I just finished reading No Honor in Death by Eric Thomson. Reading Raven’s Peace got me in the mood for some more spaceship war stories, and this one had good reviews and a cheap price point on Amazon, so I figured why not pick it up?
And man, am I glad I did.
No Honor in Death doesn’t have detailed and specific sci-fi weapons, or cool technical details, or anything like that. All of the ships are super basic sci-fi cliches, with shields and plasma guns and torpedoes. The alien empire that the human Commonwealth is fighting is basically Klingons viewed through a lens of toxic masculinity. It’s all pretty standard. If you’ve seen Star Trek or read any naval military sci-fi you should feel right at home here.
What this book does differently than most military sci-fi I’ve read is plot and character, which were both unexpectedly good. I don’t expect much from the characters in a naval sci-fi novel (which might be a legacy of having read so many Honor Harrington stories, which are written by an author who does fantastic battles but can’t write characters to save his life), so it might have been easier than usual for No Honor in Death to exceed my expectations, but even so. This book is good. There’s an interesting thematic undercurrent of both the human and alien ship captains being hampered by the internal politics and corruption of their respective civilizations, most of the villains are genuinely flawed characters rather than caricatures of evil (though there are one or two exceptions), and the novel makes a point to explore the pointless waste of the death and destruction involved in war, even while juicing those adrenaline glands with tense space battles. And the book spends a lot of time letting you get to know everyone involved in those space battles ahead of time, so that every hit feels like a gut punch. It’s great.
This is a book of sci-fi conspiracy, personal failure, and war. I very much enjoyed it, and I’m super pleased that there are five other books in the series. I’ve intentionally not read the description for book two, just went and bought it, so I have no idea what’s coming next. It’s going to be fun to find out.