Has anyone read the series?

Has anyone read the Honor Harrington series and it's anthologies yet? If not then you really need to start reading them. Personally I think that the books are great (with the one exception of book 11. Dry, really dry), David Weber has done an outstanding job with this story. It's really believable.

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This long-running (seventeen volumes and counting) military sf series, Honor Harrington, by David Weber chronicles the adventures of Honor Harrington, an officer in the Royal Manticoran Space Navy, in a far-future interstellar civilization that mostly parallels the society and politics of England and France during the early nineteenth century. The Star Kingdom of Manticore, a parliamentary monarchy, is locked in ongoing hostilities with the People's Republic of Haven, a socialist dictatorship. The starships in Weber's "Honorverse" travel via gravitic impellers—essentially force field generators that warp space in a wedge above and below a ship and drive it at faster-than-light speeds. A side-effect of this form of FTL drive is that the impeller wedges create impenetrable barriers everywhere but two narrow bands running along either side of the ship. This forces warships to cluster their missile batteries and energy weapons in broadside configurations that lead to high-tech analogs of the Age of Sail battles fought by Lord Nelson and C. S. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower.

At the beginning of the series (On Basilisk Station, first published in 1993), the two governments are locked in a cold war punctuated by fierce skirmishes between small naval forces. Harrington, first introduced as a young, earnest commander in her second posting commanding a major warship, earns the ire of her superiors with a feat of tactical brilliance in a training simulation, and for her sins she and her ship are assigned a backwater posting far from any expected action. As fate would have it, this puts her directly in the path of a deadly Havenite warship on a secret mission, which she manages to destroy at great cost to her ship and crew.

From this auspicious beginning, the series follows Harrington on her meteoric rise to fame and fortune as war breaks out with the People’s Republic, and Honor is called upon time and again to save Manticore from increasingly epic threats. Over the course of the series Harrington’s reputation (and the accolades heaped upon her) grow accordingly; by book eleven she is an Admiral in two different navies, a confidante of the Queen, a national hero and high-ranking noble on two different worlds and fabulously wealthy in the bargain. Critics point to succeeding volumes in the series creaking under the weight of unnecessary exposition and excessive detail about every technical and political facet of the story, but the popularity of the series remains undiminished.

According to Baen's website, who publishes the Harrington series, there are seventeen novels in the Honorverse. Eleven novels cover Harrington herself with six providing stories set in the same time line, but featuring other characters.


Published Novels

The seventeen novels in order of publication are:

On Basilisk Station by David Weber
The Honor of the Queen by David Weber
The Short Victorious War by David Weber
Field of Dishonor by David Weber
Flag in Exile by David Weber
Honor Among Enemies by David Weber
In Enemy Hands by David Weber
Echoes of Honor by David Weber
Ashes of Victory by David Weber
War of Honor by David Weber
More Than Honor by David Weber, David Drake and S. M. Stirling
Worlds of Honor by David Weber
Changer of Worlds by David Weber
The Service of the Sword by David Weber
Crown of Slaves by David Weber and Eric Flint
The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber
At All Costs by David Weber

Of those novels, More Than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, and The Service of the Sword are all part of a series called Worlds of Honor. Techically, Worlds of Honor appears to be the second in that series.

Crown of Slaves features a set of characters rarely mentioned in the stories about Honor herself and their story is continued in The Shadow of Saganami which nominally is supposed to be about midshipmen on their first tour of duty on a Royal Manticoran Navy vessel.


References

* Baen's List of Series

I'm on book 2, I'm new to the series. Really enjoying it so far. Anyone have any maps, charts, pictures of space craft, etc. that you'd like to share?

The maps are far and very few in between. I have just about all the artwork there is that is available that is.

just a quick image for ya,

akw4572 wrote:

I'm on book 2, I'm new to the series. Really enjoying it so far. Anyone have any maps, charts, pictures of space craft, etc. that you'd like to share?

This Map is just about all that there is when it comes to maps of Honorverse. There are I think two other maps out there.

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Cool, thanks for the images. Is the series still ongoing, or was it officially "wrapped up".

It's still ongoing. David Weber is in the process of writing another book in the Anthology Series and another in the Saganami Series. He is also contemplating another book to follow-up on "At All Costs.

So, what did you think of On Basilisk Station?

I thought it was brilliant. Honor is just one of those characters that you can easily see I think or... relate to. As you read this book, you'll almost see why.

Vik wrote:

It's still ongoing. David Weber is in the process of writing another book in the Anthology Series and another in the Saganami Series. He is also contemplating another book to follow-up on "At All Costs.

So, what did you think of On Basilisk Station?

I thought it was brilliant. Honor is just one of those characters that you can easily see I think or... relate to. As you read this book, you'll almost see why.

I had read it a couple of years ago, and thought it was good, and I had started the second book, and I can't remember what happened as to why I stopped. I thought Basilisk was really good. Some of the tech stuff got to me, as there is little explanation on "T" years, and some of the stuff, and the explanation of a Warshawski sail seemed a bit over my head. I'd love to know some of the background as to why people left earth, etc. I thought the second book started a bit slow, but I am just past the part where the Admiral was killed, and Honor slapped the diplomat after he said they should abandon the planet, and it's gotten really good.

Ahh, now that part of the slapping really sets up the story for the rest of the books. Yeah, I do have to admit that Weber really went waaay out there with his tech stuff. AI really got out a calculator myself to double check what he was writing about and well.. he did his homework.

As for the "T"-years... I just skipped the T part and read it as regular years. It tended to make much more sense to me rather than trying to figure out the variable year lengths for each of the main planets like Sphinx with a five year long - year.

I've just began to re-read the series once again myself. The one thing that continues to draw my attention to this series is how subtly Honor changes and yet how she does not change at all. Would she have thought to do what she's done in book two during her tenure as Captain of the HMS Fearless?

I don't think so. If I were her, I think I would have slapped McAlister.

You might like this little Flash video of Honor Harrington. It's very short and to the point hehe!

Did you mean Alistair? Personally I didn't quite understand how David Weber thought to make him feel bad by not having her do anything at all. Actually I thought that he made her look bad by not offering Andy Venizelos any help in discovering how to fix his mistake when placing the surveillance pods in Basilisk.