Field of Dishonor

Field of Dishonor is a science fiction novel by the American writer David Weber, published in 1994 and the fourth book of the Honor Harrington series.

It is the only novel in the sequence without space warfare, and the change is deliberate: the same habits of command that kept Honor alive in battle are no use in the court-martial, the duel and the inheritance that make up this story, and the book tests whether a serving officer can survive a country's internal politics at all. Pavel Young, whose cowardice in action should have ended his career, is saved by his father's influence and then inherits his title, and his pursuit of revenge gives the plot its shape. Weber spends a good deal of the book on the mechanics of military justice and on the noble families whose standing overrides it, which gives the series' wider war a domestic counterpart. The novel follows The Short Victorious War directly, and its consequences carry into the later books about Honor's career and her relations with the Star Kingdom's aristocracy.