I’ll start out by saying that I enjoyed this book.

I am not a great fan of Military SF. Having narrowly avoided the draft for Viet Nam and having had friends die in mismanaged wars, I really don’t like plots where large numbers of people kill large numbers of people.

The Helmsman, Like Weber’s Honor Harrington series, is a rehash of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower character. Hornblower was the subject of 11 novels that follow the career of a naval officer during the Napoleonic wars from his start as a midshipman up to the end of his life as a retired admiral. The key parts of the series which are always copied are, 1) his rise to fame from humble roots through courage, intelligence and luck, 2) his (nearly) hopeless love affair with the aristocratic Lady Barbara, 3) his loyal companions (many of whom were killed), and 4) Hornblower’s absolute integrity.

The Helmsman, Wolf Brim, has all of these elements, as does Weber’s Harrington. I stopped reading the Weber books because the politics became ponderous, I am hoping that this does not happen to the Baldwin’s Helmsman books.

As a Hornblower pastiche (homage, copy, clone?), The Helmsman is not really science fiction. It takes a little more than spaceships and ray guns to make a science fiction story. The book was just a transposition of 19th century naval warfare to distant future space warfare. Tall masted ships turn into star ships, sails into FTL drives and cannons into energy weapons. In the thousands of years that man has been in space, ships are still steered by many men by pushing buttons and turning dials and pulling on levers. Either technology stops developing in the next few years or Baldwin is very wrong about the future. Calling a cannon an Ion blaster, or coffee Raktijino, or a rabbit a smeerp, does not make a story science fiction, but I’ve argued this before.

I think that writing stories about the Napoleonic wars is too difficult, so writers who want to continue the Hornblower saga find it easier to cast their stories in the far future where they don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of sailing a ship and firing a cannon. This isn’t a bad thing as long as you don’t start calling it real Science Fiction.

My grandfather and I shared our love for C.S. Forester’s books. I gave him an old three volume set of the first novels just before he died and he read them all twice. I got them back after they cleaned out his apartment and I enjoy dipping into them from time to time knowing that granddad read the same words on the same page.

I cannot find any reason not to like the Helmsman. I think that I have more in the series so I may be reading another one soon. (I am still on the top two shelves of my new books, which is mostly author’s starting with A and B.)