Considering trying the Safehold series

[Cikomyr]

Yes, i know i am nowhere near finishing Harrington. But i just want alternatives to avoid burning out. I nearly did during War of Honor, so i am leaving my options open.

Plus, i am hating The Gunslinger, so the Dark Tower is out of the question.

I saw a book of Safehold ( Hell's Foundations Quiver) and it had the image of a spaceship blowing up a sailship. I love mixing Sci Fi and Fantasy (or medieval), so i checked its overall plot and premise. Sounds rather neat.

Is it worth picking up? Does it have Weber's best trait as a writer or his worst?

[Douglas]

Someone got overly fanciful with the cover art, I see. The main protagonist does have spaceship level tech at his disposal in a world where everyone else is at best just starting the industrial revolution, but he can't use it openly so there's nothing like an actual "spaceship vs sailship" scene.

In some ways it's very similar to the Honor Harrington series - there's a great big war between Quality and Quantity, and Quality is the protagonist side. Quality side is almost a morality poster boy, Quantity side is frothing raving evil (the leadership, at least) led by a brutal psychopath (with good PR, which gets increasingly threadbare as the series continues). Battles tend to follow a similar pattern, of Quality pulling out some new trick and proceeding to curb stomp Quantity, though there are occasional reversals and losses.

The main protagonist himself, Merlin Athrawes, is never actually in personal danger - he's got a Future Tech humanoid robot body made of materials so tough even real world modern military would have difficulty harming it. The drama is all in the survival and well-being of his friends, adopted nation, and ultimate goal.

If you want to really understand what's going on on a strategic level - where a battle is, why it's important, where these two maneuvering armies are relative to each other and what choke point they're fighting over, etc. - you're going to need to keep maps handy to reference. Especially later in the series when the fighting moves onto the main continent. There are way too many places referenced to keep them all straight without a map. There's generally some kind of description of the impact a military outcome will have, but it's hard to place into the overall picture in anything but a rather vague sense without referring to the maps.

I like it and think it's fun.

[The Glyphstone]

Safehold pretty much defines The Covers Always Lie. None of the scenes on the front art ever actually happen in the books.

Aside from that, Douglas is more or less spot-on. It has a lot of the same quality-versus-quantities themes as Harrington, and the space-age infodumps are replaced by detailed descriptions of sailing ships fluttering out portside reef tacks or whatever (Weber is, after all, a naval historian, and it shows here).

One thing I'd argue is that while the leadership of the Bad Guy side is indeed mustache-twirling evil, as befitting a planet-scale theocracy led by people who would consider the Spanish Inquisition to be pacifist hippies, a good chunk of the action is depicted on the individual army/soldier level, and it gets greyer there. He's quite good, better than in the Honorverse I think, of showing that the 'bad guys' consist of both good and evil people, and often just people people. There's fewer examples of bad people fighting for the 'good guys' - only one I can think of, actually, and it's more of a "driven mad by vengeance" situation, but then there are a lot fewer of them to begin with.

Point for point, I'd say it's a bit better than the Harrington novels in terms of story quality. However, the linguistic drift of English is used in the names and nowhere else, which can frequently cause little mental hiccups when you read the name 'Zhefry Ahbaht' or "Bynzhamyn Sahdlyr" and have to mentally switch the overabundance of Z's, H's, and Y's for their contemporary equivalents. And yeah, having the maps included with the books handy so you can keep track of where stuff is happening is crucial.

[Algeh]

I'm only one book behind in this series, and I plan to pick it up eventually.

My opinions:

If you plan to buy physical copies, buy it in hardcover rather than paperback, so you'll have bigger copies of the maps (this is one of the few series I buy in hardcover, and it's purely for this reason) (they have different maps in each book, too, as I learned when I bought the second one in paperback since I already had the first one in hardcover). I generally read each book from the library reasonably soon after it comes out, then stalk Powells until someone resells their hardcover and pick up my own copy used.

It suffers from pretty much the same problem as the Honorverse books, which is that the "stuff that happens that we are trying to keep track of" keeps mushrooming with each book, so you get less and less overall timeline advancement/updates on people from previous books you may have grown attached to with each book, and there's an increase in "amount of stuff you're supposed to remember" that I'm starting to find is higher than my actual interest level will sustain. (The funny names don't help. I find that, as a casual reader, I can keep track of 20 people or 5 elves before they all blur together unless I make a special effort, and these names are almost elf-level in terms of me retaining them.) In both series, I'm torn between taking notes so I can keep track of what's going on and not really knowing what's going on because it's too much for me to keep track of without notes, and taking notes on novels that I'm not assigned to read for a class feels silly somehow.

I keep reading the Safehold books (still reading most of his series, actually), but I suspect that David Weber is one of those people who can't separate his story from "all of the stuff that's happening in his world". I'd love to see him try writing a pure historical to see if he can keep his overreach under control when we, as readers, actually can go look up the rest of it. It doesn't reassure me that he seems to have ideas for "what happens in the next x books" in basically all of his worlds, even the ones he hasn't published anything in for a long time like the Dahak books, so I suspect he isn't really one for telling a story, wrapping it up, and stopping there because the story is over.