The latest novel in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, Mission of Honor, was released on June 22. It entered the New York Times Best Seller List at #13; hardly surprising, as all new Weber books have made their way onto the prestigious list for at least a decade. Starting out with a novel based on a board game, Insurrection (with Steve White) and his first solo novel, Mutineer’s Moon, both published in 1988, Weber has since become a space opera phenomenon, with now over forty books and numerous short stories to his credit.

Weber’s runaway success really began with the publication of On Basilisk Station, the first book in what is now known as the Honorverse, in 1992. Since then, the Honorverse has grown to encompass 16 novels and 4 attendant anthologies, and shows no signs of slowing down. But while Honor may be the flagship of Weber’s impressive fleet, he has -- to extend the metaphor -- more than one useful hull design at his command. There’s the Prince Roger series (with John Ringo), the Multiverse series (with Linda Evans) and his work in Eric Flint’s 1632 series, as well as his own Safehold series -- the most recent of which, A Mighty Fortress, made it to best-seller #9 on that New York Times list.

Here, David Weber talks Honor, Safehold, Prince Roger, history, religion, politics, thalassocracies (yes, that is a word) and what’s up next in his many and varied universes.

GS: First of all, I’d like to ask you a favor: please, please can you let Scotty Tremaine live?

DW: I make no promises. [G] Given the fact that I was planning on killing Honor herself when I originally projected the series, I think it's pretty apparent that no one gets a "free pass" in the Honorverse. Having said that, there are indeed several characters who I would be very hesitant to kill, and Scotty is one of them.

GS: Yes, you do have a well-known penchant for giving us fleshed-out and fully-realized characters we come to know and care about before you abruptly kill them (particularly in the Honorverse: I still hold a grudge against you and Eric Flint for Jack McBryde in Torch of Freedom -- not to mention Mission of Honor’s wholesale slaughter). Does it pain you to lose these characters, or do you know from the outset they’re unlikely to survive and so don’t get too attached? Did you ever kill off someone and then miss them and wish you hadn’t?

DW: It often pains me to lose a character, especially one who's been with me for quite a while. The longer you spend writing about the "people in your head," the more real they become for you. In some cases -- like Paul Tankersley's [Honor Harrington’s first love, killed in Field of Dishonor - Ed.] or, for that matter, Jack McBryde's -- I know that a character is going to die before that character is ever developed fully, whether in my own head or in the novels.

One would think that knowing a character is doomed would help to insulate the writer from "character identification," but it doesn't work that way in my case. In order to fully develop a character, to create a person the reader is going to identify with (and miss when he's gone), the writer has to invest a lot in the character himself. He has to be someone the writer cares about if he's going to make the reader care about him. The purpose behind the decision to allow a character important to the reader to die is usually an effort to produce a significant impact on the reader. To affect the reader and involve him even more deeply in the story and with the surviving characters. To demonstrate to the reader the impact which the loss of friends and loved ones has on the surviving characters in the story. For me, at least, the decision to hit the reader with the death of a character he or she cares about is never casual, never "offhand." And I recognize that achieving my goal requires me to care about the character, because I can't convince the reader to care about him if I don't. All of which means that, in response to the second portion of your question, I do, indeed, often miss someone I've killed in a book. I don't usually "wish I hadn't killed him" from the authorial perspective, but I do often wish the character was still alive for me to continue to interact with.

GS: Sometimes the deaths we most mourn happen on the nominal “other” side of the conflict; you have a gift for making us feel sympathetic towards your protagonists’ enemies, making us realize that good people can exist on both sides. What first made you want to get inside the heads of the opposition?

DW: I've always wanted to "get inside the heads of the opposition." I think a lot of it comes from the fact that I'm a historian by inclination and training. One of the things a good historian has to do is to understand that the people on both sides of any conflict are still people, with all of the strengths and frailties that entails. That doesn't mean "everyone else in the world is just like us," because they aren't. In fact, people have gotten into a lot of trouble by assuming that folks on the other side of some dispute or conflict understand that conflict in the same terms that they do when they are actually coming at it from entirely different perspectives which by their very nature have to be mutually incompatible. I'm not a great fan of postmodern relativism, but the truth is that "reality" can be different things for different people, even if they're looking at exactly the same situation, if their fundamental starting points are significantly different. At the same time, of course, as someone (I think it may have been Jimmy Buffett) once put it, the truly great hatreds are those between people who are just alike and can't stand to admit it, and that's something a historian has to bear in mind as well.

From a writer's perspective, and especially from the perspective of someone who writes military-based fiction, I think there's something of a moral responsibility to avoid painting conflicts in strictly black and white terms. Some conflicts truly can approach a pure "Good-versus-Evil" basis, but they're extraordinarily rare, and I think we do ourselves a disservice if we think in terms of only those sorts of conflicts. I think a writer has a responsibility to make that clear. And I also think a writer has a responsibility to avoid trivializing the costs of war. If you don't "get inside the heads of the opposition," if you don't make the point to your reader that the people on the other side of the firing line are just as real, just as import to the people they love and who love them back, then the "good guys" are only shooting targets on a pistol range. They aren't killing "real" people, and that both trivializes the cost of war and turns the story you're trying to tell into a sort of "splatter pornography." It makes it "all right" to blow away hundreds or thousands -- or millions -- of opponents as if in some sort of video game.

GS: It’s not just the soldiers and warriors--we often see inside the heads of various politicians of all stripes, as well. In fact, your books are filled with just as much political intrigue as carnage, and you seem to favor constitutional monarchies along with at least some form of hereditary aristocracy… is this an accurate reflection of your own political yearnings?

DW: I'm not sure that I'd say that I "favor constitutional monarchies." Or, at least, that I favor them over other forms of government. Admittedly, Manticore, Grayson, and the Andermani Empire are all monarchical systems with overt hereditary aristocracies, but there are a lot of other political entities in the "Honorverse" which aren't monarchical, and the Republic of Haven is currently in the process of reclaiming representative democracy. In the collaborations I've done with Steve White [the Starfire series, based on the board game - Ed.], the only monarchy (and it's an absolute monarchy, not a constitutional one) is the Khanate of Orion, and in the Safehold books, the original Terran Federation was certainly not a monarchy.

At the same time, speaking once again from my historian's perspective, human beings have been governed by monarchies of one sort or another for a heck of a lot longer than they've governed themselves through democracies or republics. Personally, I suspect that the conditions which created monarchical forms of government in the past are likely to reemerge once humanity starts spreading across entirely new solar systems. I think that ultimately the trend will be towards seeing those monarchies gradually transform into either constitutional monarchies or into outright republics or democracies, but that doesn't mean we won't see the monarchies (whether the monarch is called a "king" or not) reemerging as a stage in the evolutionary process of a brand new star nation somewhere.

I suppose that from a literary perspective, since I tend to write about military characters and about characters who take responsibility and act personally to discharge it, a hierarchical system which puts them in a position to act decisively is what you might call a "comfortable fit" for me. And, finally, one of the huge advantages of writing about systems which have hereditary monarchies and aristocracies is that the writer can't solve his character's problems by having an election. Monarchical systems with hereditary aristocracies allow for entrenched opposition that can't be resolved by a simple resort to the ballot box, and they also lend themselves well to situations in which patronage can be used to advance a character's fortune . . . or provide an "unjust" and arbitrary barrier a character has to overcome.