When people start naming names in the genre of military science fiction, they naturally name Starship Troopers author Robert A. Heinlein, Aliens writer / director James Cameron, Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the The Vorkosigan Saga series.
But they also often mention Honor Harrington, the central character in David Weber’s Honorverse series, which, over the course of 30+ years, has encompassed numerous novels, novellas, and short stories.
The latest of which (sort of) is 1993’s Honor Of The Queen, the second Honorverse novel, which has just been rereleased as a trade paperback as part of Baen Book’s ongoing reissue series.
In the following email interview, Weber looks back on this early adventure for Honor.
For people who haven’t read any of the Honorverse novels, who is Honor Harrington, what does she do, and when and where does she live?
Honor Harrington is an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy serving the Star Kingdom of Manticore roughly 2,000 years from now.
And then for people who’ve read the first book, 1993’s On Basilisk Station, what happens to Honor in Honor Of The Queen, and when does this second book take place in relation to Station?
Honor Of The Queen takes place approximately two years in-universe after On Basilisk Station.
Honor, promoted to Captain at the end of On Basilisk Station, is assigned as the commander of the military escort for a diplomatic mission to the planet Grayson in the Yeltsin System. The diplomatic mission, headed by Admiral Raoul Courvoisier (Honor’s beloved mentor) travels in company with a convoy headed for other Manticoran allies in the region. Grayson’s importance is its strategic location between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and its probable (as in inevitable) enemy the People’s Republic of Haven.
The difficulty which confronts Honor when she gets there — in addition to the fact that the People’s Republic is doing its best to prevent Courvoisier’s mission from succeeding — is that the women of Grayson live very restricted lives, and the mere thought of a female naval officer is anathema to their thinking. This creates quite a few problems, as I’m sure one can imagine.
Honor visiting a planet where women live restricted lives causes issues for both the men of Grayson and for Honor, who grew up in a society where gender discrimination is a thing of the past. Did you set out to write something a bit feminist and Honor Of The Queen is what you came up with, or did you come up with the plot of Queen and then realize it would work even better with some feminism?
I’ve never set out to write a feminist novel. I happen to like women and I happen to like strong people, which means that I happen to like strong women, of whom, I am happy to say, there have been quite a few in my life.
That said, I have a particular beef with avowedly feminist science fiction in which women living two hundred and fifty or five hundred or a thousand years from today find themselves facing exactly the same issues as women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I happen to think that women are stronger than that, and men are smarter than that, which is why — as I have said at many science fiction conventions — I feel confident questions of gender equality will have all of the burning immediacy for the people of Honor’s time that Pharaoh’s policy towards the Hittites has for us. It will be a done deal.
And that, I think, is the strongest “feminist” statement that anyone can possibly make — the assumption of gender equality is so deeply ingrained into Honor’s birth society that no one would even think of questioning it. So, in that sense, I suppose the entire series is “feminist,” but I don’t really think of the books that way.
Despite what I just said, Honor Of The Queen probably does come closest to being a “feminist” novel, but not in the sense a lot of people would think of. The “feminism” in the book is more concerned with a society — which, for reasons that make perfectly good sense within the constraints of its historical roots and planetary environment, has severely restricted the lives of its women — is forced to confront the way in which it has constrained them and figure out how to deal with it.
The real basis of Grayson “chauvinism” is that a society on a planet which is an extraordinarily hostile environment and in which male births outnumber female births three-to-one, the early colony simply could not risk its women. And that evolved into a protectiveness which locked those women into a restricted role that denied them full participation in their own planetary society.
What Honor does is force the men (and the Church) of Grayson to recognize that Grayson’s survival no longer depends on the fanatic “protection” of its women…and that there is no longer any justification for denying them full participation in their society.
Given all of that, where did you get the idea for the plot of Honor Of The Queen?
I couldn’t tell you precisely where the idea for the plot came from; it was just there, and the two books were written back to back. In fact, I went directly — as in the very next week — into writing Honor Of The Queen after I finished On Basilisk Station.
I can tell you that I never thought “hey, injecting some overt feminism into this book will make it even better,” though. I was looking for a planetary culture / society that was far off the mainstream galactic template and one which would present special challenges to Honor, and the ingrained patriarchy of Grayson simply came up as one of those challenges.
Of course, once it had reared its head, I had to deal with it as fairly and openly as possible.
The Honorverse novels are all military sci-fi stories. But are there any other genres at work in Honor Of The Queen?
I don’t know that I would say there were other genres at work in Honor Of The Queen, but I think all of the books in the series are, in a way, historical fiction as much as they are military fiction. I draw heavily on my knowledge and love of history when I’m building the backgrounds and the conflicts for the books, and in a sense I’m writing the history of a war that hasn’t happened, if you see what I mean.
As we’ve been discussing, Honor Of The Queen is the second Honorverse novel after On Basilisk Station. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that you think had an influence on Queen but not on Station?
People ask me about writers or stories that have influenced my writing or influenced specific stories that I’ve written, and my answer is virtually always the same: I can’t tell you who they may have been. Any writer, including your humble servant, is the product of everything he’s ever read, and he’s learned things — whether it’s things that work or things to avoid like the plague — from virtually all of them.
But while I could rattle off a very lengthy list of the writers who I’ve read, from Edward E. Smith to Georgette Heyer to Robert Heinlein to Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, I absolutely cannot nail any of them down as specific influences upon me.
What about non-literary influences; do you think Honor Of The Queen was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
Nope. History, yes; movies, TV shows, or games, no.
In the 31 years since Honor Of The Queen came out, you’ve written 13 more Honorverse novels, as well as seven novellas, four novels each in two different subseries [Crown Of Slaves and Saganami], four other novels for young adults, another four novels co-written with Timothy Zahn, and a bunch of short stories. How, if at all, do you think Honor Of The Queen influenced the Honorverse books that followed in ways that On Basilisk Station did not?
I’m not sure what you’re asking for here. The books are all part of a larger story, and they build on one another in the chain of events and causality that drive that story. I don’t think there’s any way in which any of them exerted a “special” influence on the others. All of them — collectively — influenced, shaped, and built the stories that came after. I had a “spinal cord” for the entire Honorverse, a conflict map, if you will, that began with On Basilisk Station and progressed through all of the later events that you see in the later books, but the way in which I moved along that spinal cord evolved naturally from the books I’d already written.
If there was a single story that had a major — and unexpected — impact on the shape of the series, it was Eric Flint’s “From the Highlands,” the short story [from the anthology Changer Of Worlds] which introduced Victor Cachat. Eric had asked me for something that a Manticoran and a Havenite secret agent could cooperate against, so I sicced him on Manpower and genetic slavery, which inadvertently brought the entire Alignment storyline forward by about twenty-five or thirty years. Which meant that my original game plan to have Honor die heroically in battle and then have her children deal with the Alignment wouldn’t work. There wouldn’t be enough time. So Honor didn’t die in At All Costs [the eleventh Honorverse novel]. I sort of suspect that most people (including me) are very happy that she didn’t.
Now, the reason we’re doing this interview about Honor Of The Queen is because your publisher, Baen Books, have been reissuing the mainline Honorverse novels as trade paperbacks. Is there anything different about the new version?
I haven’t done any significant reworking yet. I did an afterward to On Basilisk Station, but I haven’t done anything for Honor Of The Queen. I didn’t make any editorial changes in either of them, although there is a book later in the series that I may send back into the shop for editing. There were schedule problems at the time it was written — and, no, I’m not going to tell you which book it is — which precluded my going back and giving it the full final edit that I otherwise would have. Which means there are probably somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand words in the book that don’t need to be there. If my schedule permits, and I’m not sure it will, I may see about tidying some of that up.
Along with Honor Of The Queen, you have two other books that just came out: Rebel, which is the second book in the Ascent To Empire series you’re co-writing with Richard Fox; and the paperback version of 2021’s Governor, which is the first book in that series. We did a separate interview about those books, but real quick, what is Governor about, and when and where does it take place, and then what is Rebel about, and when does it take place in relation to Governor?
Governor and Rebel are the first two books in the Ascent To Empire series, which is basically the story of how Admiral Terrence Murphy becomes Emperor Terrence I and creates the Terran Empire that Alicia DeVries serves as a drop commando in [Weber’s 2006 novel] In Fury Born. They are set in the twenty-seventh century, about three or four hundred years earlier than Alicia’s time.
In Governor, Murphy is named governor of the New Dublin System, a Fringe system of the Terran Federation, which has been fighting a war for over fifty years against the Tè Lā Lián Méng [Terran League]. In the process, the Five Hundred — the clique of oligarchs who truly control the Federation — have become incredibly wealthy and incredibly corrupt. When Murphy, as a man of honor, does his duty to defend New Dublin, rather than abandoning it as he was ordered to do, it ignites the long smoldering hatred between the brutally exploited Fringers and the corrupt Heart Worlds. Murphy wants only to reform the Federation, but eventually he finds that it is too corrupt to be reformed and must be replaced. And, just by the way, that unless he can replace it, it will most definitely kill him and those he holds most dear.
Like Honor Of The Queen and the other Honorverse novels, Governor and Rebel are military sci-fi space opera stories. How do you think Governor and Rebel are different from Honor’s stories?
They’re telling very different stories. Honor is a patriot, defending a system in which she deeply believes against external threats. She has bitter enemies within her own society, most of whom are corrupt aristocrats and / or politicians in an otherwise very healthy, representative society, but there’s never any question in her mind that the Star Kingdom she serves deserves her devotion and sacrifice.
Murphy believes passionately in what the Federation used to be, but he recognizes that it no longer is. He is fighting against external foes — both the Terran League and the Rishathan Sphere [the alien star nation which has actually manipulated the two human polities in the fighting one another] — but his most deadly opponents are in the Five Hundred. Ultimately, before he can defend the Federation against any external threats, he has to find a way to remove its internal gangrene, and in the end he is — very reluctantly — forced to the conclusion that he cannot accomplish that through simple reform of a system which has been so poisoned and distorted.
Going back to Honor Of The Queen, earlier you said it had not been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But do you think Queen — and, by extension, the Honorverse series — could work as a bunch of movies, a TV show, or game?
As I believe I’ve said before, I think the Honorverse would work best as a TV show, with an ensemble cast that can be rotated in and out, just as the books rotate characters in and out of Honor’s life. I think that the storyline is complex enough that it would be very difficult to do justice to it in a movie format. While I would never compare myself to J.R.R. Tolkien, consider how difficult Peter Jackson found it to tell the story of the War of the Rings in cinema. He did a magnificent job, and while every single Tolkien fan I know is irked over something that he left out (in my own case, the courtship of Eowyn and Faramir and the cleansing of the Shire) or a character that got shortchanged (in my own case, Faramir’s morally courageous decision to send Frodo on his way without returning him to Minas Tirith), at the end of the day almost all of us said “But, damn, he did a great job!”
The thing is, though, that the War of the Rings was a trilogy, and trying to do the twenty-nine novels that tell the story of the Honorverse would force screenwriters to deal with an awful lot more events and characters. I don’t think there’s any way that they could do justice — especially to the characters — in a movie format, whereas TV (where production values are enormously higher than they were when I was younger, so the budget for the special-effects would be there) has the scope, space, and time to let that be done.
And if someone wanted to make that show, who would you want them to cast as Honor and the other main characters?
I don’t watch enough movies to have a current actress in mind, to be honest, though, if she were available, I think Gal Gadot [Wonder Woman] would be one of the better choices, if she were available. She’s not Eurasian, but finding a 6′ 2″ Asian or Eurasian actress with both the physicality and the acting chops to carry off Honor’s personality would be a nontrivial challenge.
Outside her, and assuming that I had a time machine available, I think it’s possible Lucy Liu [Charlie’s Angels] could have carried it off when she was younger (remember that Honor has Prolong, and at 42 when we meet her, she looks like she’s about 19 or so by our pre-Prolong standards). Claudia Christian [Babylon 5] has been a fan favorite, though she’s more than a little shorter than Honor and, like Lucy, really probably too old for the role now.
The critical points, as far as I am concerned, are that whoever might be cast would have to be able to carry Honor’s character (just as Mira Furlan carried Delenn’s) and be comfortable with the character’s physicality. While Honor’s height and heavy-gravity origins are important elements of her character, someone shorter but with those capabilities would be much more desirable than someone with the height but not the skills.
So, is there anything else you think people need to know about this new version of Honor Of The Queen or the Honorverse series?
It’s basically the same story that help launch Honor’s life thirty-odd years ago. I think it’s held up pretty well over the interval, and I hope that new readers meeting her in this new edition will join her for the rest of her journey. I can promise them that it’ll be a rocky road upon occasion, but I think it’s worth the ride.
Finally, if someone enjoys Honor Of The Queen, and they’ve already read On Basilisk Station, what non-Honor novel of yours would you suggest they check out while waiting for the reissue of the third Honorverse novel, The Short Victorious War?
I guess it depends in part on what readers are looking for. If it’s fantasy, I’d recommend Oath Of Swords, the first volume in the adventures of Bahzell Bahnakson in the universe of Norfressa. Bahzell is a hradani, one of the five Races of Man who (in the view of the other Races of Man) fill rather the same ecological niche as orcs, only worse. Except that the God of justice decides to claim Bahzell as one of his champions and essentially turn all of Norfressa on its ear.
If they’re looking for something that combines time travel and difficult moral responsibility, a good place to look might be The Gordian Protocol, my first collaboration with Jacob Holo, in which one of the characters discovers that he personally has to make sure that the Holocaust happens…or watch fifteen entire universes destroy themselves.
And if they’re looking for a single volume stand-alone (so far, at least) in which the entire fate of humanity comes down to the actions of a single woman, they might like The Apocalypse Troll, in which Ludmila Leonova finds herself five hundred years in someone else’s past as the only person who can stop a cyborg killing machine that hates all humans and makes Skynet look like a pansy.
