On Basilisk Station

Honor Harrington, #1

by David Weber

Paperback, 422 pages

English language

Published Aug. 26, 2000 by Earthlight.

ISBN:: 978-0-7434-0822-6

View on OpenLibrary

(8 reviews)

Honor in Trouble:

Having made him look like a 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.

9 editions

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

The beginning of the Honorverse

5 stars

Hands down the best military SciFi I've ever read. This book was the first entry into what has become David Weber's Honorverse. It now encompasses dozens of novels, following both the titular Honor Harrington, a Commander in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The next series follows her through multiple wars to the rank of Fleet Admiral. And not a single one of them is a dud.

The first few books are a bit "Hero Captain/Hero Ship", but not too much, and it gets better later on. Weber later also veers into intergalactic politics, but I wouldn't worry too much: I think what he does show of politics will be palatable to anyone outside the outer extremes of our current political landscape.

The one slight downside of the series as a whole: Towards the end, Weber slowly reveals a massive, Galaxy-spanning conspiracy. And I just hate conspiracies in fiction, but especially ones …

The one slight downside of the series as a whole: Towards the end, Weber slowly reveals a massive, Galaxy-spanning conspiracy. And I just hate conspiracies in fiction, but especially ones so mind-bogglingly large as the one Weber has constructed. It's not the kind of "nothing was actually as it seemed" stuff, but it was large enough to make it utterly unbelievable to me. But even the books which contain it still are good enough otherwise for me to slog through.

Also, extra fun is to be had if you're even slightly versed in the Napoleonic Wars.

Fulminata reviewed Field of Dishonor by David Weber (Honor Harrington, #4)

Review of 'Field of Dishonor' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Even more politics, even less space battle.

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

Review of 'On Basilisk Station' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I enjoyed this when I read it. The world building was interesting, and the in-depth construction of the space battles and technology was entertaining. In retrospect, the characters were a bit two dimensional, and while it's good that the protagonist is a woman, it's a bit too obvious at times that she's being written by a man. Not in a gross way, just in an occasionally unfortunate way. As pointed out by other reviewers, the fact that she is a beautiful woman who doesn't realize her own beauty is problematic, and the fact that we're constantly being told about her beauty by other characters is very male gazey.

Still, a much better attempt to do "Hornblower in space" than some other attempts done around the same time cough Seafort Saga cough.