Aubrey in Space: To Honor You Call Us

The author doesn’t hide the fact that he’s out to clone O’Brien’s Master and Commander in space, and the story’s strength and weakness lies in how closely he comes, right down to the stilted dialog and naval tradition. Which ironically, makes it both anachronistic and accurate. Oh, and fun.

Lest you think author H. Paul Honsinger is trying to slip one by you, he puts his intent on the board from the start: to take the Jack Aubrey character created by Patrick O’Brian from the deep blue to the deep black and create a series showing the master and commander as he might be in a future time and war. He’s not the first to channel heroes from the age of sail into the age of starships. Among others, Gene Roddenberry based James Tiberius Kirk in no small part on C. S. Forester’s naval hero, as did David Weber in Honor Harrington, who shares the character and initials if not the exact chromosomes.  It’s only fair that they should inspire others, as they both almost certainly were inspired by Edward Pellew, a captain in Nelson’s navy who eventually rose to admiral, brilliant at sea, but driven by the poverty of his childhood to occasional lapses of judgement ashore.

In To Honor You Call Us, we meet young the young lieutenant commander  “Max” Maxime Tindall Robichaux as he leads a boarding party onto an enemy starship grappled to the ship he serves on. His ship is outmatched, and their only hope is survival is to disable the enemy from within, a familiar scene from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) or for that matter Star Wars (1977).  Succeeding in his mission, and suddenly in command of his ship after the death of his CO and XO, he limps home. He’s a bit or a problem for the admiralty, reckless and a bit insubordinate, but there’s a war on, so they wind up sending him out as captain of a good ship with a bad crew to see if something might be made of the whole mess. They also send along a misfit medical officer, Dr. Ibrahim Sahin, cast closely in the mold of Jack Aubrey’s best friend Stephen Maturin, a man of considerable learning and with a knack for intelligence work.

The ship, the USS Cumberland, known despairingly as the “Cumberland Gap” for its record of turning away from battle, is being sent to disrupt the acquisition of materials needed for the war effort of the enemy, a race of rat faced bastards out to erase mankind from the universe. No, really, rat faced bastards. It turns out that their DNA profile indicates that someone stashed a bunch of Terran species on a world somewhere about 8 million years ago and the bipedal star-faring result are the Krag: big, bipedal rats. We were getting along so well too, until we told them we’d figured out where they came from, which didn’t match with their religious beliefs and there you have it. All out war. Along the way the Krag releases a plague that killed off half the human female population (gruesomely), which is why despite both the captain and doctors assertions that women have many admirable qualities that make them an asset to a warship both in combat and in the medical profession, there aren’t any on warships, having been sent home to make sure there is a next generation for the human race.

Let’s not linger over that.

From there Max takes the crew in hand, sorting out the good from bad, stopping the occasional sabotage attempt and giving them some backbone through accomplishment.  The strength and weakness of the book is how much the author channels Aubrey, or possibly, Russel Crowe in his role in the film version. Personally, I found it impossible not to imagine Crowe as the the captain of the USS Cumberland, especially as the language is very much that of the books, carefully enunciated, fully formed paragraphs uttered by captain and doctor, and a certain amount of instructive pedantry as the captain lifts the crew up by its bootstraps. Not the usual terse dialog of space opera, but a blend of the actual formality of naval operations, where commands are given in precise detail, and specific form, repeated back as told, and executed on approval.

The other thing that this book does out of the ordinary, but taken from the books, is to show the deftness of ship handling that Max has mastered. Trek has taken a few stabs at it, but never as convincingly as it’s done here.

The doctor gets more than a few licks in himself, being tasked with information gathering on an Arab settled world, which he operates comfortably on, thanks to his family training as a free trader, his Turkish heritage, and his Islamic faith. It’s all very well done, though as in other parts, done so tellingly like O’Brian’s work that it falls short of feeling original, which left me uncertain of how I felt about the book beyond enjoying it immensely.

What Max doesn’t channel is Aubrey’s onshore life, where he reliably annoys bureaucrats and loses money hand over fist. Jack Aubrey is immeasurably better served by being at sea, and this side of the character has been edited out of the piece. There isn’t really any home for Max to be foolish in, what with the results of the bio-plauge and his devotion to the navy.

As a result, the book dives less deeply into character than the series it echoes, making it a better fit to the film than the novel, focusing more on the heroic and admirable character of it’s lead and less on the foibles that follow him from tale to tale. All of which serves to make the story move along quickly and quite pleasantly.

In the end, To Honor You Call Us is a mix of anachronism and unusually accurate naval perspective, owing to the reality that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Links / References