Book Note: David Weber, Flag in Exile

This is book 5 of the "Honor Harrington" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Honor heads back to Grayson after her duel with Pavel Young (the Navy has put her on the beach). Religious fanatics there cause her immense injury. In the end they lose spectacularly. I'm particularly looking forward to the sword duel at the end.

Yep, that was fun. My memory seems to be pretty accurate. The religious fanatics are written very well; I almost believe in them, which is more than I can sometimes manage for the real ones in the real world. Their refrain is "They made me do it" and "I'm doing the Lord's will". It's some kind of pathology. We need to be able to recognize people suffering from it, and cure them, or at least effectively isolate them from society.

There's an Author's Note at the end, noting that this was written before an unmentioned event (but he means the Oklahoma City bombing) but published after, and that the sabotage of the school dome in this book was the worst thing he could think of but that the real world had managed worse. Given that I'm finishing this on the one-week anniversary of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, that's especially apt. (And writing that, I breifly considered if the terminology would age well, and noticed myself noting that I didn't, at least, have to worry about further WTC attacks to confuse things.)