The Shadow of Saganami
(Honorverse #2)

David Weber

Riverdale: Baen Books, 2004. ISBN: 1-4165-0929-1. Pp. 917

Review © 2007 Branislav L. Slantchev

After the promising first spin-off of the great Honor Harrington series, this one looked a bit intimidating at its 900+ pages of hefty paperback. Still, the author being Weber, I gave it a shot. Boy, am I glad I did. While this cannot top the best of the earlier Honor novels, it's right up there with the extremely good. Chronologically, this novel spans the end of War of Honor and almost all of At All Costs, and the events that are described here in gory detail are referenced repeatedly in the latter, with a couple of episodes actually told from different perspectives in both.

Recall that while the incompetent High Ridge government of Manticore was sliding inexorably toward a renewed war with the reinvigorated Republic of Haven under President Pritchard, the Manties discovered the seventh terminus of their wormhole junction. The terminus turned out to be in the boondocks: the Talbott Cluster, a poor and backward collection of systems perilously close to the Solarian League. Of course, the income from transshipments through the junction promises great prosperity if these people can only get their act together and if they can avoid getting "liberated" by the Office of Frontier Security, the colonial arms of the Solarian League. Quite sensible, the Talbott Cluster systems vote to request annexation by Manticore in the hopes that this will keep them out of the clutches of OFS and will bring instant prosperity at Manticoran standards. Naturally, not everyone is enthralled with this idea: nearby rogue OFS satraps have their own designs on the cluster, the genetic slave producing Mesa wants to keep the Manties as far away as possible, the Monican president dreams of ruling the cluster by himself, and local politicians stall the Constitution to extract a better deal from Manticore while assorted resistance movements ranging from the gentlemanly to the terrorist struggle toward high-sounding goals like liberty and equality with increasing violence. All of this threatens to derail the annexation, either because the Manties will simply decline to accept such troublesome systems or because the disorder will give OFS an excuse to come in anyway. To Mesa colludes with OFS elements to provide backing to the Monicans and the terrorists on a scale that may enable the former to challenge the Manties (at least if they catch them by surprise) and the latter to destabilize the annexationist governments.

Into this combustible mix, Manticore sends the Hexapuma under Aviars Terekhov. Terekhov, an excellent captain and overall great guy, has his own demons to battle, having lost almost his entire command to the Peeps while defending a merchant convoy. He finds himself with a sparse force but has to battle pirates (former StateSec peeps who have now turned to interstellar piracy), fight terrorists like Nordbrandt (on Kornati), grapple with freedom fighters like Westman (on Montana), shoot it out with the upgraded Navy of Monica, all the while dealing with the delicate diplomatic missions on which Baroness Medusa sends him. Some of these are complicated by the presence of one Van Dort, the founder of the Rembrandt Trade Union, the organization that does not exactly make him a favorite in the eyes of the other Talbott Cluster systems. Adding to the political intrigue are the always interesting middie cruise experiences for several young and promising junior officers in Her Majesty's Navy: Pavletic, D'Arezzo, and Helen Zilwicki (Anton's daughter), not to mention Abigail Hearns, the GSN lieutenant, and daughter of Steadholder Owens of Grayson.

The novel is very heavy on the political side and at first it can be quite confusing. The sheer proliferation of characters makes it damn near impossible to sort them out, and the unnerving insistence of referring to locations either by the system name (e.g., Split) or by the planet's name (e.g., Kornati) does not help at all. For some unfathomable reason, Weber always insists on naming even the most minor characters, even when they will die a few pages down the road. I guess that's one way of "personalizing" their deaths. At least he's had the decency not to use the same names (which does make it all sound a bit incredible: even in small groups the likelihood of two people having the same first name is well above zero). The political wrangling on Kornati are given center stage and one should not be surprised when terrorists start blowing up things in a highly visible dramatic fashion (this book came out 3 years after 9/11). Weber gets a chance to pontificate on "root causes" of grievances (e.g., inequality which must be addressed by any reasonably fair political system) and the moral cowardice of murdering innocent civilians (so the terrorists, however excusable their goals, have to be stopped because of their methods). All of this makes nice copy but is paper-thin on substance, making the problem appear as simple as satisfying the basic demands of the terrorists while appearing not to be caving in to their tactics. I think even Weber must have realized it is not that simple when Nordbrandt just drops off the radar and the novel closes with her still on the loose and able to inflict more harm.

Weber contrasts this bloodthirsty terrorist with the gentleman Westman who only destroys property and always gives advance warning to the government so it can evacuate the civilians. This is how we would all like our terrorists: mostly harmless. However, it does betray a sort of wishful thinking that is never explored in any depths. Westman himself recognized that he would eventually have to start hurting people and when this happens, he will become a pariah just like Nordbrandt. Of course, in the novel he will have a miraculous opening of the eyes so Weber never really explores the consequences of taking up arms against what most perceive to be the legitimate government. In the end, the terrorist story, while pervasive, is not at all persuasive. Weber also prefers to have his heroes and his villains so starkly outlined than no one could possible confuse them. I tend to like situations that are not as clear cut. For example, instead of making Nordbrandt a raving psychotic who spouts propaganda and obviously likes killing people, he could have made her a tormented leader who abhors violence but who has no other chance of affecting the government's policies; policies that the ordinary people are too disenfranchised to affect. Despite all the lofty talk of moral cowardice, the truth is that people resort to terrorism when they simply have no chance against regular government forces. I don't know why people insist that it is cowardly to refuse to face a tank with a Molotov cocktail. I could just as easily claim that it is cowardly to cower in a tank when your opponent has a puny bottle with flammable liquid. In other words, the militarily weak will resort to methods that will not get them wiped out by their enemies. There's nothing cowardly in that, it's just prudence. Weber could have made this a story in which we would not be quite so sure who to root for. As it is, I wanted Nordbrandt killed almost as much as I want a sequel to this novel.

Although the bulk of the book comprises the political shenanigans of a bunch of aristocratic politicos, there are several space battles. As usual, this is where Weber's skill is at its highest: I don't think there are many who can come close to him when it comes to describing space engagements, especially if there is a lone captain in the midst of it all. If there's one aspect of the earlier Honor novels that I miss most, it is this sort of perspective. As Honor got promoted, she got to command ever increasing formations, and the narrative necessarily shifted from a gritty down-in-the-trenches view to a General-Staff-looking-at-a-map version that simply does not resonate that well with me. Well, not so here. Terekhov spends most of the time commanding HMS Hexapuma, and only in the end does he get a squadron of mostly obsolete vessels to attack the Monicans. It is true that his ship is better than almost anything in this corner of the universe, but this does not mean he is not for some rough times (like when he engages the slaver ship whose panicked officers blow up a pinnace with at least one very sympathetic character on board). And nothing beats fighting against the odds: the final engagement here will test Terekhov's mettle to the limit.

Despite its length (and it could have been profitably pared down to about 60% without losing much of the content), The Shadow of Saganami is among the best Honorverse novels to date. It certainly beats the ponderous and often boring War of Honor and it probably even better than the much improved At All Costs. In complexity of narrative, it is close to Crown of Slaves and if the ending is not nearly as dramatic as founding a kingdom populated exclusively by ex-slaves, the goings on will still keep one focused on the narrative. An ultimately satisfying read, this is a welcome expansion of the Honorverse in a direction in which I hope sequels will follow.

March 16, 2007