Frequently Asked Questions

Oh, no!

          You're not getting me into that trap. First, because asking someone to choose between his own books is like asking him to choose between his children. And, second, because whatever my answer might be today, it would almost certainly be different tomorrow. There are books which I consider to be weaker and books which I consider to be stronger, but the truth is that my "favorite" changes as my mood, my energy level, and my personal interests change. So this is one question I genuinely can't answer.

This one is something of a toughie.

          As I have explained, the parallels between Revolutionary France and the British Empire, on the one hand, and the Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore, on the other, are (deliberately) far from a perfect match. On the other hand, this question is about present-day politics, which is another kettle of fish entirely.

          Basically, the People's Republic of Haven was actually the United States of America after a cynical deal had been struck between a political elite and the "machine bosses" who were able to deliver bloc votes on a dependable, reliable basis. The people who became the Legislaturalists deliberately set out to create a situation in which there would be an enormous underclass completely dependent upon the state for its support and upkeep. What had begun as a principled effort to provide the best possible life for all of the Republic's citizens under the Legislaturalists' predecessors became, in effect, a means of permanently institutionalizing graft and corruption in a way which would keep the Legislaturalists (and their descendents) in power. What we see beginning to happen in the Republic after Theisman overthrows Oscar Saint-Just and the Committee of Public Safety is a restoration of the Old Republic, under the original constitution (which happens to bear a strong relationship to that of the United States), and a regeneration of the concept of civic responsibility, personal responsibility, and honest government.

          Readers are, of course, free to make their own judgments as to how this parallels the experience of the United States over the last century or so, and what it may or may not imply for the future. While they're doing that, however, they should bear in mind that although every writer's personal beliefs and politics infuse anything that that writer writes, the primary function of the Republic of Haven -- and of everything that happens in it, around it, and to it -- in the Honorverse is to provide the basis and framework for the stories I want to tell. In other words, while no writer can avoid stepping up onto a soap box, whether he wants to or not, when he starts writing military or political fiction, I am perfectly willing to subordinate my personal views on many of these questions to the strength of the storyline I'm working with.

          I think that readers should also note that my personal sympathies clearly lie with the responsibility-taking moderates in both the Star Kingdom and the Republic of Haven, not to mention the Protectorate of Grayson. I beat up on the extreme left in the form of the Star Kingdom's old Liberal party; I beat up on the notion of economic redistribution (and the cynicism which can be inherent in it) in the People's Republic of Haven; I beat up on extreme conservatism and aristocratic abuses of power in the Star Kingdom's Conservative Association; and I beat up on religious reactionaries in the Protectorate of Grayson. I also try to show the plus sides of most flavors and brands of ideology and religious belief, along the way, and I'm sure that most of my readers can think of characters who cover that entire spectrum.

Paul accepted the duel because he made a mistake... and because of who he was. The mistake was allowing himself to be provoked into a position which allowed the challenge to be issued “for cause” in the first place. The fact that he accepted the challenge (and met it) was -- IMHO -- inevitable in light of who he was, the information he had at the time, and the consequences (personal, professional, and for Honor) if he had not.

At the time that he and Summervale met, he had no idea (and no way of knowing) that Summervale had a reputation as a professional duelist. For that matter, very few people (in the Star Kingdom of Maticore at large) knew that. It was part of what made Summervale so effective. The reader knew it, because I -- as the writer -- wanted you to know it, so I had Tomas Ramirez and Gunny Babcock explain it to other character's in Paul's absence. Accordingly, all Paul really knew was that a stranger had deliberately -- and successfully -- goaded him into striking the first blow by crudely insulting the woman he loved. (And, I might add, by using an insult which hit Paul especially hard because he knew precisely how hard Honor had found it to open up to him in the first place.)

Paul was the equivalent of a high-level black-belt in a particularly "hard" martial art. Summervale was also a trained martial artist, but Paul had no way of knowing that when he attacked him. Hence, Paul was -- to the best of his knowledge -- guilty of the equivalent (in both practical terms and in the eyes of the law) of assault with a deadly weapon.

The man he had assaulted, however much he might have deserved punishment, had just challenged him to a duel. In demanding personal satisfaction, he was (in the setting of the Star Kingdom of Manticore) renouncing any other form of satisfaction; that is, the duel, if accepted by Paul, precluded Summervale's later filing assault charges over the incident. That, alone, would not have been enough to push someone like Paul into accepting the duel, but it was a factor in his thinking. There was also the fact that whether he had been goaded by the fellow or not, Paul had struck the first blow and, in his thinking (and that of most Manticorans of the time), that meant that Summervale had a right to respond by seeking satisfaction, especially since Paul's blows had drawn blood. Again, social pressure coupled with Paul's own acceptance of that perspective as a Manticoran.

In addition, Paul wanted to take a shot at Summervale on the field. Yes, he knew he had been goaded. Yes, by the time Tomas Ramirez acted as his second, he clearly knew he had been set up by a professional duelist. But at the time he accepted Summervale's challenge, he didn't know Summervale's reputation and did know that he wanted nothing in the universe more than to finish smashing the supercilious, sneering son-of-a-bitch. This, too, was something Summervale had counted on, and it worked. (Don't forget that Summervale was a professional. He'd studied his intended victim carefully before choosing exactly how to goad him onto the field, and it worked.)

By the time Paul knew the truth about Summervale's reputation from Ramirez, he had already agreed to meet him. That moved the entire confrontation to a different plain. Had he declined Summervale's initial challenge, he would have been cut dead by a sizable chunk of Manticoran society, which would have had major repercussions. Although his family was of yeoman stock, it was also extremely wealthy, connected directly to the House of Winton by marriage (remember that he was Michelle Henke's cousin and also a cousin of the Queen herself), and the shame he would have brought upon the family name (and its connections) would, in Manticoran eyes, have been profound. Not only would it have had serious social repercussions for him personally, but it could well have had consequences for other members of his family and even -- to some extent -- on their financial interests. Politically, the Queen's opponents could have used personal attacks on him as an oblique attack upon the Royal Family itself. "After all, if one of the Queen's own cousins lacks the courage to offer satisfaction to a man he viciously beat over drunken words exchanged in a bar, then surely -- given the House of Winton's own notorious temper -- one can hardly put a great deal of faith in the Queen's ability either to think clearly and dispassionately in the present confrontation with the People's Republic or to admit that she might have been wrong and offer the new, enlightened Pierre regime an opportunity to show how different it is from the previous, evil Harris regime." In professional terms, the consequences for his career might also have been profound. For better or worse, military organizations look for officers who are willing -- not necessarily eager, but willing -- to fight and to confront physical confrontations they would not expect/require the typical civilian to face. The fact that Summervale had a reputation in certain select circles as a hired duelist might have been expected to offset that to some degree but Paul didn't know he was one at the time he accepted the duel, and so no subconscious awareness on his part of potential consequences -- social or professional -- was predicated on that basis.

Once the challenge had been issued and accepted, Paul faced a different set of considerations. Yes, by that time he knew that Summervale was believed by some people (like a goodly chunk of the Marine Corps) to be a professional duelist, but he had no proof of that. (If anyone -- including the RMMC -- had possessed such proof, Summervale would have been in prison and not available for any duels.) He had accepted the challenge. To withdraw now, because of his opponent's reputation and record, would have been seen as an act of rank cowardice which would have had even more severe consequences than an initial refusal to meet him would have carried. Of course anyone would have expected him to be concerned, and most people would have agreed that the entire situation was suspicious. But the attitude of the majority of Manticorans would have been that Paul had, in a sense, made his bed. If he only intended to accept challenges from "safe" people and decline to challenge "dangerous" ones, then he shouldn't have been so lacking in circumspection as to punch Summervale out in a bar to begin with. Even leaving aside all of those considerations, Paul himself would have been unable to back down anymore than Honor could have backed down. Summervale had deliberately set out to create a situation in which he could kill Paul. In the process, he had to expose himself to the possibility that Paul might kill him. And Paul was a smart man. He knew, from Summervale's choice of tactics, if nothing else, that he (Paul) probably was not Summervale's only target. He also knew how Honor would react if Summervale confronted her in the same way, and Paul Tankersley was not prepared to protect his own life by hiding behind the woman he loved.

In addition, Paul, as the challenged party, was in control of the protocol chosen, and he chose one in which only a single shot would be exchanged. It was the best compromise between the need to meet Summervale, for whatever reason, and the minimization of the chance of being killed. He clearly understood that he was in greater danger than Summervale, and by the time they faced one another, he knew that his chance of being killed was considerably higher than the chance of his not being killed. But for all of the above reasons, he never even considered not meeting him.

Personally, I thought it was entirely consistent with his character to accept the challenge. I didn't see any need to sketch all of the above out (I catch enough grief over 'infodumps!' ), but it was all present in my thinking and, I'd hoped, sufficiently worked into the subtext of Manticoran society to support the underlying logic of his actions. Please also note that while I do think a case can be made for a code duello serving a useful purpose, I have never been blind to the ways in which such a system can be abused, and the fact that Manticore has one does not mean that I (or, for that matter, Honor) think it is a Good Thing.

I'd originally anticipated that the entire series would be done in about eight books. Obviously, I anticipated . . . poorly. I hadn't realized the extent to which readers would take Honor to their hearts, nor had I accurately visualized just how big and detailed the Honorverse was going to get.

          Bearing that caveat in mind, I will only say that as of Storm from the Shadows, we're about halfway through my original storyline for the entire series. My current estimate is that the Honorverse will go on for at least another five to ten novels. You should note, however, that what I had projected as taking eight books has now taken fifteen, so I suppose it's entirely possible that I may be just a bit off. [G]

I do not intend, for fairly obvious reasons, I believe, to go into any discussion of future political developments in the Star Kingdom at this time. But if you're truly curious about precisely how treecat intelligence compares to human intelligence, then I have a few morsels for you. Be warned that not all of this may ever find expression in the novels, given that there is a limit to the human-cat interactions which could make all the similarities and dissimilarities apparent to the humans in anything like a short period of time.

All right, first a few words on memory singers. As I imagine you have already concluded from the short fiction which has been published, memory singers are extremely important to treecat clans. Their more obvious function is to serve as the repository of the collective wisdom and history of their species. The essential requirements to become a memory singer are an extremely strong mind voice, an ability to grasp of the nuances of other cats' mind glows with extreme acuity, an effectively \photographic memory," and the ability to project remembered mind voices and mind glows with the utmost fidelity. Normally, a very strong personality and what we might call "command presence" is bound up with the sort of mind and outlook which can satisfy the above qualifications, which further helps explain why senior memory singers are awarded so much weight when they confer with the other elders of a clan. In a very real sense, the treecats' history is truly a living entity, which moves from avatar to avatar as new generations of memory singers receive it from their predecessors and prepare to pass it on to their successors. Along the way, some of the more distant memory songs begin to lose their fine detail and resolution, and evens which do not make their way into memory songs at all are completely lost to the treecats. What this boils down to is that the portions of their history which they know have an intimacy and immediacy which no human can never match, but that there are much larger gaps in their knowledge of their history than is the case in post-oral tradition human societies.

There is also, however, an additional function of memory singers which in its own way is even more vital to the health and future development of the treecat community, and helps explain the reason why they are so intensely venerated and protected. The memory singers are not merely the repositories of history, but also the teachers of new knowledge.

I suppose that the fairest way to compare treecat intelligence to human intelligence is to say that the two are basically equivalent but function in quite different ways. Even the most intuitive human abilities pale beside the way that treecats process and interpret information. A treecat does not input, correlate, and evaluate data in the same way human does. They are far more likely to depend on their ability to perceive the emotion behind the thought (where humans are concerned; where other treecats are concerned, they perceive the thought itself, of course) and to form what a human might describe as a near-instant gestalt. This is one reason why it was so difficult for Climbs Quickly to reason his way through to an understanding of the bond which had formed between him and Stephanie Harrington. It was far outside the normal parameters of his species' experience, so he had no existing knowledge base to guide him, yet the fact that the telepathic channel was not available to him virtually shut down half of his normal information pathways and required him to approach the question on a deductive basis, which was not really comfortable fit for him or any other treecat.

In interpersonal relationships, treecats are vastly more sensitive, intuitive, and likely to comprehend intricacies and nuances than humans are, but for most of them (memory singers tend to be exceptions to this rule, but that is far from a universal case) their ability to handle those relationships is restricted to those whom they have actually met. In other words, they are masters of personal relationships, but beyond their own clans, they have a much poorer grasp of the sorts of collective relationships which make mass societies function, which helps explain why a race of telepaths and empaths has not evolved a societal matrix more complex than that of the extended clan.

The plain fact is that treecats are not exceptionally innovative, even in matters of purely social evolution. Once you step beyond the social arena (which, after all, is where they excel) they become even less innovative. As a rule, their first response to any new situation is to attempt to apply existing custom or solutions to it, and they become uneasy when they are unable to do so. When the humans first arrived on Sphinx as a permanent presence, the treecats recognized the potential danger which human technology posed to them and also that they themselves had nothing which might act as a counterweight to human tools and weapons if the situation turned ugly on them, and so they adopted the strategy of observation and concealment which lasted until Climbs Quickly met Stephanie Harrington. Their uneasiness over their inability to get a "handle" on human psychology and intentions (which was made infinitely worse for them by the fact that humans appeared to be mute race, as they were unable to "speak" in any way a treecat could understand) was also a major factor in their standoffish attitude. In addition, treecats -- because they are telempathic -- tend to be extremely consensual (by human standards) when it comes to choosing courses in action, which means that in potential threat situations the reaction of the species as a whole tends to err on the side of caution, as was demonstrated by the reaction of Climbs Quickly's clan elders once Stephanie spotted him. In addition, it usually takes something fairly extreme to cause treecats to alter an existing pattern of behavior. You might say that they rely very heavily on the concept of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it."

Compared to humans, treecats -- although in most ways they possess something between 90 and 95 percent as "much" intelligence as humans -- produce perhaps 1/10 as many individuals, proportionately, who have what we might call innovating mindsets. Their intelligence also tends to lie within a narrower band then human intelligence, with comparatively few individuals who fall very far below or very far above the median. In short, treecats Leonardo da Vincis are very, very rare, and "village idiots" are equally rare. As individuals, treecats are very unlikely to make great leaps forward, but in the rare occurrences when a treecat possesses both the ability to innovate and what one might call "genius," the fact that he or she has on the rest of his species is far more profound than the effect a similar human could have on humanity as a whole. The reason for this is the existence of the memory singers. Literally anything a treecat can learn or conceptualize can be passed on in its entirety to any other treecat via a memory singer. It does not necessarily follow that every treecat who receives a concept or knowledge through a memory singer will be able to use it as effectively as any other treecat, because there are levels of ability in all things. But this does mean that when the rare treecat genius comes along, his or her accomplishments can be added to the intellectual armory of his clan -- and spread beyond his clan through the traditional interacting of memory singers -- far more rapidly and completely than would be possible in a human society. This is precisely what made Climbs Quickly and Sings Truly so extremely valuable to their clan and to their species as a whole. Sings Truly, in particular, was not simply an innovator of genius, but was also a memory singer in her own right, which both gave her very high prestige and made her particularly effective in spreading her innovations throughout all treecats.  By the same token, Samantha -- who is very similar to her in both "intellectual stature" and inherent ability as a memory singer -- is perhaps even more important to her people than Sings Truly, even though she has never assumed the formal mantle of a memory singer.

There are certain areas in which treecats do not and probably never will equal human capabilities, just as humans will never be telepaths or (with a few significant exceptions) empaths -- or certainly never on a scale which will conceivably equaled the abilities of treecats. One major treecat "disability" which probably precludes their ever developing a high-tech society of their own, is a fundamental inability to grasp higher mathematics. It is significant that a society which has been around for thousands upon thousands of years still refers to numbers in terms of "hands of hands" and has never developed a written form of mathematics. Obviously, this has strong implications for all areas of advanced human technology. It is possible, that this inability will begin to ease if and when the treecats do completely internalize the concept of written language. It is also possible that sufficiently persistent humans will be able to teach a treecat someday to transcend the current limitations of his species, and if that happens, the existence of the memory singers means that it would constitute effectively a species-wide breakthrough. Of course, it is always possible that the treecats will never approach human levels of ability in math.

For the foreseeable future, certainly, treecats will continue to regard human technology much as they have for the past several centuries. They will probably learn to use certain human tools more effectively and confidently than is currently the case, and they will not be actively uncomfortable in the presence of humans' machines and tools, but they will regard those devices as being uniquely "two-leg" in nature. On the social front, treecats will almost certainly become much more deeply integrated into human society as a whole, using their empathic abilities and their intuitive grasp of complex personal interrelationships to make themselves invaluable in such professions as psychology, politics, dispute arbitration, "social services," the law, etc.  The precise effect which this will have upon their social and political standing is, of course, something which I have no intention of telling you about at this time.

I will add just one more thing. The Ninth Amendment of the Constitution establishes treecats as the native sentient race of Sphinx, reserves just over one-third of the total planetary surface for their sole possession, and grants them the legal status of minor children under the direct protection of the Crown. It does not grant them citizenship in the Star Kingdom of Manticore, enfranchise them as voters, or in any other way contemplate their full integration into the human society of the Star Kingdom. This is not to say that such integration is absolutely ruled out by the Constitution, only that it is not guaranteed or provided for, and that it is quite likely that it would be necessary to further amend the Constitution in order to make treecats citizens or subjects of the Crown. It probably also would require a degree of planet-wide social integration which treecats have not yet attained in order to provide anything like a representative body of treecats empowered to speak for the race as a whole if they were invited to become subjects of Queen Elizabeth.