|
What the hell is this? Safehold is a science fiction series by best-selling author David Weber. The premise is that in the future, humanity was attacked by a bunch of genocidal aliens but one last colony fleet escaped. The colonists knew they'd need to abandon technology for a while, but were brainwashed by the colony leaders to form a religion which would prevent innovation and science so as to not get detected. (Don't worry, all this is in the prologue so I'm not spoiling too much). The protagonists are trying to rediscover science. I feel like I've read this before... If you're a big David Weber fan, you probably have! Weber's Empire from the Ashes trilogy (which I will admit to enjoying) has this exact scenario of the Space Church repressing science and space dudes coming to overthrow the Space Church with superior tech, all in one book. However, David Weber decided to turn this into an 8+ book series to make more money. I've never read any Weber before, what should I expect? Weber is currently one of those authors who makes enough money churning out giant books that no editor is going to tell him to trim any of this poo poo down. Hence you can expect a whole lot of padding, boring political machinations, and an epic battle being interrupted by an entire page describing a cannon, the sociopolitical history of cannons, and other crap interrupting your attempting to visualize a cool action scene. You can also expect to see: -The Good Kingdom of Not-Great-Britain, locked in eternal struggle with the Evil Empire of Bad Guys Who Are Bad -The Wise and Just Monarch of the Good Kingdom -The Plucky Female Protagonist -The High-Ranking Bad Guy Leader Who Is Not A Bad Guy But Just Wants To Serve His Country Last but not least, my favorite Weberism -The Good Guys' amazing tech advantage meaning they almost never lose a fight. To be fair to Weber, his earlier stuff is actually pretty fun, it's his later stuff where he's clearly escaped editorial control that sucks. I think you are wrong about this series and I want to defend it. Don't clutter up the thread with a huge flamewar, but I'm interested in hearing any defenders. Feel free to call out anything you think I'm wrong on or may be missing. So, uh, how about them spoilers? As long as they're in tags, post away!
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2016 02:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 02:08 |
|
|
This is the first book in the series, so here we go! We open with a prologue aboard a Terran Federation heavy cruiser Swiftsure, which is orbiting a newly colonized planet. Suddenly: quote:"Skipper,” Lieutenant Gabriela Henderson, the heavy cruiser’s tactical officer, had the watch, and her normally calm contralto was strained and harsh, “we’ve got bogies. Lots of bogies. They just dropped out of hyper twelve light-minutes out, and they’re headed in-system at over four hundred gravities.” Fofão’s jaw clenched. Four hundred gravities was twenty percent higher than the best Federation compensators could manage. Which pretty conclusively demonstrated that whoever these people were, they weren’t Federation units. “Strength estimate?” he asked. “Still coming in, Sir,” Henderson replied flatly. “So far, we’ve confirmed over seventy.” It turns out that these are bad aliens. quote:But then, ten years ago, a Federation survey ship had found evidence of the first confirmed advanced nonhuman civilization. No one knew what that civilization’s citizens had called themselves, because none of them were still alive to tell anyone. Humanity had been shocked by the discovery that an entire species had been deliberately destroyed. That a race capable of fully developing and exploiting the resources of its home star system had been ruthlessly wiped out. The first assumption had been that the species in question had done it to itself in some sort of mad spasm of suicidal fury. Indeed, some of the scientists who’d studied the evidence continued to maintain that that was the most likely explanation. Those holdouts, however, were a distinct minority. Most of the human race had finally accepted the second, and far more horrifying, hypothesis. They hadn’t done it to themselves; someone else had done it to them. Fofão didn’t know who’d labeled the hypothetical killers the Gbaba, and he didn’t much care. But the realization that they might exist was the reason there was a genuine and steadily growing Federation Navy these days. The next scene is the remnants of the last human fleet preparing to launch a last-ditch diversionary attempt to get one last colony fleet away from the Gbaba's war of extermination. We meet one of our protagonists. quote:Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban was a very junior officer indeed, especially for an antigerone society, to be suggesting to a four-star admiral, however respectfully, that his judgment might be less than infallible. Pei Kau-zhi felt absolutely no temptation to point that out to her, however. First, because despite her youth she was one of the more brilliant tactical officers the Terran Federation Navy had ever produced. Second, because if anyone had earned the right to second-guess Admiral Pei, it was Lieutenant Commander Alban. Nimue transfers to a suicide ship, says her goodbyes (which are very emotional between two people the reader has never met before this scene and has no reason to care about). The fleets prepare for battle while Pei and Nimue muse on the technological disparity between the two sides. quote:“You know,” he said, turning away from the display to face Lieutenant Commander Alban and Captain Joseph Thiessen, his chief of staff, “we came so close to kicking these people’s asses. Another fifty years—seventy-five at the outside—and we could have taken them, ‘star-spanning empire’ or no.” quote:“Do you think we gave them enough of a shock that they may start actively innovating, Sir?” Thiessen asked after a moment. Pei looked at him and raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged with a crooked smile. “I’d like to think we at least made the bastards sweat, Sir!” We get an infodump of the history of the conflict - the Federation fought bravely but was crushed by superior numbers. The Gbaba learned English but refused to communicate. The last Terran fleet launches its attack while Nimue swears that some day the Gbaba will pay for their sins. We cut to the planet Safehold, where we'll be spending the rest of the series. Timothy Harrison is interrupted by his great-grandson Matthew yelling about an angel. Matthew tells Timothy the yellow Angel Signal Light is on (yes, really) and Timothy sends Matthew out to gather all the villagers. We get a bit about how Timothy and his wife were directly created by God upon the planet Safehold 65 years ago. The angel lands in some sort of aircraft on the special angel platform no one else is allowed to touch and tells them he is going to give them the directions of "God and the Archangel Langhorne". We cut to Pei Kau-yung (the brother of the admiral from earlier) who is watching an argument between Dr Eric Langhorne, the colony administrator, and his sister Pei Shan-wei over whether the colonists should remember the Gbaba, or whether the colonists will be trapped into forgetting about technology to hide from the Gbaba. It turns out the religion of "Archangel Langhorne" was actually created by modifying the memories of the colonists. Shan-wei argues that humans will eventually innovate and fight back, threatens to upset the belief system, and leaves. Kau-yung gives us an infodump about the colony history. Long story short, the colonists flew through space, found this planet, dismantled all their advanced technology, and all agreed to get their memories altered. Unfortunately for the colonists, Langhorne and the head psychologist, Adoree Bedard made some changes. quote:The sleeping colonists had volunteered to have false memories of a false life implanted. They hadn’t volunteered to be programmed to believe Operation Ark’s command staff were gods. We cut back to Tim and Matt as they are receiving terrible news from the angel - Shan-wei has sinned against God and seeks to rule instead of serve! They need to remain faithful, and vigilant. Then a friggen orbital bombardment comes down from the heavens and the angel gets spooked and flies away. We cut to yet another viewpoint - robot Nimue Alban! It turns out that despite having died in the space battle, the Pei family stuffed her uploaded brain into a robot with superhuman capabilities. Fortunately, instead of progressing the plot we get a three-page infodump about the robots, which are basically like the bodies in Avatar but robots instead. Kau-yung left her a recording, which spells out that she's around to help teach science and technology to fight the Gbaba once the colony has hid out enough for it to be safe. He gives her the lowdown and ends with this: quote:Besides myself, only one other person knows of your existence, and he and I have an appointment with Administrator Langhorne and the Administrative Council tomorrow evening. I don’t know if it will do any good, but Langhorne, Bédard, and their toadies are about to discover that they aren’t the only people with a little undisclosed military hardware in reserve. There won’t be any survivors. It won’t bring back Shan-wei, or any of the rest of my—our—friends, but at least I’ll take a little personal satisfaction out of it. That finally finishes the prologue. My Thoughts That was our 51-page prologue (out of 789) which sets up where the story is going to go. I want to emphasize that humans restricting technology to make themselves gods is in no way a bad premise. It's even been done before, in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. In fact, I'm going to be comparing a lot of this series to Lord of Light because they share a similar theme of men setting themselves up as false gods on a colony world. Is it an exact comparison? No, it's probably not even a fair one. I'm going to make it anyway throughout this series, because I think Lord of Light got a lot right where Safehold got a lot wrong.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2016 02:09
|
|
|
So after skimming my way through nine loving huge books full of meetings, conferences, plotting, lunch dates, breathless explanations of 'new' technologies that any of the readers should be well acquainted with by now, soldier characters who are about to die grumbling about how they're hot/cold/wet/dry moments before the bullet hits, and the occasional sliver of actual interesting action, the series has finally ended. By taking such a hard turn in the last fifty pages that you can smell the burning rubber. I thought for sure that a tenth book was on the way given the generally glacial pace, but apparently Weber just said "gently caress it, done now."
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2016 04:35
|
|
|
Valatar posted:So after skimming my way through nine loving huge books full of meetings, conferences, plotting, lunch dates, breathless explanations of 'new' technologies that any of the readers should be well acquainted with by now, soldier characters who are about to die grumbling about how they're hot/cold/wet/dry moments before the bullet hits, and the occasional sliver of actual interesting action, the series has finally ended. *Blinks* *Blinks Hard* W-w-wait. Weber finished a series.  Welp. Guess the End Times are upon us.
|
|
#
?
Dec 20, 2016 14:40
|
|
|
Don't get too excited. He says in the postscript that Merlin's story isn't over.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2016 07:23
|
|
