On Twitter, one Joel asked:
If you’re on the political left, what is the most right-wing artistic work that you enjoy and appreciate (in whatever way you understand that concept)? And if you’re on the right, the reverse?
And my mind immediately went to David Weber and his Honor Harrington series. Doing Horatio Hornblower in Space! series is already a pretty conservative concept, but Weber took it up to eleven, especially at the start. We get the plucky little hereditary kingdom of Manticore as the standin for Georgian England and the *shudder* socialist welfare state People’s Republic Haven as the stand-in for ancien regime France, which gets its own revolution a few books into the series. But whereas real world France got it due to the relentless grinding down of farmers and middle classes by high taxation caused by feckless military adventurism as the French crown tried to compete with Great Britain and lost, here it’s because most of the population is on welfare and to finance it Haven has taken up the habit of taking over other star systems to pay for it. Haven is nefarious and ruthless, while Manticore is divided between steely eyed monarchists who see the danger and ineffectual peacenik liberals who’d rather stick their fingers in their ears than confront the danger. Most politicians, except those who vote for increased navy budgets, are gutless and venal, while the military on both sides are honourable and patriotic even when serving the wrong masters. Weber’s real ire is always at the ‘liberals’, invariably hypocrites, to the point it becomes funny rather than infuriating. His villains are also bad through and through, no room for shades of grey here.
Combine all this with a writing style that at best can be described as ‘functional’ and you may wonder why I’ve not only read but reread the series. It’s because Honor Harrington has the same quality as a good fanfic: first you want to keep reading to see what happens next, then you want to reread to see Honor kicking arse. Weber clearly is in love with his own protagonist: Honor is tall, physically imposing, convinced she isn’t beautfiul when she clearly is, smart and a tactical genius. Oh, and she also has an intelligent alien cat as a companion. A Mary Sue if there ever was one, but one the author would clearly like to fuck. That’s to be honest is what makes the series so readable, as Weber keeps giving her cool scenes and battles. For this I can ignore the dodgy politics, which in any case get slightly more bearable over the course of the series and never are as fascistic as some of his fellow Baen authors…
