Fleets. They might carry brass cannons or photon torpedoes, plucky sailors or space marines, our last hope for victory against an evil empire or just a bunch of murderous assholes with smallpox. Regardless, they fascinate us. Personally, I’ve been intrigued by fleets since I first saw Ben Hur, and now I’d like to share five of my favorite books featuring fleet actions.
H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian
France is out to steal the riches of Asia, but Jack Aubrey knows that’s Britain’s job. Indeed, those riches are already in the holds of British merchant ships bound for home when Admiral Linois, one of Jack’s oldest frenemies, intercepts them with a greatly superior force of French warships. Jack’s H.M.S. Surprise, itself heading home after an aborted mission to deliver an envoy to Kampong, is the only British man-of-war close enough to help. The catch is, the dear old Surprise was only on that mission because she’s small, weak, and ancient, and so can be spared from the war in the Atlantic.
Now Jack’s little frigate must serve as flagship to an under-gunned, under-manned, and often under-captained gaggle of merchantmen as they face off against the most powerful fleet in the hemisphere, in one of the most spectacular age-of-sail naval battles in all of literature.
The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by Jack Campbell
We’ve all been in embarrassing situations. Admiral Bloch’s is that he rescued a legendary hero from a drifting cryo-pod and promptly suffered a crushing defeat under the man’s nose. Awkward. The hero in question is John “Black Jack” Geary, missing and presumed dead for a hundred years. What do you say to a man like that, when you’re a space admiral with so much egg on your face? Apparently, you say, “You’re in charge now, kthxbye.”
So, on his first day at a new job, Geary leads a fighting retreat, pursued by a large fraction of the enemy’s entire navy. Worse, with the way home cut off, the only line of withdrawal leads them deeper into enemy territory. Trapped, demoralized, and with an armada following on their heels, half of Geary’s captains want to surrender while the other half would rather charge the enemy and die in glory. He must bring them to a happy medium between capitulation and suicide, and use every trick he knows to outwit the enemy during a harrowing chase through multiple solar systems.
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Again with the French, always trying to subjugate the peaceful, freedom-loving British Empire. And this time, they brought flipping dragons. Prevented by blockade from sailing across the English Channel, Napoleon takes his invasion force over it, carried by squadrons of giant, scaly beasties. Above the waves, they clash with hastily scrambled British dragons in a battle that’s equal parts naval action, aerial dogfight, and ordinary dogfight—all teeth and claws.
In the thick of it is the dragon Temeraire, along with his rider and BFF, Will Laurence. Taken from the French when he was only an egg (because it turns out the British are, like, super good at stealing things), Temeraire’s abilities are largely unknown, even to himself. For better or worse, education will come swiftly when he’s in a fight for his life and for his adopted home.
The Short, Victorious War by David Weber
The Star Kingdom of Manticore is at a disadvantage to The People’s Republic of Haven. Compared to its militant neighbor, Manticore has fewer ships, fewer soldiers, and fewer paid holidays per calendar year. Their only advantages are a small edge in some technologies, and a large edge in one Honor Harrington.
In The Short, Victorious War, Haven sends a fleet of dreadnaughts to capture Hancock Station, a vital repair base commanded by Honor’s sexytime pal and best human friend, Paul Tankersley—her best friend overall being her cat, Nimitz. It’s still early in the war, so Haven can perhaps be forgiven for falling into one of the two classic blunders in the Honorverse. The first and most famous is “never get involved in a land war on a high-gee planet,” but only slightly less well-known is this: “you mess with Honor Harrington’s loved ones, you die.”
With a task group of relatively puny battlecruisers and support ships, Honor formulates a desperate plan to make the Havenites pay in blood for their near-inevitable victory, and just maybe buy enough time for a relief force to arrive. The plan is thrown into chaos when her admiral is killed and the cohesion of the task group falters, but Honor bypasses two senior captains to take command and steady her fleet. Because she’s Honor Fucking Harrington, that’s why, science fiction’s most audacious weirdo cat lady.
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Hexarchate voidmoth swarm commanded by an undead traitor anchored to the body of a Kel infantry captain flies into the phase transition zone between calendrical stability and calendrical rot, where a guardswarm of bannermoths detonates a radial force multiplier bomb and suddenly outnumbers the Kel swarm by five to one. And that’s not to mention the fortress full of heretics protected behind a shield of invariant ice.
One of the greatest achievements of Ninefox Gambit is that all this makes perfect sense in the book. In the Hexarchate, the laws of reality, and therefore the workings and potential of non-invariant technologies, are dependent upon consensus belief. Cheris, the aforementioned Kel captain, shows a talent for understanding zones of heretical belief—a trait which is nearly as troubling to her superiors as it is to her enemies. Jedao, the aforementioned traitor whose undying mind is chained in servitude to the Kel, is an apparent psychopath who murdered his own crew. They forgo the expected path of starring in a sitcom together, instead conducting a space battle that hinges as much upon skill with math as it does on force of firepower, and every moment is as beautiful as it is horrifying.
Robyn Bennis is a scientist living in Mountain View, CA, where she works in biotech but dreams of airships. Her debut novel, The Guns Above, is available now from Tor Books.
Add Marko Kloos books to the list
Fleets, is it?
But necessity rules, in the Navy. Anybody’s Navy. As Captain Aubrey will be the first to explain.
Good selections! The only one unfamiliar to me is the last. A couple of other “wet Navy” examples you could add include:
– The original Hornblower series by C.S. Forester. You can’t beat the ship to ship actions in the core trilogy of Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line and Flying Colours.
– The “Kydd” series by Julian Stockwin, a series that is still being added to, and one of the best written in the style of the Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin books.
And, for a real action, which might read as improbable if presented as fiction, any book about the Battle of Leyte Gulf is worth reading. Overmatched U.S. destroyers and light carriers went toe to toe with battleships of the Imperial Japanese Fleet, and fought them to a standstill, saving an extremely vulnerable amphibious operation from annihilation.
I want to add a Hornblower book to the mix, but it’s been so long since I read them that I can’t remember a specific instance of an actual fleet action (as opposed to single-ship duels). So I’ll say: Just read them all.
Also C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station has at least one large-scale engagement.
Edited to add: Ninja’d by AlanBrown above! And I’m certain I’ve read at least a few books with ancient world-style actions (triremes, etc.), but I’m having trouble coming up with examples.
If you are going to talk David Weber, you have to include the Safehold series.
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Trafalgar
I love the suggestions in the comments! Many of you have mentioned series or books that made my short list, and that I was very sad to have to cut from the final article. Tor.com really needs a feature called “25 Things”.
So many ships require the Z9M9Z to co-ordinate.
mndrew @8-
You mean “… the incaclulably uncountable mass of maulers, supported by super-dreadnoughts, spewing forth a miles-thick column of energy so raw, so stark, so incomprehensibly violent that it had to be seen to be even dimly appreciated. It simply cannot be described” needs the Z9M9Z?
it’s Patrick O’BriAn w/ an A not wit an E!!
David Drake! His Lt. Leary series is a great…reflection? pastiche? nod? to Patrick O’Brian (I always thought of Honor Harrington being more a nod to…erm…Horatio Hornblower).
“Doc” Smith and Edmond “World-Wrecker” Hamilton and Jack Williamson still are among my favorites.
Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War” is mostly ground action, but there are several space encounters. I second Cherryh, not only Downbelow Station but the Chanur stories. Great political action, great sociology, great space battles, such wonderful books.
Trowbridge and Smith’s Exordium are big fat space operas with fleets and even a mobile world base (hello, “Doc” Smith!).
And so much more. Alastair Reynolds. Peter F. Hamilton. Iain M. Banks. Ken MacLeod. Ann Leckie. Oh, so much more!
@10 – Whoops! Typo fixed, thank you!
It’s hard to beat the battle between Sleeper Service and the Affront in Iain Banks’ Excession, where Sleeper Service, one of The Culture’s Ships, whipped together a fleet of some 80,000 ships in few months.
The Earth Company fleet is a looming (often off stage) presence in Cherryh’s Alliance/Union stories, but they are out there lurking in the shadows.
In the Rissa Kerguelen-Hulzein Dynasty books by F.M. Busby the Rebel Fleet vs the evil U.E.T Fleet is the big payoff.
Oh, and the Battle of the Blackwater! Sort of …
And if we’re including smaller-scale engagements (just one or two ships per side), then there’s a nifty one in Larry Niven’s Protector.
I rate for Vernor Vinge’s A Fire on the Deep. One of the plot threads involves a lone ship trying to outrun a fleet of spaceships commanded by beautiful, xenophobic aliens while another fleet, on a mission of vengeance for the genocidal attack of the xenophobic xenomorphs, engages the pursuers.
I put off reading the book for many years, and ended up kicking myself for doing so… it still gives me goosebumps.
Dread Empire’s Fall series by Walter Jon Williams is the best in this category in my view. Start with The Praxis.
“At Dawn We Slept” and “Miracle At Midway” by Gordon Prange, about Pearl Harbor and Midway respectively, are excellent
Oh, and The Gripping Hand, sequel to Niven and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye, has some pretty intense space battles.
Bujold’s The Vor Game.
Eh, if you’re going to go for Cherryh, I’d have to say the fleet actions in Chanur’s Homecoming – particularly at the end – not only cap off the incredible rising scope of the trilogy[1], but are damn impressive in and of themselves.[2]
[1] Seriously. The trilogy starts with a single human being smuggled aboard an ordinary merchant ship (in a can of fish!), which has to sneak away and basically run for its life, while avoiding kif attention. It ends in a multi-species war that shakes the Compact to its roots, with the final battle coming in the hani’s home system – their only system, with the threat of a c-velocity rock that could take out the homeworld and effectively the whole freakin’ hani race.
[2] The Pride’s last jump still gives me chills, even just thinking about it – Chur waking while in transit, staggering up to the bridge to lock the weapons to fire on emergence, while the rest of the crew are still out cold – the only active crew in a ship of ghosts… the jangle of confused reports as the ship breaks out and the rest of the crew starts waking up, a strange captain in the hot seat…
…dang it, I’m going to have to re-read these again, aren’t I?
@21 Yes, you have to. But don’t you worry … you are not the only one. You have about 3 hour head start on me in Pride of Chanur, use it wisely. Thankfully I finished Convergence last weekend. See you in other side.
–edit: Fixed the time difference, didn’t realize the posting time wasn’t on my ‘clock’.
Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta series deals quite a bit with the ins and outs of fleet battles, more so as the fleet grows during the series.
Since we’re including historical fiction and not just SFF, I have to recommend the “Bloody Jack” series by L. A. Meyer. It’s historical fiction, during the Napoleonic war The title character is a girl who escapes from life in a London street gang by disguising herself as a boy and signing onto a British naval ship. She gets discovered eventually but then later, while in disguise again, gets taken by a press gang and ends up serving again! Here’s a link to a chapter in which they see some action – the captain of the ship she has been forced into serving on is utterly incompetent (and may be involved in smuggling) but she has been drilling her gun team on their own time.
http://www.8novels.net/Young_Adult/UndertheJollyRoger/index_20.html
I love Bloody Jack!
In a similar vein, although more fanciful, there was Tanith Lee’s Piratica (and its sequels).