Fire Season
 |
|
| Author | David Weber |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Honor Harrington series |
| Genre | Science fiction, young adult |
| Publisher | Baen Books |
|
Publication date
|
October 15, 2012 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 368 |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | A Beautiful Friendship |
| Followed by | Treecat Wars (2013) |
Fire Season is a 2012 young adult science fiction novel by American authors David Weber and Jane Lindskold. Set in the fictional Honorverse, it is the second book in the prequel Stephanie Harrington series, part of the multi-part Honor Harrington series. It is a sequel to the 2011 A Beautiful Friendship by Weber.
Stephanie Harrington is an ancestor of the main series character Honor Harrington.
The story takes place a few years after Stephanie Harrington is adopted by a Sphinxian treecat whom she has named Lionheart (and whose name among his own people is "Climbs Quickly"). During this time, Lionheart has witnessed Stephanie grow into a clever and confident human teenager. Yet Stephanie's move into adulthood comes at crucial time on many levels. Sphinx is undergoing "Fire Season" and Stephanie and her friend Karl Zivonik are constantly on fire duty to prevent the more dangerous brush fires from endangering the human population and the treecats. She and Karl personally save two treecat twin brothers, named Left-Stripe and Right-Stripe, from such a forest fire and deliver them both to her xeno-veterinarian father for treatment. Stephanie is also forced to contend with an official anthropological survey team that arrives in the kingdom with the express purpose of studying the treecats to determine whether or not they are sentient. Stephanie takes an immediate liking to the teenage son of the survey team's lead scientist, Anders Whittaker. Unbeknownst to Stephanie, Dr. Bradford Whittaker has intentionally brought his son along for this express purpose, believing that he and his team would need to circumvent the "paternalistic" Sphinx Forestry Service and its attempts to shield the treecats and Stephanie from him and his team.
With Stephanie's fifteenth birthday approaching, Stephanie is looking forward to getting tested on an aircar and obtaining a piloting license for her birthday. However, she is disappointed to hear that her parents have already planned a birthday party for her instead. While they have already invited her colleagues from the SFS as well as Dr. Scott MacDallan, his wife Irina and his treecat companion Fisher, she is told to invite any of her friends from the hang-gliding club, as her parents feel that she needs to spend more time with kids her age. Reluctantly, she invites the kids she most gets along with as well as Jessica Pheriss, a newcomer to Sphinx. She is later horrified to discover that her mother had accidentally invited her least favorite person in the club, Trudy Franchitti, but her horror is forgotten however when her mother also says she invited Anders as well. The party is a major success, as the hang-gliding club's members land at Stephanie's freehold and eat her mother's recent botanical experiments. It takes a serious dive however, when Trudy arrogantly expresses her hope that the survey team remain impartial about the treecats, as her wealthy family has much invested in the land the treecats live on. Stephanie shows considerable maturity in answering Trudy's comments without lashing out at her for her insensitivity and finds an unexpected ally in Jessica, who also looks upon Trudy with disfavor. In the aftermath of the party, Stephanie and Jessica become friends, with Stephanie discovering the Jessica's family is both large and poor, the result of her parents' wanderlust and her father being a "drifter". She asks her mother to offer Jessica's mother a job as a research assistant in her botanical experiments. Though her mother thinks Mrs. Pheriss might be a good fit, she cautions Stephanie about charity as her experience with Trudy has proven how it can backfire.
...
Wikipedia