Crown of Slaves
(Honorverse #1)

David Weber and Eric Flint

Riverdale: Baen, 2003. ISBN: 0-743-49899-2. Pp. 720

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

It was inevitable that the wildly successful Honor Harrington series would be spun off eventually: the Honorverse is too vast, too complex, and too rich with possibilities to be explored through the chronicle of a single individual, no matter how remarkable (or some would say, implausible) she is. Even though I have nothing but respect for Mr Flint, I am grateful that Weber is present to ensure some consistency and give this novel the feel of a "proper" Honorverse entry (some of the short-stories by others in the collections he edited were... uneven). We have met some of the leading characters before in short stories and the events in Crown of Slaves, which chronologically take place during, and before the end of, War of Honor, will be important for the next Honor Harrington adventure in that they flesh out the bitter resentment of Manpower toward both Haven and Manticore.

The novel is slow, very slow, to start. We get tedious introductions to the many characters but unfortunately they all seem necessary to give the basis for their subsequent behavior. When a prominent anti-slavery political figure is assassinated, both Haven and Manticore send unofficial representatives to the "festivities" on Erewhon, a Manticoran ally being wooed by the increasingly exasperated Havenites. The unbelievably venal High Ridge government has managed to alienate just about everyone but even though the solid Graysons hold firm in their commitments, the calculating Erewhonese waver and start looking for a better deal that Haven is aching to offer. On the Manticoran side, the frustrated Queen Elizabeth sends the uber-spy Anton Zilwicki, his daughter Berry, and her own niece Princess Ruth, all under an elaborate guise involving passing Berry for Ruth and so on. On the Havenite side, the equally frustrated President Pritchard sends the deadly but sexually repressed Victor Cachat along with his boss's stunningly beautiful wife who poses as his lover. The first group is here to prevent the second from luring Erewhon out of the alliance.

But nobody's reckoned with the presence of a bunch of other more or less disreputable characters. There's the Solarian League, the galactic behemoth of an empire with politics so rotten and unpredictable that one can never be sure which way its representatives will go. There are the ever-calculating rulers of Erewhon who present such a striking contrast to Grayson. Then there are the lurking crazy Masadans, who can always be counted on to screw up even the best laid plans. Then there's the previously barely mentioned Manpower, the company that dominates the planet Mesa, the center for production of genetically-engineered slaves. We get intriguing glimpses of the subculture of the despised slave soldiers (Mamelukes, anyone?), as well as an introduction to someone I hope to see more of: Thandi Palane, another "mutant" (naturally, she absolutely gorgeous and deadly) who gets to rethink her priorities after she inevitably falls in love with the stolid Victor.

The novel is rich on adventure which is often breath-taking despite the convoluted politics and the occasionally laughable chance coincidence that conveniently advances the plot. Weber and Flint here seem to reach the apogee of Weber's basic insight about his Honorverse: the seemingly evil people may be redeemable but there's true evil that must be eradicated. That is, Haven, for all its awful characteristics, really is just an experiment gone bad (in the way that the USSR or Mao's China were). It has gone spectacularly bad, true. At the cost of thousands upon thousands of lives, true. And it had to be redirected, as it were, by force, true. But in the final analysis, almost all of the people involved there (except StateSec, of course) were fundamentally decent human beings. Some made mistakes, others were cowed into submission, and others were true believers. Not so with Manpower. Here's an organization run by bastards who have to be eliminated. No question about it. There will be no discussion, no negotiation, no compromise. In this both Manticore and Haven agree. And as a philosophy, it ain't bad either.

Weber and Flint offer some rather interesting observations about slave rebellions and why they succeed (actually, they never do). I cannot recall of a single slave revolt that managed to overthrow the rulers permanently: there was no hope for Spartacus from the beginning and the helots never did gain their freedom until Sparta's defeat at the hands of Thebes essentially gave it to them on a platter. The authors essentially offer a psychological explanation of why recently freed slaves will be unable to form a representative republican society (it has to do with their brutalization and lack of socialization in alternative dispute resolution strategies). Unfortunately, their solution involves a variant of the white man's burden in the sense that the better-educated and more knowledgeable elite will be the vanguard of freedom. History tells me it is precisely this externally-guided society-building that must inevitably fail. I say, let the former slaves sort it out. There may be violence, sure. But it beats the hell out of "I know what's best for you all" benevolent tyrannies.

In that sense, the ludicrous ending with Berry getting installed as the Queen of the new Torch nation of ex-slaves is more than just unbelievable dramatically, it is stupid as a resolution to an interesting problem that may not have neat solutions at all. In fact, this is one thing that really bothers me with some of the recent sci-fi I have been reading: the authors identify a fundamental conflict and then bow out with a simplistic formula that "solves" it. (See, for example, Card's cop out in Xenocide.) Is this driven by a Hollywood-style mentality that every story has to have a neat ending? Or by the strong aversion, which I often see in my undergraduate students, to situations which may not have any good solutions? I think it's the latter: the one notion I have had a terribly difficult time getting through in my class is that sometimes even the best option is really bad, its only distinguishing characteristic is that it is not as bad as the worst. So would it have been so terrible to let the ex-slaves build their new lives by themselves come what may? What if their disagreements degenerated into civil war? Such is life...

May 24, 2006