Ashes of Victory

Author's Afterword

One of the problems with creating background for a series as long as this one is the difficulty in maintaining continuity and internal consistency. I know of a few places where I've failed in that regard (most of them, fortunately, minor), and I feel quite certain that there are those among Honor Harrington's readers who could point out several more instances to me.

In the course of writing this novel, unfortunately, I discovered yet another, all on my own.

In the background notes, which were published as part of the appendix in More Than Honor, page 331, it is specifically stated that the Prime Minister of Manticore must command a majority in the House of Commons. This is inaccurate. When I first created the Star Kingdom's political structure, I had envisioned the framers of its Constitution as kinder, gentler, more enlightened souls than they turned out to be once I got into actually writing them. In fact, they were much more interested in maintaining their monopoly on political power than I had initially envisioned, and I decided that they would have deliberately written the Constitution to give themselves and their descendants (i.e., the House of Lords) control of the premiership. I had changed the relevant section in my tech bible for the series by the time I wrote Flag in Exile, but somehow an earlier version of the tech bible got sent to Baen for the More Than Honor appendix... and I never noticed it when I proofed the galleys.

So those of you who thought to yourselves, "Hey! This is wrong!" when Elizabeth was forced to accept a governent formed by the Opposition deserve a pat on the back for catching the inconsistency between what happened in the book and what had previously been published.

Or, as Shannon Foraker might have said:

"Oops!"