Book Journal: Safehold Series

... It surprised me quite a lot when I went to check past posts that I've never written one about David Weber's Safehold series before. I guess I'll go ahead and fix that now.

While this series has some interesting science fiction roots, it's a lot closer to historical fiction than his Honorverse series. Most of the action is set within a world that has no access to electricity or really any technology more advanced than sailing ships and crude guns. (At least - at first, and with some exceptions.) So the fighting and politics in this series are a decidedly different affair from the space opera battles that are the centerpiece of the Honorverse.

The attention that Weber pays to the politics and economics that lead up to those battles is no different, though. As with many of the Honorverse books, a lot of the Safehold books talk about a lot of political maneuvering and military strategy, get through one major battle, and then close with the implications of that battle. So they can get a bit dense and slow if you're looking for straight-up military action. Weber does do a great job with the world building (as always), though, and he does a great job of getting us to care about the fate of the characters involved, so I've always liked it anyway.

Interestingly, he also does a good job (at least in my opinion) of making it seem like things are always hovering on a knife's edge for the protagonists, constantly keeping them in danger of being defeated, even when they don't actually lose very often. Under most circumstances, I guess it probably should inspire worries about boring invincible heroes when they lose as rarely as these people do, but I've never really felt that way.

The inspiration for this particular post was (naturally) my reading of the latest book in the series, which for a few different reasons is actually a rather different book than many of its predecessors. Spoilers for the series (and that latest book) follow, so if you haven't read any of it yet (which I recommend you do if you haven't), you've been warned.

The big difference for this latest book (Through Firey Trials) is that with the major military campaigns in the previous books largely concluded, it's a lot more general in its coverage of events than any of them were. All of the books (particularly the later ones) tend to drift across several years of in-universe time, but I don't believe any of them covered fifteen years in one go. That made this one feel like an entire book's worth of filler, frankly; while I'm happy that it moved the story all the way forward to the next major point, I could have wished for something a bit more interesting.