She’s a model officer, an excellent leader, and should be voiced by Jennifer Hale if they ever get around to making a video game out of the series. Honor Harrington is exactly what would expect from a character who literally has “Honor” as her first name. Basically, Weber wanted to write about ships-of-the-line IN SPACE, and that’s what he did, dammit. Of course, that in turn makes me wonder why nobody in the Honorverse thought to put, you know, turrets on their spaceships, but there’s probably contrived reasons behind that, as well. Weber really plays up the Napoleonic aspect of it- the spaceships have energy sails, and they even have a kinda contrived reason to operate on mostly a 2-D plane, as the space-drive thingies that make the ships go also create invincible forcefields above and below a spaceship, forcing them to exchange broadsides the old-fashioned way. It wasn’t based on Horatio Hornblower directly, but it was definitely influenced by the series, and gets you the general idea of “dutiful English officer sails around and shoots cannons” genre. The high concept premise is simple: “Horatio Hornblower INNNN SPAAAAACE.” For those of you who aren’t literary nerds for whatever reason, just think back to that “Master and Commander,” movie with Russell Crowe in it. This is the first novel in the Honor Harrington series- one of the more popular works to come out of Baen.

It does, however, keep to the Baen tradition of ridiculous covers.

On Basilisk Station by David Weber