(perhaps to appear in Tightbeam, genzine of the National Fantasy Fan Federation, Est. 1941 n3f.org)
This year N3F Bookwyrms has generated a list of a dozen books for reading and, perhaps, discussion. I happen to have recently read On Basilisk Station by David Weber and offer a few remarks. First, an interesting historical note. Once upon a time, or so it is reported from several sources, a then largely unknown science fiction writer by the name of David Weber approached the late Jim Baen with a series of ideas for serial novels: multiple novels involving the same characters set the same hypothetical universe. Apparently each set of ideas was worked out in some considerable detail. By report, there were 10 or a dozen different ideas. Baen asked Weber to deliver up one of these novels. He delivered up On Basilisk Station, which could be described as Horatio Hornblower in outer space. Indeed, in one of the later novels, the series’ heroine, Honor Harrington, is presented by her parents with an extremely obscure series of novels set in the almost unknown prehistoric Napoleonic epoch. The novels were, in fact. the Horatio Hornblower novels.
Having read the entire series, I note characters who appear in the first book all propagate through more or less to the present, except for a few people who managed to die along the way. The author brings to the volume a style of writing that was more common two centuries ago than it is now, namely that substantial parts of the book are written in the authorial omniscient voice. Readers familiar with the greatest Victorian novelist, Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, will have heard this voice used at great length. The author steps across the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, explaining perhaps in great detail some issues that will affect the plot and that someone who lived in the period would have known. The modern crasser term for the authorial omniscient voice is “info dump”.
Having said that, on rereading On Basilisk Station, one notes a drift in the author’s style over the past decades. In this volume, the heroine is faced in large part with personality conflicts between her as the ship’s captain and the ship’s officers. Only in the later parts of the book do we see military conflict, culminating in a space battle which obviously the heroine has to survive since otherwise it would be kind of difficult to write further novels in the series. In more recent novels, there are opponents, but there is much less friction between the heroine and other people who were supposed to be on her side.
With respect to the recent triumph of Hugo fandom in creating an all-hobby fan feud, it is noteworthy that we are looking back through a number of decades, and the author has blandly presented a culture in which there is no discrimination against women or against men, and in which (though the point is not to be made for a few books yet) the ruling family of the heroine’s monarchical government is of African extraction.
The author has since given us several other series novels, including the Safehold series, the Hellsgate series, the Bahzell series, and the March series. I am not sure if Starfire is supposed to be a series counted as one of the ten, but it would appear that the author still has approximately four or six additional series in his writing locker waiting to be brought out and written. In addition, there appears to of been a massive tendency to underestimate how many books would appear in the series, in that the Honor Harrington volumes have reached approximately book twenty of six.
