HONOR IS BACK!

Dear Bookseller—

Jim Baen wants me to tell you why you should buy At All Costs.

I can think of a lot of reasons why I'd like to buy it, but the only reason you should decide to buy it is because you think it's a good book and that your customers will agree with you. Fortunately for both of us, I think, it is, and they will.

This is the eleventh "mainstream" Honor Harrington novel. There are also four anthologies of short fiction, and two additional novels—Crown of Slaves and The Shadow of Saganami—in a "secondary" series set in the same universe. Actually, Crown and Shadow are very much part of the mainstream novels' story arc, and that's going to become even more pronounced over the next few novels. But all of the "Honorverse" stories hang together as part of an evolving and continually growing literary universe.

I have to confess that although Honor Harrington was planned from the outset as a series character, I didn't quite anticipate when I was creating her that she was going to catch on the way she has. I think the steadily expanding "future history" which forms the background for the stories about her is a major factor in the success of the novels, but from the reader feedback I've received, Honor herself—and the other characters with whom she interacts—are the real secret of her success.

Honor is a growing, changing individual. The mainstream novels have spanned a period of approximately twenty years as of the end of At All Costs, and the Honor Harrington of this book isn't the Honor Harrington of On Basilisk Station. She's grown, changed. She's learned things about herself, and grown into new roles and new personae. The intensely focused, apolitical naval officer of the first few books has found herself a great noblewoman, a senior admiral, and a confidante of queens and emperors. She's discovered that the reward for accomplishing almost-impossible tasks with skill and integrity is to be set even more impossible tasks. And she's discovered that whatever else may have changed, she remains constitutionally incapable of not stepping up to the challenges which confront her.

Those readers who have been with the series from the very beginning have seen her growing and changing, facing those realizations and grappling with them. I think that's a huge part of the reason they've followed the books. They want to see her continue to grow and change, to deal with the challenges without sacrificing her principles. She's bigger than life, obviously, and yet I think there's a resonance there. She's who we'd like to be, doing the "right things" we want to believe we'd recognize and strive to do beside her.

In At All Costs Honor confronts the greatest challenge of her career to date. The fate of the Star Kingdom of Manticore literally hangs on the decisions she makes and the skill with which she executes them. The personal price she pays is high, and the cost in death and destruction is equally terrible. Against that backdrop, her personal life changes at least as fundamentally as the carnage of the warfare she confronts. And this book, coupled with The Shadow of Saganami and Crown of Slaves, marks the beginning of an equally fundamental change in the direction of the entire series—a change which will allow the Honorverse to grow still broader and bring Honor and her friends—and many of her old enemies—together to face still greater challenges and dangers.

I think readers will like this book. I certainly do, although I may, perhaps, not be the most unprejudiced judge in the entire known universe where it's concerned. Be that as it may, my personal judgment is that At All Costs is the best Honor novel at least since Honor Among Enemies, and I believe most of Honor's readers will agree.

David Weber