Customer Reviews

A Mighty Fortress (Safehold)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(42)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

I'm a fan of David Weber's books, but not this one. Sometimes a book or movie starts with exceptional promise, but its sequels drift off course, and by the third or fourth you're wondering why you even bothered. That is, I'm sad to say, what has happened with the Safehold series. It's the Rocky VI of the Weberverse.

"A Mighty Fortress" is tedious and rambling, with extensive dissection of religious nuance and military logistics but little action or intrigue. Most of the elements that made the series worth reading in the first place have vanished. Most of what is left is buried beneath the leaden weight of a cast of hundreds, meaning each makes relatively brief appearances. (This is no exaggeration -- the list of characters at the end is 21 pages of single-spaced names. What was Weber thinking?)

If you like swordplay, look elsewhere. There is none. If you enjoy cannon-and-grappling-hook naval battles, don't bother. The first significant naval engagement happens, by my count, on page 509 of 690. By that time, your eyes have glazed over from 10-page disquisitions into the salient chemical properties of gunpowder. Or you've simply given up after reading word-for-word transcripts of Archbishop Maikel's sermons. It's no exaggeration to say I fell asleep at least twice reading what probably should be called "A Mighty Long-Winded Fortress."

We know Weber can do better. His Honor Harrington series remained a good read all the way through the most recent installment. Weber's Mutineers' Moon was a delight, as was his collaboration with Eric Flint on the 1632 series. And the Safehold universe remains the most intriguing intersection between advanced science and high fantasy I've ever encountered.

It's come to this: Weber badly needs an editor with the seniority to stand up to one of Tor's better-selling authors. This book would be excellent if it were cut by two-thirds and merged with its predecessor (By Heresies Distressed) and its sequel. As it is, with a few exceptions, the fourth Safehold book is about as entertaining as being forced at gunpoint to read John Galt's 70-page speech about Objectivist philosophy from Atlas Shrugged. Twice.

The problem is, as Merlin Athrawes might say, one of too much love. Weber has created a fascinating premise and dropped his characters into a dangerous universe. But along the way, he's come to love Safehold so much that he began writing more about the world -- its politics and its theology and its gunpowder manufacturing processes -- and forgot his readers are buying his books because they simply want to read a good story.

I'm a huge fan of Weber's previous work and found the Safehold series extremely compelling. And what's not to like? A lost human colony with 19th century technology is slowly being manipulated back towards modernity by an android with a love for constitutional democracy and a secret stash of gravtanks. But as so many other readers have noted, Weber offers us detail at the cost of action.

And by action, I don't just mean titanic battles or desperate sword fights. I'm about 200 pages into the book and nobody is really doing much of anything. It's not exaggerating to say the book has mostly consisted of chapter after chapter of meeting minutes.

I will certainly finish the latest installment to the Safehold series, since the story is still fundamentally sound and Weber can still take it (and us) in interesting directions. Having said that, A Mighty Fortress feels like something the author wrote as an assignment for his fans, rather than a work intended to entertain them.

The Safehold Series has a fascinating premise:

Even with access to space age technology, how can one 'man' single handedly sow the seeds of change to modernize/democratize a 1600 century culture/world steeped in the dogmatic teachings of a corrupt and all powerful Inquisition/Church determined to halt any Reformation/Renaissance?

Plus an evil alien empire (which has already wiped out the Terran Empire & the rest of humanity save for this one hidden away colony) lurking in the background potentially ready to pounce on any sign of emerging advanced civilization.

Actually a prequel on this conflict would be nice tho challenging to write a story with downer end already known. So.... for a decent plot with some suspense, Weber could create other escaped colonies or orphan military fleets (which found allies? hidden stock piles of ancient weapons from prior civilizations? Cloaking technology? wormholes to another part of the galaxy? explaining how they survived when main battle fleets didn't?) that are other wise occupying the aliens also adding to the reasons why this colony has yet to be found and wiped out (current reason: its technology is too backward to attract attention).

Also wondering if Weber ever intends to advance the Safehold series sufficiently so that searching out & taking on and defeating/exacting revenge on the aliens become a possibility. He is soooo dragging out the series that it does not seem likely; at the rate it is going both he and his readers will be ensconced six foot under before the story advances to that point!

David Weber is EXCELLENT in battle/combat sequences. Unfortunately, in between, he waxes on and on, long & exceedingly boring, taking waaaay too long to set up/resolve conflicts.

Massive skimming is the only way to 'read' this book. There are good parts, they are just few and far between. The book is 700 pages, it could've easily been 275 and a LOT better book,

I liked the premise for this (I generally like Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court variations which is what this is).

I was a little distressed when I realized the main character was just a variation on Honor Harrington remade as a male robot -- much like the main character in The Armageddon Troll was Honor Harrington thrown backwards in time -- but I was willing to overlook it.

But after the first book in this series they have started sliding, badly. I am two hundred pages in and there is NOTHING happening but priests and nobles from all over the world and lord only knows how many kingdoms and factions talking and theorizing. Three of the kingdom names I see the most just happen to start with the same letter for crying out loud. Too many freaking players and locations with non-memorable made up names doing nothing memorable.

The main character could be fun but we hardly see it except when it is whining about how little it can do without 1) waking up bad things designed to block the use of technology, 2) making the situation worse, or 3) taking time away from boring things that are more important. At this point it might as well not be there at all. Conventional spies, inventors, historians, and bodyguards could cover all of its plot points.

Seriously, the first tenet of science fiction is you don't create a story as science fiction unless science fiction elements are needed to create the story. If Mr. Weber really wants to write Machiavelli he should probably confine it to historical settings (and probably under a pen name). His writing skills have probably never been better but he seriously needs to back off and reconsider what has happened to his story telling skills and who his target audience is.

I've read and own everything David Weber has ever had published. I never dreamed he might churn one out that I might not finish.

Most of this book is one big "expository lump," as writers called chunks of explanation. That the lumps are inside dialog rather than bare was no consolation. I quickly began skimming and then skipping. There are only three or four mostly physical actions scenes did not make up for all the rest of the book.

Ordinarily, I do not mind a long expository section or sections of a novel because it builds up the color of the world being created. However. This novel almost proceeds in real time. Lots of talk, little action, and what action there was seemed peripheral to the story. I'm 61 and at this pace we'll have moved along 5 years novel time by the time I'm dead. That's assuming that at volume 12 (1.25 years from now novel time) I don't use the series for kindling after realizing I don't remember who the main characters are anymore. This is not a scintillating addition to the Safehold story.

Let me say that I have enjoyed reading the reviews here of other readers.
They pretty much have it right.

A great story idea whose wheels have now dug deep ruts.
I had to laugh; in the early part of the book, there are something like 3 successive chapters where a small group of nobles gets together in a room and has a disscussion of the political situation. In each instance, the conversation goes on for many pages of minute thoughts, words and detail. If I called this tedious I would be understating the patience it requires.

Mr. Weber should remember that, while many guys that read his stuff might in fact be interested in sailing ships and the history of the British Navy and the evolution of armed warfare, this is NOT why they are trying to read these books.
We enjoy the action of the Safehold conflicts, but not when it develops so slowly. If I want to read hour by hour accounts of the unfolding of a great war, I can read Churchill (and even his is only 6 volumns)
Mr Weber, your fans are SCIENCE FICTION FANS. They have repeatedly told you that the Gbaba encounters hooked them in the first place. They have let you know loud and clear that this is where they want the story to go.
The Safehold saga along the way is pretty good, but it needs to move and the bigger picture needs always to be kept in sight and nudged along.
Mr. Weber would probably say that he is doing that.

I am going to try and continue with the series. I give the author credit for the good things he does. But the longwinded dialogues are overdone, if the author would "be honest with himself about it". He needs to place limits upon the political minutia and think of the science fiction Big Picture. And where we do have political events, have for example Wave Thunder actually working an intelligence op, not having a discussion about it.

And, yes, as a side point, the kindle version was carelessly done with no oversight and proof reading. I say to the digital copyrighter, what kind of "ser vice" is this??

If Weber's goal was to get me to stop reading this series, he's won. I'm done with it. And it pains me to say that, because the premise of the series is creative, and the first book surprisingly well done. Here was a world with depth, with power, with a future, set in a universe where humanity is clinging to the last threads of its existence. It had epic evil, and true horror as it looked at the manipulation of humanity by a select few. And it did it in such a way that the evil, while horrible, was understandable. Langhorne and his crew were the best kind of bad guys, original, careful, and understandable. It was possible as you looked at what they did, to understand why they did it.

All of that changed over a course of a few books. Gone is the creativity. Gone is the sense of adventure. The characters are stereotypes at best and clichés at worst. Its almost as if Weber has become overwhelmed by his own work. It feels like he used up his allotment of risk and creativity in the first book, and has become so in love with his world and his main characters that he never places them in any risk or danger. He cares for them so much (both good and bad) that I as a reader didn't, because nothing happened to any of them. They didn't grow, they didn't change, they simply wandered through the pages (and there were a phenomenal number of pages for them to wander through) and did NOTHING. He introduced new characters, or played up previously minor characters (in an effort to get you to care about them for a few hundred pages), before challenging them, and then killing them off or maiming them horribly. But the fact remains, nothing happens to the main characters, to the people you are supposed to care about, and because nothing happens to them, you don't care about them. They have become bland, predictable, and the weakest part of the series.

As I said in a previous review, the real problem however is that Weber has written a Superman with no Lex Luther. He's created this all powerful, all seeing, all knowing, character and as a result everything happens the way its supposed too because there is no one that can challenge the great Merlin. I had thought this book was going to be different in that respect. I thought and hoped that this would be the book in which the great Merlin would fail, and in a sense he almost did, sort of, kind of. But not really. Some people died, some ships were lost, but they weren't people you really cared about, and the events, and the cost of failure (had there been a real failure) were so abstract as to be non-threatening.

I do need to correct myself. I said that nothing happens to main characters. I was wrong. One of them cried.

One last note. The Kindle version of this book sucked. Other reviewers have commented on that and it is worth mentioning just how bad the Kindle conversion was (it was so bad I bought a tree version from a local bookstore in the hopes that would help me to enjoy the story more...it didn't). Oddly placed hyphens, words broken up strangely, and then you throw into that Weber's fondness of spelling everything with Z's and Y's and Cy's and H's and it rendered the Kindle version completely unreadable to me.

So I'm done, and I'll quietly mourn the death of a series that could have been great, and return to waiting for George R. R. Martin to get on with his next book.

This was easily the one of the worst effort by David Weber in ANY of his books, and he's written a lot of them. A self-respecting editor who actually signed off on this publication should be ashamed and offer his resignation if he's not fired already.

First, there was the constant filling in of details, trying to explain every single back story of the past 3 books. That is the worst kind of writing and an editor's job to filter out. Yes - you don't want to write a book which is inaccessible to people who hadn't read the previous books. But there comes a point where such repetitiveness destroys what little flow there was in the action and this book passed it LONG ago.

Even worse was the complete breakdown of the premise of the first 3 books. Bad enough that there was a secret society ready to help Nimue/Merlin out, but now he's just blatantly flashing the high tech all over the place. And if the author is prepared to write that ridiculous storyline - why not just go all-out? Take out some of that military hardware and sink the enemy fleet in the deep ocean. Zero survivors.

The holes in the story wouldn't be quite so annoying if not for the dragging pace of the book. I nearly died of boredom trying to wade through the endless back stories only to be rewarded with... nothing.

Like others, I agree that this should have been 150 pages at most, and make up only PART of what should have been book #4.

Almost 700 pages of information on things we don't want to or need to know about combined with absurdly spelled names which make it difficult to keep track of who is who. How many characters does one story need?! Here's a hint. Weber provides a list of characters at the back of this book which is TWENTY TWO PAGES LONG! And most of them have silly spellings that keep stopping you as you try to figure out how it's pronounced, not to mention - who is this again? As for the main characters, not much happens to them, and as for the story - was there a story - oh right, fighting the Church. Well, not much happens there, either. Like others, I believe Weber has gone the way of Jordan. You see it in his other series' as well. He's too big now to pay attention to mere editors, and just stuffs reams of dull, plodding talk into his books which he thinks is brilliant writing.