Shadow of Victory by David Weber
Cover art by David Mattingly
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
This sub-series of the Honorverse began with Shadow of Saganami, and was billed as the story of Honor Harrington's various proteges as they made their careers in the Manticorian Royal Navy or the forces of various allied star nations (particularly Grayson). However, as Storm from the Shadows progressed, the storyline focused increasingly upon the Verge systems, a region of space in which settlement was largely by underfunded expeditions, with a resultant retrograde technological development for multiple centuries. Few of these civilizations were able to maintain any form of space flight, even satellites, and many of them are struggling to recover basic Industrial Age technologies such as steam and IC engines, mechanized farming, and electrical grids. As a result, the Solarian League's Office of Frontier Security has swept them up as territories -- and more and more of them are getting fed up with the corruption that OFS fostered, the systematic exploitation of their worlds and their people, and the thorough lack of the technological hand up they were supposed to be getting.
By Shadow of Freedom, the Verge storyline was really taking over. That volume of this storyline threw the reader straight into a civil war on a world that appeared to have been settled by a Scottish separatist movement. This can be a problem, especially for someone who was expecting the novel to start with familiar characters from other Honorverse works, and can easily result in lowered investment from long-term readers. Someone who's coming to the Honorverse for the first time through this novel, perhaps because they grabbed it off a spinner rack in a duty-free shop at an airport before a long flight, might also have a lot of trouble getting all these characters and factions sorted out fast enough to pick the book back up if reading is interrupted early on (an experience I had with the first volume of a new series by another favorite author -- I didn't care about any of the characters by the time I needed to set the book aside to do another task, and hadn't felt any great urge to give it another shot before I needed to renew it, so I just took it back to the library and was done with it).
This volume has a fair amount of that same problem. If anything, it's compounded by a lot of the threads being carryovers from previous volumes, both from the Saganami sub-series and from the main series and other sub-series. As a result, it can be very difficult to keep track of all the various Verge systems and their governments and the various people who were helping different factions. Especially given that some of these agents were operating under false flag in order to discredit enemies (for instance, it sure looked like some Mesa agents were pretending to be Manticorean in order to enable acts of mass murder just so they could make the Star Empire of Manticore and Her Majesty's Government look bad on the galactic news).
However, speaking of Mesa, what I found really interesting was the continuation of the Mesan storyline that began in Cauldron of Shadows, in which the Mesan Alignment decided it was necessary to activate Operation Houdini far earlier than they'd originally intended. This plan was designed to remove key members of the Mesan Alignment from Mesa and take them to a super-secret bolthole system (which was originally hinted at way back in War of Honor, when a scout ship stumbled on something Mesan and was destroyed). Because the obvious disappearance of large numbers of highly-placed people would attract curiosity, it had to be made to look like they had all died -- but that many tragic accidents would also attract attention, so they had to have a better cover.
Given their ongoing conflict with the Audubon Ballroom (an organization for the liberation of genetic slaves), the necessities of Operation Houdini provided an excellent opportunity to portray the Audubon Ballroom as a bloodthirsty gang of indiscriminate killers. And in this novel, we get to see the sort of people who are capable of executing such a vicious plan, including killing off any close relatives who are not included in Operation Houdini and might just ask awkward questions. Interestingly enough, most of the top tier of the crew tasked with carrying out these "terrorist attacks" are sufficiently lacking in insight that they have no notion that they are slated to be tossed in the meat grinder as soon as their usefulness is exhausted. It seems that these hatchet men (and women) either never learn from past history or are certain that it surely won't happen to them.
In this novel we also get to see what happens to a lot of the people who are being evacuated via Operation Houdini, including Zach McBryde, twin brother of Jack McBryde, who blew up Green Pines and set off the sequence of actions that resulted in the activation of Operation Houdini. Because it's being carried out much earlier than planned, they're having to use a lot of makeshift transportation options, including ships normally used for transporting genetic slaves. As a result, the evacuees all are guarded by security officers who have orders to kill if anything goes wrong, rather than risk letting someone be captured who has extensive knowledge of the true nature of the Mesan Alignment and the centuries-old Detweiler Plan. It really underscores just how ruthless the Mesan Alignment is willing to be in carrying out their plans.
Yet when they finally arrive at the bolthole world of Darius, we see a society built along very different lines from that of Mesa, with its genetic slaves and seccies (second-class citizens, the descendants of early clones who were given a limited degree of freedom). Yes, most of the population are clones, often with various genetic modifications, but they are not treated as slave meat to be used up and thrown away. Instead they are raised in family groups, allowed to form normal human social attachments, and are not abused as part of their training for their work. It's not exactly the azi of C.J. Cherryh's Union society, with its eternally positive deepteach tapes, but neither is it the abomination of genetic slavery.
It's going to be interesting to see what kind of society develops on Darius. On one hand, the clone families seem to suggest that this society is trying to achieve Detweiler's original ideal of human self-realization. On the other hand, given that Mesa has shown itself to be a very sore loser in the past, it seems very likely that their society will also be shaped into a weapon of revenge. The original Detweiler made some very long-term plans, so it's completely possible that Darius is intended to nurse a plan for revenge that will take multiple generations to carry out.
On the other hand, with Eric Flint's announcement that he and David Weber are working on a fourth book in the sub-series that began with Crown of Slaves, it's also possible that Darius will not have that long to nurse its resentments. It may well depend entirely on just how much information is left behind on Mesa in the aftermath of the horrific sequence of nuclear explosions at the end of this novel.
Overall, I really can only recommend this novel for someone who's really a serious fan of the Honorverse, and who has read all the relevant preceding volumes, preferably fairly recently. I've read all them, but it had been a long enough time since then that I often had trouble keeping track of all the different characters and where they belonged. I'm pretty sure a lot of stuff was zooming right past me for the simple reason that I didn't have the time to go back and re-read those critical novels and re-orient myself in that part of the 'verse.
Buy Shadow of Victory from Amazon.com
Review posted December 12, 2020
