Hornblower Canon Stories – Author’s Notes

Although they are not all interdependent, these stories can be read as a loose series, arranged here in chronological order beginning at the end of HH2 and incorporating canon from the later books.

These are not happy stories. They involve bitterness, disillusionment, homophobia, corruption and chances lost forever. It is not a particularly flattering portrayal of Horatio Hornblower (or of Edward Pellew), and not heading to a happily ever after.

It is a Live Kennedy Universe, because I needed Archie’s perspective on events, but it’s not leading to a joyful reunion.

And it contains slash elements, although not in all the stories, but the emphasis is chiefly on contemporary prejudice and its warping effects.

If you don’t like the sound of that then I do have other stories further down the mainpage

If you are still here, then I’ll explain that this series grew out of my profound dissatisfaction with the end of ‘Retribution’, not so much for what actually happened (although I do find the universe a lot less interesting shorn of the relationship between Horatio and Archie), as with the fact that we were apparently expected to feel the same way about Horatio afterwards.

My own reaction was that when Horatio accepted the verdict of the court-martial he subscribed to everything Archie hated, displayed a profound inability to learn from events by reverting to the same attitude he had had at the beginning of ‘Mutiny’, and lost the integrity and moral courage that had always made him an admirable character despite his faults. Basically I lost respect for him at that point, and I lost any ability to believe him capable of giving worthwhile loyalty to anyone or anything except a service which didn’t deserve it. This wasn’t helped by the fact that when I read the books I found myself more and more inclined to dislike Forester’s Hornblower as the series went on, and found the Admiral Hornblower of the last book to be precisely the kind of officer Archie Kennedy would dislike. (I wasn’t convinced he and his wife would live happily ever after either)

Then there were things which just made no sense to me at all, like Pellew’s allowing Hammond to bulldoze him into a scapegoat hunt (if you want to know ‘what else could he have done?’ then the second half of my story ‘The Trousers of Time’ has an exploration of this) or Hornblower’s bland reaction to Hammond in HH3, which looked like he’d forgotten all about the court-martial.

I could have simply written fixits, but instead I felt a strong urge to explore why these characters were behaving the way they were, and also to write out what I hated about ‘Retribution’ (and HH3) and make it clear why I hated it.

So this is the result. If you want to read on then you know what to expect.

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