Blog in Exile: Background

Boy, I'm excited. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Blog in Exile, my re-read of Flag in Exile, the fifth Honorverse novel - and one of the best.

Why am I starting the Honorverse with this one? A few reasons.

One, I wanted to start the Honorverse with one of my favorite entries in the series, and neither Field of Dishonor (too much backstory) nor At All Costs (waaaaaaaaaaay too much backstory) could serve neatly as an entry point. I suppose I could have done The Honor of the Queen, which Flag is in some ways a sequel to, but I'd probably get bogged down comparing it to The Wrath of Khan, because it is basically that - two crippled ships, one whose commander is consumed by self-doubt, the other commanded by a psychotic fanatic, circling each other with intervals of them pounding the snot out of each other.

Another thing I really like about Flag is that it's the book where the heroine finally drops the neurotic tics that have plagued her for the first four books, and she does it in style.

The deciding factor was that this happens to be Flag's 20th anniversary. What better way to celebrate?

What I'm going to do in this post is give you a background on the story so far. Honor Harrington was a rising star in the Royal Manticoran Navy (think Space Britain), until a political kerfuffle in the previous book smashed her career to smithereens. The timing is less than fortuitous, because the People's Republic of Haven (think Space France, right down to the fact that it's led by a Committee of Public Safety, which is chaired by a guy named Rob S. Pierre) is on the warpath, and Manticore is in its crosshairs.

Honor is persona non grata on Manticore right now - the navy basically had to beach her in order to placate certain political actors. (To put the backstory in terms least favorable to her, she exploited a loophole in the House of Lords procedures in order to get at and then cold-bloodedly murder one of its most powerful members. It was totally justified but everyone knew what the consequences would be going into it.) It doesn't help that one of the inciting incidents of this political kerfuffle was the murder of her lover, Paul Tankersley. So for a couple of reasons, she doesn't feel like sticking around.

Honor retreats to the planet Grayson (think Meiji-era Japan with Mormon trappings) to basically get away from it all. Grayson is ruled by The Patriarchy, but that's not too bad, all things considered: a nearby planet, Masada, is basically Space ISIS before there was an ISIS (interestingly, this book does have a little historical oof afterword, but not about ISIS... I'll get to that later).

But here's the important thing: Honor has dealt with both The Patriarchy and the Masadans before, in Book 2, The Honor of the Queen. Manticore struck up an alliance with Grayson against Haven, so Haven tried to sabotage their activities by allying with Masada. The local Havenite commander, Captain Alfredo Yu, blew up most of the Grayson fleet (and Honor's mentor as well), but before he got the chance to fight Honor, his Masadan collaborators staged a mutiny, took over his ship, and then got themselves blown up fighting Honor. Yu escaped and, fully cognizant of the fact that Haven would shoot him for his failure, claimed asylum on Grayson. (Grayson was all too happy to have a Havenite's brain to pick - and information to share with the much-richer-and-more-advanced Manticore.) Anyway, Honor saved Grayson from a deadly orbital bombardment, getting her ship shot to ribbons and scores of her people killed, and in so doing earned the respect of most of The Patriarchy.

It also helps that Benjamin Mayhew, Protector of Grayson, was educated off-world and, while he is by no means what anyone would call a feminist, does want to reform his planet and sees in Honor a way to do it...