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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Off Armageddon Reef
I have mixed feelings about this book. I’m not ashamed to admit it; I am a David Weber fan. I started by reading On Basilisk Station years ago – first Baen Book I read, IIRC – and went on from there. By the time I left Secondary School, I had read and bought – the highest accolade – almost every David Weber in existence, the one exception being the fantasy books. I could just never get into them. As a struggling university student, the ebooks kept me going, and things just got better. Finally, I read this book…and I admit that I have mixed feelings. The basic plot is fairly simple; a purist might argue that there is too much explanation in the first few chapters, but never mind. Humanity is steadily being exterminated by an alien race, something that remains me alarmingly of Bootstrap, and a small core of survivors is being established a long way from the aliens. To make detection even more unlikely, the humans are being forcibly regressed to pre-tech (think Spanish Armada levels) and this will be enforced by a religion created by the nutter in charge of the efforts, someone who thinks that technology is evil. Weber fans will note a mixture of elements from Heirs Of Empire and Honor of the Queen; in many ways, the book seems like a replay of the former. Fortunately, all is not lost; the good guys have created a sentient robot (female, but changes into a man fairly quickly) to help one of the kingdoms on the planet regain the stars. Naturally, the Church does not like this idea… If you have the patience to read through it twice, you’ll see how events fit together, but lord are the enemy incompetent! Weber has done well with competent enemy characters in the past – Ester McQueen, for ex – but the villains of OAR seem almost comic-book stupid. Such a power system – the Church remaining arbiter over everything – depends upon a balance of power between the subordinate states; when one state manages to get itself into a superior position, it will eventually start bossing the Church around. The Pope has been a prisoner in Rome before. One would expect a free victory, given the tech advances introduced by ‘Merlin,’ but after that things should start getting harder… …Instead, it becomes difficult to see how the good guys can lose; Merlin has all of that technical wizardry under his command and is well-nigh invulnerable to boot. Elements of the plot that might have made it more interesting – a woman posing as a man, for ex – are left out in favour of the super-robot. It’s not exactly Daneel of Foundation fame, but it seems too easy. Part of the problem, I think, is that we know nothing about the world beforehand. I’ve said this before, when reviewing the Hell’s Gate/Hell Hath No Fury books, but the point remains the same. Readers of Honor Harrington, right from the beginning, know the world. With OAR, it’s like coming into the Honor series at Book #9; there are hundreds of names being dropped…and we don’t know how they fit together. It’s a good read. But in many ways, it lacks the charm and easy skill of its predecessors.
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