relaxation was then old school – conversation, card & board games, 1 nightly reel-to-reel film at sea and reading. I was always a reader even before I enlisted, it just intensified on board ship. My nickname was 'the library' because I always had books with me, bought new ones in foreign ports and was willing to lend them out provided they came back in as good a shape as you got it. No page corner bending, writing inside, getting them wet, etc. Take reasonable care and you got to borrow a second book, a third and so on. Screw up once and that was it, hope you enjoyed the read because now it's the ship's library for you, hope you like technical and reference books.

Reading allowed me a degree of privacy onboard. I could escape into my own imagination with the help of the story and ignore the noises and activity around me. On a month long trip I could inhale an easy 20-25 books. So I was always on the lookout for more reading material and if they were a series, so much the better. Spider Robinson's Callahan books were great, Dickson's Dorsai Saga, Piers Anthony's various series, Dune, Foundation, Robert Aspirin's MYTH books. Read them, liked them to varying degrees. Still have a bunch of them.

Which brings me to the Honor Harrington series. Still have the copies I first purchased, exact date when is fluid. All copies I have were bought in Canada because they have dual pricing, cdn and US dollars. On Basilisk Station was $5.99 US, $7.50 Cdn. Title page says 2nd printing June '94 so it couldn't have purchased earlier. Cover art by Larry Schwinger. Not the greatest book I ever read but good. Did what it was supposed to, get me into a sweeping story. I liked it enough to pick up the next few and then the next. 1st printing for Honor of the Queen, June '93 ($5.99/$6.99), 1st printing for Short Victorious War, April '94. Cover art by the same guy, Larry Schwinger.

So, 1994 I was in Halifax on an electronic technician's course, then back to Victoria in '96. Read them at first to get away from physics, calculus, electronics so wasn't too enamoured of all the technical info but slogged through. I was learning about communications, not blowing crap up. When I got back to the West coast and on board ship, kept up with the reading because they were an enjoyable diversion. All paperbacks until War of Honor, which, lo and behold, had a computer cd in the back. Found out it was all the books so far which was cool. Didn't have a computer then but still, cool.

roseandheather wrote:TVTropes.

No, seriously.

I kept encountering Honor Harrington examples everywhere, and given that the work page ever so kindly pointed to the Baen CD archives... well, the rest, as they say, is history.

I want to say that was just after the release of Torch of Freedom, but it might have been just after the release of The Shadow of Saganami - I'm not really sure. At first I had them in electronic versions only - in PDF, if you can believe that, since at the time I was still terribly skeptical of this whole "e-book" thing - but I do have about half a dozen of the books in paperback thanks to secondhand bookstores.

I can tell you for certain that it was definitely my gateway into literary science fiction - up until then I'd been more interested in fantasy.

I find it extremely amusing that we heard about HH from the same source. TVTropes is extremely clever and funny but it is a time-suck of immense proportions!

Welcome wetnavy. The tillmans on us.

Hope you have fun here.

KNick wrote:Finally. Someone who has been craving a Weber fix nearly as long as I have. I started with Mutineer's Moon in 1991, when it first came out.

Now, that's a good question.

Who's been a Weberfan the longest?

I think KNick's in the lead at 1991....!

Mike.

Oddly enough I picked up War of Honor (my now least favorite) in a B&N in NYC while there with a then girlfriend (long story) and thought it was interesting but put it down.

Fast forward two years and a friend lent me OBS to get me interested and I've been hooked since! Hehe, that friend was so into HH that his wifi password was "HumanityUnchained". Good stuff.