ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 13, 1997 TAG: 9703130012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER THE ROANOKE TIMES
David Weber, writer guest of honor at Blacksburg's 14th annual Technicon gathering, has created a far-future nonsexist culture in his "Honor Harrington" novels.
Nobody who ever met David Weber would confuse him with being a woman.
Weber is big, bearded and boisterous in a thoroughly male manner. He once put a knife-wielding mugger to flight in a Baltimore parking garage. But some fans of his "Honor Harrington" novels, who have never seen him, insist that he is a woman writing under a man's name.
No man, they say, could write women characters so convincingly - not only Harrington but the supporting casts in his stories, where women handle fully 50 percent of the action.
Weber, who lives in Greenville, S.C., will be the writer guest of honor at Technicon 14, a science fiction convention starting at 3 p.m. Friday and continuing until 4 p.m. Sunday, at the Best Western Red Lion Inn in Blacksburg.
Steve Bennett will be the artist guest and S. John Ross, gaming guest. Other participants include Blacksburg comics artist Kevin Sharpe, and Fred Eichelman of Salem, a retired educator who has been active in science fiction fandom for decades. Eichelman will lead a panel on fandom in Southwest Virginia.
Admission at the door for all three days is $25 for the general public, $15 for Virginia Tech students, and $20 for college or secondary school students. One-day admission is $15.
Weber takes claims that the Harrington novels could only be written by a woman as compliments that he gets it right.
He has written six of them so far: "On Basilisk Station," "The Honor of the Queen," "The Short Victorious War," "Field of Dishonor," "Flag in Exile" and "Honor Among Enemies." Another, tentatively titled "In Enemy Hands," is in the hands of Baen Books, his publisher.
The books have proved popular enough to stay in print, quite an accomplishment for the short shelf-life of most paperbacks. "Honor Among Enemies" was the first to come out as a hardback.
Harrington is a military officer in the ranks of a star-spanning space navy, opposed by a similarly ambitious republic based loosely on 19th-century France. In fact, Honor's adventures have been compared by critics to those of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, who rises from midshipman to admiral in the British navy of those times. Weber also draws on the real-life exploits of British Adm. Horatio Nelson, whose victory over Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 made Britain the world's dominant sea power.
Honor looks completely different on the cover of each book (on one of them, she resembles Michael Jackson). Weber's conception of her is a slightly Oriental Sigourney Weaver, with the body of Linda Hamilton from the "Terminator II" film.
"There were two things that I always wanted to do in my life I wanted to teach and I wanted to write," Weber said when he was a writer guest at another Virginia convention. But after teaching under an assistantship at Appalachian State University, where he had done some work on a master's thesis, he found that he was uncomfortable in a classroom.
His first story, written when he was a child, told of a drunk who sold his soul to Beelzebub "He gets down there to hell and it's really not all that bad," Weber said.
At age 16, he swept the top prizes in a local arts festival writing contest in the category for ages 16-22. "I owe part of it to my English teacher, and part of it to my mother," he said.
, "The Disinherited," "Legacy," "Debt of Ages," and is now at work on "Prince of Sunrise."
In the early 1980s, Weber met Steve White, a Charlottesville resident who had written a blistering critique of a war game Weber authored. The two hit it off after Weber responded to the letter. They ended up co-authoring two novels based on the game and are working on a third.
Weber also has a separate series of novels - "Mutineers' Moon," "The Armageddon Inheritance" and "Heirs of Empire," as well as an epic fantasy, "Oath of Swords," and a nonseries novel, "Path of the Fury." Again, he worked with publisher Jim Baen to cut some of them.
"My problem really and truly is that too many things suggest novels to me," Weber said. "I think you can reach a point where you drain your tank." He obviously has not reached it yet.
Weber, who has been a key guest at conventions in other parts of Virginia, recalled a time before he understood fandom when his older brother, Michael, went to conventions.
"I felt rather superior to all these silly people," Weber said. "But he was right. He was right. Fans are pretty - well, let us say, interesting."
They can also serve as an early-warning system to writers "when we begin to take ourselves too seriously," he said. "When we write, every one of us climbs onto a soapbox. We may not mean to, that may not be our main objective, but we can't help doing it. The bottom line is we are entertainers."
Further information on Technicon 14 is available by calling 951-2610.
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (heasdshot) Weberby CNB