The Great Geek Manual

Book: Off Armageddon Reef
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1500-9

Author: David Weber
Series: Safehold Series
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Space Opera
Release: January 9, 2007
Length: 608 pages (Hardcover)

Rating: B

Verdict

For fans of the Dragonriders of Pern and Guardians of the Flame series, picking up Off Armageddon Reef is going to be like meeting an old friend all over again. The book embraces the best traditions of the fantasy, military fiction, and science fiction genres, then recombines them into a single story in which a character with contemporary sensibilities satisfies all of a reader’s impulses to reach into the story and single-handedly rebuild a fantasy society into an idealized modern civilization.

With this, his first entry in the Safehold series, Weber clearly establishes himself as the next master of the space opera. However, readers jonesing for an action fix should look elsewhere. The thrill of this series are strictly cerebral in nature.

Pick it up, but stick to the audiobook, otherwise you may have difficulty getting all the way through it.

Pros: Weber’s wars unfold like a game of Starcraft, with a lot of the emphasis focused on the build-up of military forces rather than the war itself, which lends itself to a distinctly nerdy read. His greatest strength is telling a story on a global scale, following multiple elements of his story concurrently. Highly engrossing.
Cons: Weber’s books are beginning to strongly resemble each other. His characters within this series are very poorly differentiated, often speaking and reasoning alike. Also, most of the story is told through monologs and info dumps, which get very tiresome.

Synopsis

In Brief: Simply put, this series is The Dragonriders of Pern with a navy rather than dragons and an android (PICA) rather than a computer (AIVAS). An starship officer from the war that extinguished humanity wakes up in an android body on a world that has reverted to medieval technology. Equipped with technology that seems magical to the world’s inhabitants, she must find a way to guide the world’s inhabitants through a Napoleonic navel war to help them achieve their own Protestant reformation. Author David Weber has explained that he set out to create a series in which high technology fused with “the feel of a ‘last defender of elfland,’ but without the urban fantasy matrix.”

Official: Humanity pushed its way to the stars – and encountered the Gbaba, a ruthless alien race that nearly wiped us out.

Earth and her colonies are now smoldering ruins, and the few survivors have fled to distant, Earth-like Safehold, to try to rebuild. But the Gbaba can detect the emissions of an industrial civilization, so the human rulers of Safehold have taken extraordinary measures: with mind control and hidden high technology, they’ve built a religion in which every Safeholdian believes, a religion designed to keep Safehold society medieval forever.

800 years pass. In a hidden chamber on Safehold, an android from the far human past awakens. This “rebirth” was set in motion centuries before, by a faction that opposed shackling humanity with a concocted religion. Via automated recordings, “Nimue” – or, rather, the android with the memories of Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban – is told her fate: she will emerge into Safeholdian society, suitably disguised, and begin the process of provoking the technological progress which the Church of God Awaiting has worked for centuries to prevent.

Review

David Weber does military science fiction very well, as he has proven repeatedly with his Honor Harrington series, but the scope of Off Armageddon Reef reaches far beyond military science fiction to include just about everything but the kitchen sink. It’s a story of naval warfare couched in a story of global political intrigue, wrapped in a space opera, with all the accoutrements of a fantasy novel. The book incorporates an an alien race that exterminates humanity, men who pass themselves off as archangels with the use of advanced technology, an android who poses as a samurai of the opposite sex, a medieval kingdom, a technology-oppressing church, political intrigue, a British-style navy, and oh yeah, dragons. At first blush, it seems like renaissance faire costume inventory, but Weber does a fairly convincing job bringing the elements together in very satisfying way.

For that alone, the man ought to earn a medal. However, readers prone to nitpicking and those seeking some literary depth in their characters would be best served looking elsewhere for their science fiction fix, because, while Weber weaves an intricate tale, his plot is filled with the types of holes, missed possibilities, and oversights Star Trek fans used to love to raise during convention, and his expansive cast has an unfortunate tendency to be a group of shallowly developed, like-minded characters.

In addition, Weber tends to deliver most of his story through excruciatingly detailed descriptions of political situations delivered via character dialog (aka “infodumps”) that are bound to leave readers wondering where Weber was the day the rest of us were having “show, don’t tell” pounded into us by our English teachers. As such, the center of the novel tends to drag in place, but never so much so that there is any temptation to stop before the climatic naval battle that ends the book.

The worst part of this book and both of the sequels that follow it, though, are the infuriatingly inadequate maps. Weber spends pages and pages providing detailed descriptions of the maneuvering of fleets and armies over the geography of his expansive world, which readers never get to see because the map provided at the beginning of the book covers such a limited area. Without maps for references, all of the locations and movements eventually begin to blur together, especially during the book’s climactic naval battle.

Despite the novel’s shortcomings, Off Armageddon Reef still comes highly recommended as a book that’s hard to put down. The characters, while a bit thinly written, have a surprising tendency to grow on you, and the constant imposition of modern sensibilities into what is essentially a fantasy story becomes increasing satisfying with each round of showdowns between technology and corrupt religious zealots.

Pick it up, most especially if you’re a fan of the genre. This series has a lot of promise!

Similar Books

If you enjoy this book, you may also enjoy these very similar series:

• Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
• The Elenium Series by David Eddings
• Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg
• The Tamuli Series by by David Eddings
• A Wizard in Rhyme by Christopher Stasheff

Further Information

• Author David Weber’s Official Webpage.
• David Weber’s profile on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
• Excerpt of Off Armageddon Reef available at the Baen Free Library.
• Interview with author David Weber on Off Armegeddon Reef.
• The Publisher’s Official Website for Off Armageddon Reef.