On Basilisk Station

by David Weber

mass market paperback, 458 pages

English language

Published Aug. 11, 1993 by Baen, Distributed by Simon & Schuster.

ISBN:: 978-1-4165-0937-0
OCLC Number:: 62338798

(42 reviews)

This is the first novel in the Honor Harrington series. Honor Harrington is in trouble: having made a Senior Admiral look the fool, she's been exiled to Basilisk Station in disgrace and set up for ruin by a superior who hates her. Her demoralized crew blames her for their ship's humiliating posting to an out of the way picket station. The aborigines of the system's only habitable planet are smoking homicide-inducing hallucinogens. Parliament isn't sure it wants to keep the place; the major local industry is smuggling, the merchant cartels want her head; the star conquering, so-called Republic of Haven is Up to Something; and Honor Harrington has a single, over age light cruiser with an armament that doesn't work to police the entire star system. But the people out to get her have made one mistake, they've made her mad. This special limited edition includes an excerpt from the …

1 edition

Angrboda reviewed On Basilisk Station by David Weber (Honor Harrington, #1)

Review of 'On Basilisk Station' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

Eh, I tried. It failed to catch me, and it's just not for me. As far as I got, it was 10% story, 90% history/world building/science/anthropology lesson which I just feel like could have been delivered in a more story-integrated way. As it is, it's incredibly dense and incredibly dull. And then suddenly, combat! Wait, what? I have no idea where that came from and it took me a long time to work out that it was some kind of excercise or something.

I may come back to it and give it another try at a later date, because I thought it really did sound interesting and I'm not entirely ready to accept that it isn't. But for now, this is me giving up.

Geekess reviewed On Basilisk Station by David Weber (Honor Harrington, #1)

Review of 'On Basilisk Station' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I didn't really expect to like it. The reviews weren't that good, and the empathic cat put me off (at first, even though I'm an avid catlady).
But despite the heavy Mary Sue-ness of Honor Harrington and the uneven writing (most of the story is gentle YA scifi, but the battles are unexpectedly gritty and clearly written for their shock-value), I liked it.
I would actually rate it 2.5 stars, between "It was OK" and "I liked it". Why then not round it up to 3 stars? The infodumps. Those terrible terrible amateuristic infodumps. Writers should really know better. The writing is fairly OK within the story, but the flow of that story is broken up by heaps of dry infodumps that bring down the pacing to a slough.
With a better (and more stern) editor, this could have been a terrific fast paced jewel, but instead, they decided that massive infodumps were OK.
And a second thing that detracted from the rating: Viewpoint. The story switches from viewpoint to viewpoint. That's OK. But what's not OK is doing that from sentence to sentence, and without clear indications in whose head we are at that moment. That, as well, slows down the pace in action scenes. I understand it is meant as a device to engage the reader more with all parties involved, and evoke more empathy, but the way it is done, is way to crude and it just doesn't work.

But overall, this story has a lot of potential. I will continue with the rest of the series.