Book Review: On Basilisk Station by David Weber

David Weber’s On Basilisk Station is widely considered a masterpiece of military science fiction. The main character Honor Harrington is very much a sprout from the same seed as Hornblower, and the setting is a rich and interesting one.

As far as the story goes, the novel explores Honor Harrington, a Captain in the Royal Manticoran Navy, an imperialist and aristocratic institution. Honor and her crew are assigned to Basilisk Station, a dead-end job of sorts, but while there discover a plot that they intervene in.

The space action is well-written and the political situation is explored robustly, but I feel like this book needed to develop some of the ideas it had before actually implementing them. In some cases, entire ideas in the technology and strategies employed were introduced the chapter before they were used (this is a problem of writing I see in MSF as a genre).

That’s not to say that the book isn’t remarkable. Weber is a skilled writer, and Honor is a fascinating character. I know she isn’t as developed in this book as I would have liked, but this is a series and likely intended to be one from the start.

If you like books like that, you will like On Basilisk Station.