Ky gets kicked out of the military academy for helping a fellow cadet that ultimately betrayed her trust and good nature at the beginning of the novel. One of the most endearing aspects about Ky in the beginning is how naïve she is. She does things for the right reasons and sometimes ends up totally bulldozed in spite of her good intentions. I love that quality about her because it makes her vulnerable and fallible.

After she gets released from the academy, her father – a powerful shipping magnate and head of the Vatta corporation – assigns her command of a derelict ship meant for a one-way flight. I enjoyed meeting Ky’s family, even if it did tend to bog the story down a bit. That familiarity with those family members is important for the rest of the series. They keep playing parts in Ky’s life as well as the twists and turns of the stories.

At the helm of the ship, Ky is nervous and somewhat resentful. She’s in command of a tub and doesn’t really have any power over her course. While Ky is dealing with this, we’re treated to an overview of the ship, the crew, and how both work together. Moon has invested a lot in her fictional part of the galaxy and she enjoys showing off. Thankfully, the details are fascinating and will consume the thoughts of imaginative readers.

It doesn’t take Ky long to get into trouble, though, and therein lies the beginning of the adventure she ultimately undertakes. Upon her arrival at the Belinta colony, she discovers that the locals desperately need a shipment of tractors that were promised but never delivered. Sensing an opportunity for profit, Ky undertakes the contract and sets the wheels in motion for her own independence.

I found the negotiations Ky has to undergo fairly interesting because I’m an amateur historian and it’s fascinating to see that no matter where the human race has been or goes, much of what it does will center around the art of business. Moon brings that home in these books.

With a newly inked contract in hand, Ky makes for the Sabine system to buy tractors and hopefully see about getting enough of a profit to re-outfit the ship to make it spaceworthy. Instead, she ends up getting involved in a planetary insurrection and caught in a deadly crossfire.

I loved the scenes with the Mackensee mercenaries and the way they did their jobs. The praise was heaped a little heavily on Ky, but it wasn’t too sugary sweet. I was surprised when she was nearly killed at one point, then amazed again at her audacity to negotiate a new contract with the mercenaries.

Assigned to ferry out other ship captains that have lost their ships, Ky ends up having to deal with a mutiny that has deadly consequences. I liked the way Ky prepared herself and her crew for the eventuality, and the lengths to which she was prepared to go to keep her ship. She reminded me a lot of A&E’s Horatio Hornblower series. Moon’s not quite in John Ringo territory, but she’s definitely in good company with the military background.

Military/science fiction readers looking for something fun and light to read over the summer will definitely enjoy Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series. All five books are out now, so you won’t have to wait on any of them.

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Honor Harrington is the heroine of several novels. On Basilisk Station is the first. In this book, Honor is a junior grade officer who ends up with a bad assignment because she made higher-grade officers look bad in a war games maneuver. She’s young, clever, ambitious, loyal, and not afraid of anything. I was intrigued that a woman was the main character of the novels. The genre is military science fiction, a hybrid whose parent genres usually fall into the domain of “boy” books. But the author, and Honor, pull off the duty amazingly well. When Honor thinks on the page, I never forgot that she was a woman in a man’s world, and that made her course of action all the more daunting in some respects.

After upstaging her fellow officers in the war game, Honor is reassigned to the armpit of the known universe. At least, one of the armpits. Stuck out at Basilisk Station where the Royal Mantacorian Navy doesn’t really bother to enforce all the rules and turns a blind eye to some of the black market dealings there that are extremely profitable to corporations who have the ears of the royal courts, Honor feels doomed to a career of mediocrity. Fate intervenes, though, and the main flagship and the captain return for new fittings. Everybody knows, however, that the ranking officer just wants to log some downtime and leave his newest officer abandoned with the impossible and hopeless task of policing the area. Honor is left behind and placed in charge with a ragtag crew that hasn’t yet learned to work together.

But no one expects Honor to attempt the impossible. She seizes opportunity by the throat and begins mounting her own campaign to be the best royal naval officer she can. And her first order of business is to emphasize the Navy’s presence in the area and shut down smugglers’ routes. She meets immediate resistance on part of the smugglers as well as local business and corporate trade ships from Haven, another star system that’s bent on reaping as many profits legally and illegally as they can. David Weber is an accomplished military science fiction author. He’s written the Honor Harrington books as well as other series and novels with John Ringo. The Honor Harrington universe has even spawned a sister series that concentrates on other characters from those worlds.

The book reminded me a lot of a Horatio Hornblower novel, and the movies put out by A&E. The same kind of political and military problems got in Honor’s way, as well as similar crew problems. But Weber intentionally designed the series to echo that. The Star Court of Mantacore is basically Great Britain while the People’s Republic of Haven takes France’s place. Even the feel of the navy, the pomp and procedures, is a lot the same. But the Napoleonic War still captures the attentions of readers, and these books make the conflict enjoyable all over again.

But Weber excels in worldbuilding as well as military strategy and science fiction hardware. His military, his worlds, and his struggles felt real all through the book. Despite the fact that he based so much of his future on our past, I was hooked by the familiarity as well as the detail of his space battles and political and military jockeying. I’m looking forward to reading the other Honor Harrington books.

Another area where Weber excels so naturally is in the characters. Honor Harrington “feels” like a real person. So does her XO, McKeon. The troubles she has with her crew, figuring out what to do with them as well as how to win them over, are real and natural. Although McKeon doesn’t warm up to Honor at first and the reader will dislike him for a time, when he reveals his motivations for being so distant make him believable and likeable. Other abrasive personality conflicts, like the one with the ship’s doctor, aren’t resolved in a win-win manner. The crew, and the reader, discovers that Honor doesn’t mind playing the bad guy or getting a little blood on her hands.

Later, in the final acts of the book when Honor is dealing with every sordid and underhanded thing that her enemies and political rivals can throw at her, I was delighted to watch her calmly and precisely pull the teeth of those serpents and kick them in the butt on the way out the door. Honor isn’t just an action heroine. She’s also a thinking reader’s ideal warrior. Even when the conflict didn’t involve lasers, assault rifles, or long-range missiles, but instead focused on political powers of privilege and vulnerable political positioning, I was drawn in through those encounters and simply couldn’t stop reading.

If you haven’t read any of these books, then — like me — you’re about to find a treasure trove of good reading material. But start here with On Basilisk Station. This is where the action begins and Honor takes up the greatest challenge of her career.