Echoes of Honor
(Honor Harrington #8)

David Weber

Riverdale: Baen Books, 1998. ISBN: 0-671-57833-2. Pp. 718

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

At the end of the previous installment, Honor Harrington and a handful of her officers managed to escape the clutches of Cordelia Ransom and land unnoticed (well, almost unnoticed) on the planet Hades, the super-secret maximum security prison planet ran by the Havenite State Security. In the process, she lost an eye and a hand in a not-too-subtle tribute to Horatio Nelson. Naturally, this novel would be dedicated mostly to her inevitable escape from the planet that is impossible to escape from and is such a closely guarded secret that very few even know its location.

Honor and her bunch of impossibly competent officers get in touch with other prisoners and stage a revolt that enables them to take over the planet and its space-based defenses. Then they lie in wait and ambush every Havenite vessel that strays into their space. Despite some minor infighting, Honor maintains a steady grip on the situation and eventually executes an absolutely brilliant maneuver that puts enough ships under her command to transport over half a million convicts to Manticoran safety.

While all this rousing adventure is taking place remote from the main war, things are afoot in the People's Republic. The Committee of Public Safety has empowered the brilliant McQueen to conduct the military operations and her rationalizations quickly yield fruit when she unleashes several excellent commanders on the Manties who have found themselves stretched a bit too thin after all their expensive conquests. The likes of Tourville and Giscard manage to re-conquer a few systems and even hit the Manties at places regarded entirely too safe, like Basilisk. With the tempo of the war accelerating, the initiative yanked from under their noses, and the attrition rate starting to favor the Peeps, the Kingdom is indeed in dire straits.

In terms of the Peeps, it was about time they got a handle on the strategic situation. I just cannot see how it would be possible for a Navy that has steadily expanded and conquered countless other star nations to suffer so many defeats without eventually regaining their strength by dipping into their seemingly inexhaustible reserves. The obvious parallel here would be the Soviet Union and the initial awful battering it took from the Germans in 1941-42 but then size and potential reasserted themselves just as inevitably as they did in 1812. Despite the incompetent commanders whose inept planning had virtually ensured the annihilation of over half of the army in the opening phases of the war, the regime managed to scrape by just enough to halt the Germans and then steadily push them back. I doubt that the PNS would get to conquering Manticore, but it was high time its resources came into play.

Unfortunately, the plot in this novel is not enough to sustain the 700+ pages of reading. The infodumping is merciless, the characterization is even more tiresome than ever, and only the few explosive action sequences really help with the narrative. And while I am all for reading the superbly ironic funeral ceremonies (we, the readers, know Honor is alive albeit not too well), it's just not a whole lot that goes on aside from the occasional battle in which the RMN commanders have gotten so lazy and unprepared that one wonders how they did not flunk out of Saganami.

Here's probably as good a place as any to rail a bit about all those extremely competent people that seem to inhabit Weber's universe. There isn't a single slacker among the characters that matter. Not one who cannot solve some impossibly complex problem. I won't dwell on Harkness and his ability to hack into any computer system unobtrusively. Or on all those things that could go horribly wrong but never quite do. But it all reminds me all too unpleasantly at that Crusher character on Star Trek: TNG, and I am sure prolong probably makes all the Weber ones look uncomfortably young as well. Still, I find that prolong is among Weber's more successful inventions, and one that any director who ends up adapting the books to film would relish: how else can you have extremely young (read: attractive) people who are also superbly competent? With prolog you can have someone who looks barely twenty but who has had forty years hands-on experience. So maybe it won't be as grating as dealing with some toddler geniuses.

Now that Honor is back, it's time for the Manties to stop licking their wounds and take back the initiative with all that wonderful new technology on the horizon.

March 16, 2006