Those of you who know me, know that I have no qualms about the fact that I cry at Hallmark commercials or when Lassie comes home. There's some incongruity to it, a huge man, with a definite dark side, who can be moved to tears for the silliest things. I don't know how many times I've seen The Wrath of Khan or The Return of the Jedi but I still cry at the final scene between Kirk and Spock, "The needs of the many..." or the "I want to look upon you with my own eyes," as Darth Vader transforms back into Anakin Skywalker.

I saw the movie Titanic twice in the theater (on the huge screen at the Eastgate theater that I miss so much). The first time through there were water works as expected. There is a scene where an Irish mother, is in her steerage cabin with her two children, knowing they have no hope as the ship goes down, doing her best to comfort them in their last moments. That definitely got to me. I'd gone through most of the film without tears, and then Cameron did that and I was a goner.

The second time through the film, the water works started far earlier, There's a scene as everyone is boarding the ship where we see that Irish mother and her children getting ready to board, and that scene had almost the same impact on me as the scene later in the film, because I could see these happy, full-of-life people who were looking forward to a better world and a better life for themselves, and I knew what was going to happen.

I find myself in a similar position now. Regular readers know my devotion to the fictional Honor Harrington, and that I'm working my way through David Weber's books about her for a second time. Currently I'm in the fourth book, Field of Dishonor. In it some very bad things happen to Honor and those whom she loves and cares for. The first time through I shed tears at the penultimate acts of evil. This time through I find myself sitting on my deck reading and mentally screaming "DON'T! Pay fucking attention and DON'T RESPOND!" The tears have come far earlier, because I know, I know that no amount of screaming on my part will change the inevitable outcome.

If you've never read Honor Harrington, I encourage you to do so, even if you don't like science fiction--I don't--I encourage you to read them. David Weber has given us an amazing woman in Honor Stephanie Harrington, and despite the tears, my life is the richer for it.

First a bit of background. I do not read science fiction. It's just something that generally does not interest me. However, I am very interested in copyright, and other forms of intellectual property rights. That lack of interest, and interest collided several years ago when Baen, a publisher of science fiction and fantasy novels, published a book called War of Honor by the author, David Weber.The book came with a bound-in CD that included the complete texts of all the previous books in the series, and that work was being made freely re-distributable. I wasn't interested in the book, but I needed to support the concept so I placed my order with Amazon and waited.

The book arrived, and I checked out both it, and the CD. I put the CD in my computer to see what kind of job they'd done on all this "stuff." They'd done a very very good job, and I started reading the first book of the series On Basilisk Station in it's electronic form. I was surprised to find I was hooked after the first few pages. Reading online is a pain, so I started getting the books from the library and bookstore as fast as I could devour them.

Weber is very skillful at doing something that, in my experience, has been quite rare he is able to portray noble "bad" guys, and very ignoble "good" guys. Throughout all this is one constant, Honor Harrington. Honor is a woman who believes in doing what is right, not because she has to, but because it is just that, right. She believes in doing things well because doing them well is the correct thing to do, because doing things right and doing things well, no matter the difficulty, or the cost, brings honour, not to herself, but to others.

I've read all the books in the series once, and just started over again at the beginning. I'm passing them to my oldest son, and hoping that Ms. Harrington will have as great an impact on him as she has on me.

If you are interested, you may read the first two books in the series online at the Baen Free Library:

On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen