Saturday, May 2, 2015

Imperial Double-Post, Part 1: Rooting for the Empire

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading the Honor Harrington novels, and yeah, now I'm at the point where everyone starts rooting for the "bad guys" because the "good guys" have their heads up their asses. (Book 10, War of Honor)

Basically the series, for those of you who don't know, is Horatio Hornblower In Space, kind of like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was, except with much more "hard" science fiction. There's "Space Britain" - the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the ostensible good guys - and there's "Space France" - the People's Republic of Haven, the ostensible bad guys (clue's in the name). There's also "Space Germany" and "Space... Um, Not Sure, Really. Conservative-Version-Of-The-UN?*" but they're kind of side acts, at least so far.

*By which I mean it's utterly massive, utterly inefficient, and the warring parties kind of tiptoe around it without it doing anything.

Now, here's the thing - there are some pretty blatant parallels, especially on the Haven side, where Robespierre and Napoleon both have pretty clear stand-ins. But... (SPOILERS)

...those comparisons kind of went of the rails around the time Space-Napoleon's coup was launched.

Anyway, Haven is now a democracy, and meanwhile, the good government of Manticore has collapsed, leaving a bunch of scheming bastards in charge. At this point, Manticore is only the "good guys" because they have more POV characters. And the most significant one has been sidelined by the corrupt new government. Again.

In fact, this isn't the first time that they've sent her out to Silesia (uh, Space Caribbean, I guess??) on some crap assignment just to get her out of the way. That was also the plot of Book 6.

Another reason I started rooting for Haven here was because they're the guys who actually do stuff. Honor was sidelined in Book 9 as well so she could recuperate from all the stuff that happened to her in the previous two books (involving pretty traumatic injuries and a sojourn on a planet called Hell), and the only thing she did there was eat a missile meant for the queen. The tide of the war turned decisively against Haven, yes, but what actually ended the war was a) the Haven-initiated assassination attempt against the queen (see the missile-eating mentioned above) that did manage to kill off her prime minister and most of his cabinet, and b) a certain Haven officer shooting the supreme dictator in the face. Really, it's refreshing to see people with such initiative actually try to make their nation better... something that can't be said of the Manticore politicos.

Another group of characters I'm very sympathetic to are two Havenite defectors from much earlier on in the franchise. One sought asylum in Manticore after his government blamed him for a failed operation; the other was part of Honor's escape from Hell. Now that Haven's nice and reformed, it's not hard to feel sorry for them because the choices they made earlier mean they still can't go home.

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