 I just finished on Basilisk Station, which is book one of approximately 17, or 37, I don't actually know how many there are, in the Honor Harrington series, and I thought it was pretty good. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Now, I do genuinely like this book. I'd like to make that clear, but when I say it's pretty good, keep in mind I'm kind of grading it on a curve. Because this is military sci-fi, and that is really just all about the battles, okay? It's about looking at cool weapons and cool spaceships and looking at people, use them in really neat, innovative ways to win and just to be badass, okay? That's what it's about. It's not really about anything deeper for the most part, and you go into it kind of expecting that, yeah, there aren't going to really be any good characters or anything, but whatever. It's neat. It has cool battles and all that. So that's what it set out to do, and I think it did that pretty well, even though it only really has one big battle at the end. But other than that, there were a lot of little issues that did drag this down for me. So basically, the plot of this book is that there is a woman whose name is Honor Harrington, which is kind of a dumb name, because one, just someone being named Honor is dumb, and two, there's an alliteration, but it doesn't sound the same, even though it looks like it should. It's dumb, but it bothered me, but anyways, Honor Harrington is just a captain in a space navy, and she gets reassigned to this sort of backwards, out in the middle of nowhere post, and while she's there, her superior officer takes off and leaves just specifically to screw her over, and then while she's there, she decides to do the best she can with what she's got, and other more sinister plans are afoot, and that's really it. You know, it's not much of a spoiler to say that there are sinister plans afoot and that there are bad guys working against her, and then at the end there's some sort of big epic battle which she wins. That's not really a spoiler because, one, there's more books after this, so obviously the main character isn't going to die at the beginning, but two, Honor Harrington is kind of like a perfect Superman figure, and I don't think that's necessarily bad, like people, if they were being uncharitable, they might say she's a Mary Sue, but honestly that term has been extremely overused in the past couple of years, like she's not a Mary Sue, she's more of like a James Bond or Dirk Pitt type character, where she's just hyper-competent, she's good at everything she does, she's super smart, she's way smarter than just about everyone she goes up against, she's way smarter than most of her friends, and she's not even like a jerk or anything, you know, she's not even, she's very reasonable, I was about to say she's kind, but no, she's not a nice person, but she is very reasonable, she never lashes out or gets angry at people when they don't deserve it, she never belittles them or puts them down, she's just, yeah, she's a very competent commander, and you know, she doesn't have a lot of depth to her character, but if you're able to get into that sort of archetype, which is fairly common in military sci-fi actually, then yeah, you should be fine, you should enjoy this. Other than that, the only character that made any sort of impact on me was Commander McKeon, who was Honor Harrington's second in command, and I did kind of like his development because at first he really doesn't like her, but then he grows to respect her, and it's not done in such a way where it's like, er, I hate her just for some arbitrary reason, and then he slowly, because she's just so awesome, he opens up to her, like he realizes that he himself was being an asshole, and through, over time, he gets better, and he realizes, you know what, she deserves better than that, and so, yeah, I liked his development, other than that, I couldn't tell you a single character's name, even, because, like, and that kind of ties into my next issue, which is, the way it's written just isn't that great, like, none of the characters talk any different from one another, none of them really get descriptions of what they look like, and in fact, the majority of this, there's very little description of what the setting looks like, and the only character that really gets a physical description is Honor Harrington herself, and so, yeah, like, none of the characters, I couldn't really picture them in my heads, I didn't really think about what kind of personality they had, all I can remember is, oh yeah, there's that guy who did this thing at this point, which is a big deal, and then, like I said, the actual writing is just, it's not that good, like, there's a lot of points where it just introduces it and says, Tim walked down the hallway, he was the commander of this base, and then, like, that's all we get for Tim, you know, we have a couple of scenes with him being a commander, and, you know, he might be smart, he might be dumb, he might be good or evil, but that's all we get with him, just a couple of scenes, and so, yeah, the character cast isn't that great, and the exposition in this is just, guys, it's awful. Okay, I mean, I'm used to once in a while reading sci-fi, where you get, like, a page-long description of how this technology works or how that technology works. In this, we get multiple, several page-long descriptions of how technology works, which is not done in a very interesting way, and I always read it and just think, like, okay, that doesn't really affect the plot, though, and it probably would have been better if you just made something simpler, or if you just simplified the explanation, so we wouldn't have to sit here through this this whole time, and then there's multiple page-long info-dumps about the history of places, like the history of Manticore, which is where Honor Harrington is from and where her navy is from, that gets, like, a four or five page history exposition dump right in the middle of everything, and honestly, that part was actually pretty good, but it's still very clunky, and then there are huge sections of characters where they're having conversations, and one of them will just go on for a giant-ass paragraph about, here's the situation here, and then a brief question from another character, and then several giant-ass paragraphs, and there'll be entire chapters where that goes on like that, and so a lot of the characters are just there for exposition, which is, ugh, no, no, it's not good, it's not good. The worst offender in this regard, though, has got to be the one near the end where they just suddenly decide to explain how hyperspace works and how all the physics of ships going faster than light works, and, look, if you're gonna do that, do it near the beginning, otherwise don't do it at all, okay, because this happens, like, right at the beginning of the climactic battle, we have to spend, I think, around five or five and a half pages just learning how this shit works, and I still couldn't really tell you how it works, because it's just, it's really irrelevant. It's just a ship is chasing another ship. Cool, that's all we really need to know, and that really took me out of the last battle, but once I got back into the last battle, that was definitely the best part of this book, okay? Like, that's what military sci-fi is for, okay? It's just people using cool tactics and strategies to defeat their opponents. That's what I'm here for, and I assume that if this sounds interesting to you, that's what you're here for as well. So, again, like, just the fact that the book did that so well, because it really did. Like, some of the political maneuvering and the espionage-type stuff that comes before this, or where the characters are investigating what's really going on, that's pretty cool, too, and seeing it come to a head was neat, but at the end of the day, like, that big battle is what we were here for. And while I do wish there had been a couple more throughout this, like, you know, one or two smaller ones before, just so we could get a better feel for how the combat in this world works, and just so we could have something else to read about, because, again, like, that's what we're here for. We're here to read about these battles. If that was there, that would have been great, but if not, well, whatever, it's not the end of the world. So, overall, I'm still saying that this is a pretty good book just because it did that well. One thing I do have to talk about, though, and something that just really irks me a lot in this book, was the conflict between the two main nations. Like I said, Honor Harrington is part of the Kingdom of Manticore's Navy, and their primary antagonist in this book is the People's Republic of Haven. Now, it's made clear really, really early on, like, literally the first sentence of the book, that Haven is a dictatorship, okay? They make it clear that the President can do whatever he wants, and that it's a hereditary position, so it's basically just a monarchy. And it's made clear throughout this that the citizens of Manticore, including Harrington herself, look down on them for that. They view them as a dictatorship, which rightfully so, and they kind of sneer at them for it, thinking, oh, these tin-pot military men are coming in and trying to take over. Okay, that's fine. Manticore is a kingdom, though. That is literally a monarchy. Okay, it's a constitutional monarchy, certainly. Like, there is an elected legislature, but there's also plenty of other nobility, like Dukes and Earls, and it's made clear throughout this book that they have special rights and privileges, and that even though Honor Harrington is a very hyper-competent commander, she has not gotten promoted as much as she deserves, because she doesn't have the connections that she needs. She doesn't know any Earls and Dukes or anybody that can help her out in her career. So, okay, Manticore is also seeming a lot like a dictatorship, especially when, like I said, the history of the nation is really, really interesting, but it's made clear in that that they specifically set up a monarchy in order to keep out the voices of the people. Like in order to keep out the will of the majority of the people, they just set this up this way. So, it just seems very hypocritical. And also the main system that they're fighting over is the Medusin system, and, okay, the Manticoreans have already come in and taken over, and Haven wants to take it for themselves. But here's the thing, Haven is, again, portrayed as the bad guy for being this imperialist power that wants to come and take over, but at the same time there were already people living in the Medusa system when Manticore came and took it over, and they're also being imperialist, and they're also bad guys that are just there for the sake of greed. So, it just really bothered me. Like, this whole thing just reeked of hypocrisy, and I don't know, like that more than anything is what really, really took me out of this book and really, really annoyed me, because, like I said, I was grading this whole thing on a curve, and if you're just here looking for cool space battles, or really cool space battle, then, yeah, you'll probably enjoy this, but you do have to go through a lot to get there, and just the rank hypocrisy of the characters and the lack of personality that they had, that really did grade on me. So, if this isn't something that interests you, then definitely stay far away from it. But if it is something that interests you, even knowing all that, then go right ahead, you'll probably love it. Thanks again to Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Pendergraft, and all the other patrons whose names you see here. Couldn't do this without you guys, you guys are the best. Please comment, subscribe, like. I'll stay quiet for a few more seconds, so the credits have time to scroll by. Okay, bye.