...remember I was reading this for a book club.  I should have been discussing frequently here on the dashboard.  I should be writing a good review.

 

Instead, I wolfed through this one, then book two and then immediately book three.

 

I did want more in the Honor-verse.  I hesitated to start this before was a bookclub because I wasn't confident author could write for YA.  

 

I was wrong; he did very well with YA.  Excellent book, but possibly a bit lacking in some ... not sure "tension" is the correct word.  Everything wasn't breezy and light; a few very possibly serious things just seemed a bit easily resolved with the M.C. often just that much smarter than others.  Most places that worked well; just enough off that it's not quite a five star read for me.

 

Boy did I ever want to read this early backstory of the treecat world!

[11/27/2011]

This is an ARC, e-book copy.

This book is a little unusual for Weber. No lengthy descriptions of technology or weaponry. No lengthy space battles; what confrontations do occur are averted or resolved quickly. Also, not very much Honor Harrington.

However, it's well written and engrossing as usual. And it's a logical progression in the saga of the Star Empire of Manticore and the very complex political situation of human space.

I enjoyed this book. My two complaints are:

(1) It's lack of focus on any particular person. Weber's longer books always seem to be rather diffuse because he brings in so many people and different viewpoints. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes not. But he usually has a central focus on one character. Not here.

(2) It is apparently the first part of a much larger work. It kind of stops in the middle, with much unresolved. And, of course, there's no telling when the next installment will be available.

[9/27/2015]
After my second read. I actually enjoyed it much more. Maybe because it was in the midst of a reread of the entire Honor Harrington mainline series, so the events in the preceding books were much more immediate to me. This book seems to followup on a lot of the things that happened in the last book or two. They were therefor more meaningful for me.

My full review of the book can be found here.

 

One of my favorites in this series, Honor finally returns to Manticorian uniform but the forces behind it don't have her best interests at heart.

 

I really love seeing her and her crew meet Caslet and his crew. Seeing the good of both sides working together was perfect.

 

I also loved the below decks story with Aubrey Wonderman learning to stand up for himself.

For my thoughts on the writing, plot, etc. please see my review here.

 

Another great audiobook by Madelyn Buzzard. I love her choices for the characters' voices as well as how good she is at narrating the battle scenes which I would ordinary and in other books would find boring. One thing I appreciate about Weber - and Buzzard handles it well - is his way of getting into the heads of people like Young. I hate it, because he's view of the world is so warped, but even his side gets a voice. That side is never even remotely shown as right, but we get to see why he reacts the way he does...and how he reasons it out in his own mind.

 

Warning: There is strong language in this book, mostly coming from Pavel Young.

What can I say, this book just didn't do it for me. Although the ending was pretty exciting, the majority of On Basilisk Station was just too slow-paced and dull for my liking. It took me a while to make myself finish this.

 

On Basilisk Station is a space opera that follows the command of Honor Harrington on the HMS Fearless in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The HMS Fearless has been exiled to Basilisk Station, a humiliating post which Honor's crew holds against her, despite the assignment being no real fault of her own. Honor must find a way to rally her crew, deal with the situations arising from the only habitable planet in the system, put a stop to the prevalent smuggling going on under the RMN's nose, and figure out what the star-conquering Republic of Haven is up to.

 

The best thing about this book is Honor Harrington herself. She's a strong, capable, and competent female character, and despite the number of issues she has to deal with, she's not a complainer - she's a problem solver. As great as she is, though, her character isn't enough to carry the book.

 

I thought that On Basilisk Station had a lot of potential, especially as I was reading the early chapters, but it just seemed to fizzle. For one, there's Weber's luxurious writing style, which seems to go into exquisite detail on every little thing. For example, here's a passage from a battle scene:

The missile belched from Fearless's number two missile tube and sped ahead at an acceleration of 417 KPS2, building on Fearless's own velocity of just over eighteen thousand kilometers per second. It could have accelerated twice as fast, but reducing its acceleration to 42,500 g raised its small impeller's burnout time from one minute to three, which not only gave it three times the maneuvering time but increased its terminal velocity from rest by almost fifty percent.

Is there a more boring way to write about a missile being fired?

 

Weber also has a tendency to start chapters in the points-of-view of entirely new secondary characters, most of whom hadn't even been mentioned in the book previously, some of whom would never be mentioned in the book again. I always found myself groaning when a chapter would yet again start this way, as I got extremely bored having to suffer through the POVs of these characters.

 

There were also a lot of shifts in POVs within chapters, and sometimes (in my Kindle ebook version at least), there was no space between paragraphs to denote the change. I found this especially confusing at the end, when the POV was continually shifting between people on different ships. One second we are seeing things through Honor's eyes, while in the next we are seeing them through the eyes of a captain of an entirely different ship, with no visual queues to mark that this was happening.

 

I also wish there had been a glossary included, or at least an appendix with a who's who of characters. There were so many secondary characters (for example, all the officers on Honor's crew), and it was impossible to remember which character was responsible for what on her ship, so I eventually gave up even trying. Furthermore, the majority of these secondary characters had no personalities or differentiating characteristics, making it even more difficult to tell them apart.

 

It should have been more sad than it was when some of the characters lost their lives. Yet, since there was not a lot of character development outside of the characters' jobs on the ship, the deaths that occurred were nowhere near as devastating as they should have or could have been.

(spoiler show)

 

All in all, I think this book had a lot of potential that it didn't quite live up to. After reading On Basilisk Station, I personally have no desire to continue on in the Honor Harrington series.