Classic SF Book review: "Ashes of Victory" by David Weber (Honorverse 9)

Back from the dead ...

Like the other stories featuring Honor Harrington, "Echoes of Honor" is set about two thousand years in our future.

It begins a few hours after the end of the previous book, "Echoes of Honor" as the heroine has retuned home where everyone believed her dead after the "Peeps" (People's Republic of Haven) claimed that they had hanged her and broadcast faked footage of her execution.

But she wasn't dead and has managed to stage a successful rebellion on the most secure, escape-proof prison in human history,  a planet nicknamed "Hell" for good reason, and making it home from 200 light years behind enemy lines with half a million escaped prisoners.

Honor was badly injured during the escape attempt, and even with the wonders which the novel assumes medicine will have achieved in two thousand years, she's going to be on light duties for a while recovering, so her main role in this book is as a viewpoint character while Manticore finally begins the big offensive with new ships and weapons which they hope will win the war.

Meanwhile on the "Peep" side, Rob S Pierre has finally realised that the People's Republic of Haven certainly won't win the war while they continue the policy of giving their generals and admirals no freedom of action, shooting them for failure if they lose a battle and shooting them as potential traitors who might overthrow the state if they win too many. So he takes the risk of making their most successful admiral, Esther McQueen, Secretary of War and giving her more freedom of action.

McQueen soon manages to cause the Star Kingdom of Manticore quite a few problems, but the "Peep" chief of security, Oscar St Just still doesn't trust her ... with fatal consequences for a lot of people.

Those fatal consequences of largely "offstage" in this book but there is a short story by David Weber called "Nightfall" which can be found in the third "Worlds of Honor" anthology,  "Changer of Worlds," available from Amazon at

Changer of Worlds (Honorverse - Worlds of Honor Book 3) eBook: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store  

This short story can be read as if it were a greatly extended version of Chapter 33 of  "Ashes of Victory and indeed the first dozen pages of  "Nightfall" are more or less identical to that chapter. 

Chapter 33 of this novel concludes with a strong impression of what is about to happen, and later chapters give a retrospective from the viewpoint of characters picking up the pieces after it has/: "Nightfall" actually describes the events, so to speak, "as they happen."

If you have copies of both this book and "Changer of Worlds," you can get the entire story in one sitting: when you reach the start of Chapter 33, which begins, "Citizen General Fontein is here, Sir." you put down the novel, pick up the anthology, turn to the last story, and start reading with exactly the same words.  At the end of the short story "Nightfall" you return to the novel and start reading again at the start of chapter 34.

The ending of "Ashes of Victory" might seem utterly unbelievable were it not that something very closely analogous did actually happen at a closely corresponding point in British political history in the era which inspired both the Hornblower novels set in that era and this "Honorverse / Ms Hornblower in Space" series set more than two thousand years later. 

To give too much detail would probably be a spoiler, but if after reading the end of this book you find yourself thinking "surely something like that could never happen," look up the history of William Grenville's coalition government formed in 1806 after the death of the long-serving Prime Minister Pitt the Younger, and nicknamed the "Ministry of All the Talents."

Like other books in the series, "Ashes of Victory" is a well-written story and if you pick the book up you will have difficulty putting it down.

You can buy "Ashes of Victory" from Amazon at

Ashes of Victory (Honor Harrington Book 9) eBook : Weber, David: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

More details of the series as a whole are given on this site at

Book Series overview: David Weber's "Honor Harrington" universe book reviews.

I can strongly recommend "Ashes of Victory" and indeed the whole series.

Mitth'raw'nuruodo