This is presented as the first in a
prospective series of “Young Adult” science-fiction novels set in
the “Honorverse” of Weber's Honor Harrington
and related novels set in the Manticoran Star Kingdom. It's
actually not entirely new. The first third or so is actually a
revised (I presume, but I didn't really compare) version of a novella
of the same name published over a decade ago in the first “Worlds
of Honor” collection, More than Honor
(1998). There we meet Honor Harrington's
four-centuries-great-grandmother Stephanie Harrington as an
eleven-T[erran]-year-old immigrée
to the recently-settled Manticoran frontier world of Sphinx, and
learn how she made first contact with the native species of Sphinxian
sentients, the arboreal six-limbed “telempathic” (my word)
“treecats” (Stephanie's word). The circumstances of her meeting
“Climbs Quickly,” whom she dubs “Lionheart” while she earns the tree-cat name "Death Fang's Bane" – plus the
unusually strong “mind-glow” of the precocious young "two-leg" –
forms a bond between the two that foreshadows the one we all know and love between Honor and
Nimitz.
The
bulk of the novel is pretty much new, although it too builds somewhat
on another novella from a later “Worlds of Honor” anthology,
written not by Weber but by one of the other authors he allows to
play in his sandbox – “The Stray” by Linda Evans, in Worlds
of Honor (1999). The discovery
of the treecats on the world previously believed to be an uninhabited
wilderness totally open to human settlement naturally causes a bit of
an uproar. How sentient are they? What are the implications for
those who most have a stake in the natural resources they'd
previously believed were simply there for humans to take? Briefly,
just a couple T-years later Stephanie and Lionheart end up being
central to thwarting a plot by an offworld purveyor of “exotic
pets” attempting to abduct as many treecats as he can. “Exotic
pets” would be the preferable of the fates of his victims. He also
intends to sell some for research into the genetic basis of their
telepathy.
I
found this book to be very enjoyable, not quite on the level of
the Honor Harrington
stories themselves with their intricate political machinations as
well as rip-roaring space battles (that's a very
high bar!), but a quite believable portrayal of a young girl and her
adventures on a wonderful new world, discovering a wonderful new
friend and experiencing hair-raising adventures that test her courage
and character. Weber's penchant for “intricate political
machinations” does appear here as well, and might well make some of
the exposition in a few places a bit difficult for “young adult”
readers to follow. I'm not the best judge of that. I'm intending to
give this book to my niece for her eleventh birthday later this
month, and maybe I can get some direct feedback from her.
And I'm looking forward to the second novel in the series, Fire Season, which comes out in October.
And I'm looking forward to the second novel in the series, Fire Season, which comes out in October.
One
thing this book did was remind me greatly of my memories of reading
H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy
when I wouldn't have been a whole lot older than my niece – a
similar tale of first contact between humans and a cute little alien
species (George Lucas doubtless based the Ewoks on Piper's fuzzies)
dealing with the same issues of how do you judge alien intelligence,
and how do you balance interests between humanity and a desireable
planet's natives. I've got a hankering to go back and reread that
novel again. If I recall correctly, it was one of the first two
books I got when I first joined the Science Fiction Book Club for the
very first time (I've had three separate stretches of membership,
spaced out over almost forty years), and that copy – part of one of
the SFBC's “omnibus” editions pairing Little Fuzzy
with its sequel, Fuzzy Sapiens
– is long gone. But for some reason, even though Little
Fuzzy is not even as old as
myself, being first published in 1962, much of Piper's work has
passed into the public domain and is available
through Project Gutenberg.
Cheers!
… and Thanks for reading!
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