Beauty and the Beast and Best Laid Plans are two excellent Honorvese short stories. Both nicely fill important niches in the Harrington Saga. ( )

This anthology has five very different short stories:
By the Book by Charles E. Gannon
A Call to Arms by Timothy Zahn
Beauty and the Beast by David Weber
Best Laid Plans by David Weber and
Obligated Service by Joelle Presby

Some of these I wasn't as fond of, and others I loved.

Gannon's By the Book I would have enjoyed in a collection of SF mysteries. It didn't really have the feel of the Honor Harrington universe. I felt as though it had a Honorverse envelope wrapped around a mystery set in Earth's not-distant future.

Zahn's A Call to Arms was much better. Set in Manticore's more distant past when Manticore didn't have the end-all and be-all of technology, this military science fiction story had me on my toes throughout.

Weber's Beauty and the Beast was perhaps my favorite. In the story of how Honor's parents came to know each other, I could see the hints of the people they would become. And yes, there are truly villainous bad guys.

Weber's second story Best Laid Plans made me smile. A young Honor Harrington has an adventure.

Presby's Obligated Service, for me, was an absorbing story. It wasn't always comfortable to read, but it made me think. In so many of the books, we see the more upper-crust Grayson citizens. This is more of a look at the underside of that life as a young woman tries to make her way in the Grayson navy.

This is absolutely written for fans of the series. If it weren't for the story By the Book, the collection would be a solid 4.5 stars, rounded up to five. That first story drags it down to a four-star book for me. ( )

Very enjoyables stories of relatively long lenght, so you do have time to discover the charaters appropriately. ( )

Good stories, good background. It does us good to remember that Honor does not populate this unit only with her and hers...... ( )

Five stories, and I really liked all of them. None are perfect, but none are bad, either. By The Book by Charles Gannon - very interesting view of early Solarian politics (very early, at the beginning of the Diaspora). Rather annoying hero, though - too much plotting and twisty thinking (required by the situation, which is equally annoyingly convoluted). A Call to Arms by Timothy Zahn - a not-bad space battle story, again very early - this time, early in Manticore's history. I rather like Travis, though he needs to lose the prickles. And it was interesting seeing a battle in which Manticore actually was the tech underdog, or at least no better than the enemy. Honor has had that comforting thought pretty much her entire career - even outnumbered, she generally had the better tech (ok, aside from Fearless in Basilisk). Beauty and the Beast by David Weber. Hmm. Very good story, fascinating characters and events...but it feels very much like rewriting history. I haven't seen any indications, anywhere in the previous Honor stories, that her parents had any empathy (in this sense). I would have liked this a lot better if the magic empathy thing had belonged to different people. The Best Laid Plans, also by Weber - good story, and arrgh. Again, sounds like rewriting history. I've never seen a hint previously that Honor and Nimitz met by battle and injury. And...Sharp Nose gets his mid-pelvis crushed, but suffers no damage to his mind-voice...OK, that could be, Nimitz's injury wasn't exactly the same. But it feels odd. Obligated Service by Joelle Presby. Oh, I like this one! The writing is quite awkward at points - there's a lot of story that's skimmed over, told rather than shown. Dialog is stilted at several points, and descriptions don't work very well. And a lot of people never get a name ("the medic" remains the medic throughout, even when he joins them for search and rescue...). And with all that, it's a great story. I love Claire - love her history, love the glimpse of the lower classes of Grayson, love her determination to keep going and to handle all she's given. The things she encounters that she sees as threats, that she sees as just the way things are, and that she sees as helpful - and the way the same things are seen by others. Fascinating story, I'd like to see more like this - more of Claire, and more of that class (and the equivalent on Manticore - we've seen a little of them on Terra and in the new sector, not so much at "home"). It looks like Presby is a new author - I'll be looking out for more by her. ( )