Merlin, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth II Battle the Inquisition

Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber

Humanity exists on only a single world, but it's not Earth. The population of Safehold is the rescued remnant of near-extinction by an unpronounceable enemy that found them because of broadcasts, bursts of energy, and expansion into space from the humans' original home.

Instead of preparing Safehold to remain in a state of technological "quiet" until the colonists are eventually ready to take on the foe that devasted them before, their leaders choose instead to reprogram them, compelling them to worship their leaders, and to follow an over-arching Church that requires its believers not to progress from a feudal-level society's art and knowledge. 

The colonists' programming defines their leaders as semi-divine "Archangels," and that status is underscored by their use of space-travel technology in which the Archangels indulge themselves. Finally, they recreate the Inquisition to ensure that even when their very-long-lived leaders are finally dead, the colony will continue to stagnate in its Dark Ages.

Unknown to these corrupt leaders, a safeguard has been put into place to undo their schemes at a far-future date. Nimue Alban (or rather, the near-immortal avatar that holds her personality and memories) must guide the Safehold colony to progress past this short-sighted program so that they will have a chance to defeat the enemy if and when it ever finds them. The Archangels are long dead when her avatar is roused, but their Church and its Inquisition are still very much alive.

When I first read Off Armageddon Reef years ago, it took me almost a year. I kept putting the book down—for months at a time—and coming back to it only when I had nothing else to read. I thoroughly enjoy all of Weber's Honor Harrington novels. Why couldn't I get into the Safehold series?

Re-reading it this year in the omnibus Safehold, I now recognize the problem. This series-in-one-volume begins with nearly 900 pages of prequel and exposition. Reading it in the omnibus Kindle version makes better sense of the initial novel, even though it doesn't quite cure another issue. Like many David Weber novels, Off Armageddon Reef is chock-full to bursting with characters, most of whom are crucial to the story, or essential to plot-points that will come later in the series. In Weber's other series, this is not an issue. If you like Weber, you've learned to accept that well-developed masses of players are part of his game.

However, in the Safehold series, there is a bug in the game. Those abundant character and place names are all spelled weirdly. Weber says in the prequel/exposition that "over nearly nine hundred years there had been a shift in the language such that words were pronounced differently, but spelled the same." In the novel, the opposite occurs, and the shift seems limited to names—plus the rules for unraveling vowel and consonant shifts are not consistent. So "Bynzhamyn" is probably "Benjamin," and "Jhames" is obviously "James." But "Jherneau" and multiple others are beyond simple transcription. The effort to translate becomes a constant diversion from the story, and it makes it harder than necessary to unravel the cast of characters.

That issue, however, is all that detracts from the novel, which like any Weber novel, is also full to bursting with action—political, naval, military, and yes, religious. Building a world like this one, with a culture begun as a <i>tabula rasa</i>, and then programmed and designed to remain in a technologically medieval state, offers Weber a wide scope to show the development of all the science and engineering that exploded at the end of our own Dark Ages, with the sweeping cultural and political changes that this explosion brought. 

I expect that the subsequent novels in the series will read easier for me, now that I can be less distracted by the odd spelling choices, and just enjoy the interconnection of religious awakenings and social changes that follow in the wake of massive technological advances. As well as the stirring naval battles and political manuevers, of course!

So if you've been puzzled, as I was, by the way Off Armageddon Reef seemed to be a puzzle with a few missing pieces, try the omnibus version, the first twelve hundred pages or so. With that addition, it becomes another thrilling Weber series with a strong female protagonist.