The Great Honor Harrington Read Along is a read along led by me with critical analysis and SPOILER FILLED looks at the Honor Harrington series and related works by David Weber and collaborators. I’ve read the whole main series and the overwhelming majority of the offshoots, but some of these will still be first time reads. However, spoilers will be abundant throughout these posts, including for much later books in the series.
Honor Among Enemies by David Weber
Here it is, Honor back in action after being “exiled” due to her legal killing of Young. The Manticoran Navy needs her too badly to allow her to languish in another fleet. She’s recalled and set about piloting a Q-ship, a modified merchant designed to ambush pirates. Honor Among Enemies places her outside the reach of Manticore or Grayson, off in the fairly lax Silesian Confederacy, surrounded by–you guessed it–enemies.
Of course, those enemies aren’t all just enemies in the sense of military enemies. Hauptman shows up as well, though he only really makes an appearance to Honor late in the book. Early on, however, he supports using her as a captain in the region, as do others, hoping that maybe her “recklessness” will finally do her in, much to their supposed benefit.
The book has quite a bit going on, from introducing an entire new region of space to the readers to major pirate raiding to shipboard violence to Havenite expansion to new potential allies to politicking. Watching all these balls in the air, its somewhat surprising to see them all come to fairly satisfying conclusions by the end of the novel. Not only is Silesia introduced here, but we also get a small sense of the Andermani Empire as well.
Does anyone know the story of the flipbook in the corner of the pages? The edition I has shows a ship slowly exploding as you flip through the pages. I’m wondering how it ended up as an idea for the book.
Anyway, the high points here are fairly similar to other books in the series so far, just rearranged. You’ve got some solid space combat (it’s immensely satisfying when the Q-ship manages to ambush some pirates), some “ice” running through Honor as she deals with infighting with the crew, ramping up of hostilities, etc. One of the more satisfying moments in the series is when Aubrey Wanderman puts the smack down on his bully and then the tap on the wrist Honor gives him after the fact. This is another great book, though I think it’s fair to say it doesn’t quite reach the greatness of some of the previous entries. A lot of this novel is setup for broader conflict. Indeed, many, many side characters take the spotlight from Honor throughout this book.
Treecats are still being built up as an idea–Samantha is introduced as a mate for Nimitz. Indeed, Treecats seem to be an idea that Weber percolated for a while early in the series before really making them as fascinating as they become later. Sure, there are isolated scenes of Nimitz kicking butt and Honor reflecting on how smart they really are, but so far they’re kind of just quirky side characters more than anything else. Get ready, because that’s going to change in the next couple books.
Honor Among Enemies is another great entry in this series. It gives more growth to secondary characters, shows Honor challenged in some new ways, and sets up future conflicts.
Links
The Great Honor Harrington Read Along– Follow along as I read through and review all the books and offshoots in this series!
Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!
SDG.
Eclectic Theist 