BOOK CluB

KB Wagers celebrates an inspiring tale of starship combat

KB Wagers celebrates starship combat tale On Basilisk Station.

If you’re a fan of science fiction novels, it’s most likely you know the name Honor Harrington, the coolly competent starship captain for the kingdom of Manticore. In On Basilisk Station the hero of David Weber’s series isn’t the legend she will become. When we’re first introduced to the new starship captain and her crew, they’ve been banished to the Manticoran dumping ground of Basilisk Station for failing to successfully implement an experimental weapon during the annual Naval war games. Once there, Honor struggles to discharge her duty and turn her sulking crew into a team while facing a mysterious threat that could destroy the kingdom itself.

In a masterful display of storytelling, Weber takes on three different plots, weaving together the first rumblings of two political giants about to go head to head, the intricacies of interstellar space flight, and an extremely personal tale of total strangers becoming family.

While no one would claim that Weber’s book is the first science fiction work to put a woman at the helm of a ship and the front of the narrative, the tale of Honor Harrington is without a doubt one of the influential stories of the 20th and 21st centuries that has given rise to the world we now live in: one populated by women-led Star Wars films, such as The Force Awakens and Rogue One, urban fantasy novels like Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine series, and Kameron Hurley’s bounty-hunter Nyx from her Bel Dame Apocrypha novels.

Honor’s cool competence under pressure is a nice change from stories of women learning their jobs on the fly. She already knows what she’s doing. When she comes onto the scene, she’s a new captain but not new to command. As readers, we get to see how she uses the skills she already has in order to tackle the impossible task of picketing her station with a single ship. We see this later in science fiction, as women characters are not only the narrators of their own stories but play front-and-centre roles. These stories aren’t the tired old tales of a woman trying to learn something new; rather, they are about women excelling at a job or skill they already know.

While conflict and uncertainty often make for interesting stories, there is a certain amount of satisfaction to be found reading a story about a woman who’s good at her job. Women across the globe have proven time and again our competence in our chosen fields and it is vindication to see this reflected in media.

Weber only partially falls into the trap of surrounding his powerful woman hero with men, as there is a generous scattering of women characters in the integrated military structure of the Kingdom of Manticore. However, there is a consistent imbalance in regards to speaking parts for women and several rather consistent – and disappointing – tropes used to illustrate how horrible some of the villains are as the series progresses in the form of gendered slurs and sexual violence. If anything, this is a sign of the times when On Basilisk Station was written: women were still anomalies in science fiction, rather than fully fledged participants.

On Basilisk Station is hard science fiction with lots of technical descriptions of hardware, battle formations and politics. But for all that, the focus is often on Honor and her companions. The people who make up her crew and the kingdom of Manticore are the ones the reader connects to and cares for as we watch them come together against smugglers and cartel owners.

Even Honor herself goes through a metamorphosis over the course of the book, emerging by the end of the novel as the legend fans of the series know and love.

Beyond The Empire by KG Wagers is out 14 November from Orbit.