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caprica 's review for:
Off Armageddon Reef
by David Weber
As background: I generally enjoy sci-fi, fantasy, and quasi-historical fiction, and have a degree in naval history. A friend recommended this book on those grounds, which I understand. I wish he hadn't! I finished it in large part because I hate to abandon a book that has been recommended to me, but I did not enjoy the slog.
There are potentially some spoilers for the book in the review that follows, though I've tried to speak to broader themes rather than specific events, and so have not tagged them as spoilers, per se.
The premise behind the book is that humanity has expanded outward into the stars, whereupon they encounter a genocidal alien race that beats them back. With their backs against the wall, humanity sends a last, desperate mission out with a colony. The goal is to ensure the survival of humanity by limiting their technological progress to pre-industrial levels and ensure the aliens never find them. Okay! Pretty interesting premise.
It's all downhill from there, I'm afraid.
Weber falls into the classic "I'm going to make my character names weird to make them seem different" trope, which has the effect of making them unreadable rather than interesting. Similarly, there are so many characters and their naming conventions are so dumb (my kingdom for a character without a double vowel or a y in it) that it honestly made it hard to follow. This, combined with the almost total lack of character development, made it simply not worth the time to try to pay attention to who all these people were. Bouncing around between viewpoints can be effective, but if you're just giving me a glimpse of a cartoonishly evil villain every now and again whose name is indistinguishable from the other villains, I'm going to stop caring (and I did).
The main character performs as a literal deus ex machina. Merlin (sigh) is an android that can do anything, be anywhere, and know nearly everything, while remaining morally virtuous and... that's about it, I guess. This is a good demonstration, in some sense, of the maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and this might have been an interesting setting/premise to explore that, but instead the result is that Merlin's presence and stated goals make the story utterly, tiresomely predictable, and remove any and all stakes from the story. We don't need to worry if the protagonists succeed because how could they not?
The flatness of the development of the characters simply serves to bring two more flaws to light: first, the protagonists are almost completely without moral blemish, making them boring, and second, there are no women in this book. Merlin is ostensibly a woman, in that he is actually an android version of Nimue Alban, but he becomes a male because society is male-dominated and he needs to be a man to operate in it. So, aside from the first few sci-fi chapters that establish the book's premise, there is nary a woman to be seen. I mean this almost literally - there are essentially no women in this book *at all* once you get to the Safehold part of the story until near the very end.
Aside from the fact that this is stupid, it is unrealistic (there are women in the real world, I promise!), and it is a-historical. For a book obsessed with the minutiae of technological details, the total abandonment of an entire gender just seems stupid. Maybe he didn't want to write women? Maybe he felt like making Merlin a woman-not-woman was good enough?
The intrigue that takes place in the book is deeply uninteresting, because we, as the readers, know that Merlin is using technology to make success for anyone else essentially impossible. Uninteresting, too, because the intrigue is clumsily done. The potentially interesting premise of the book is undone over time, as it becomes clear that the author just wants to write an 18th century naval epic, with a villainous stand-in for the Catholic Church on the one side, and a glorious stand-in for England on the other. As someone who normally enjoys both those things as topics of fiction and non-fiction, I found their depictions here derivative and exhausting.
When Merlin does finally get around to introducing new technology, it is explained in excruciating detail. It very much seemed like the author wanted to demonstrate how very much research he'd done to get all these things right. However, aside from being absolutely miserable to read, it also made the rest of the books unrealism stand out. I'm perfectly willing to suspend disbelief, but if you insist on rubbing my nose in how accurate these tiny details are, I'm going to start questioning whether or not you know anything about the bigger picture you've presented. The situation becomes more and more unrealistic as the book goes on - we're expected to believe, for example, that an invincible android is here to force a society industrialize (fine, I'll go along with it), while at the same time accepting completely preposterous strategic and naval scenarios (you really want me to believe that a fleet of non-ocean-faring galleys is going to make a trip of ten thousand miles?).
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. It's a book desperately in need of an editor. The technological advances could've been done with a montage. The character development is absent. There are no women in this story (!!). Everyone is neatly divided between good and evil. The premise is interesting and ultimately collapses under its own weight. There's a naval epic at the end that is undermined by its own ridiculousness. There are no stakes, because one side has a nigh-omniscient, omnipotent robot.
I cannot recommend this book in good conscience. It is a mess, and it is a slog. It is entirely possible that Weber has virtues as an author, but none of them are on display here.
There are potentially some spoilers for the book in the review that follows, though I've tried to speak to broader themes rather than specific events, and so have not tagged them as spoilers, per se.
The premise behind the book is that humanity has expanded outward into the stars, whereupon they encounter a genocidal alien race that beats them back. With their backs against the wall, humanity sends a last, desperate mission out with a colony. The goal is to ensure the survival of humanity by limiting their technological progress to pre-industrial levels and ensure the aliens never find them. Okay! Pretty interesting premise.
It's all downhill from there, I'm afraid.
Weber falls into the classic "I'm going to make my character names weird to make them seem different" trope, which has the effect of making them unreadable rather than interesting. Similarly, there are so many characters and their naming conventions are so dumb (my kingdom for a character without a double vowel or a y in it) that it honestly made it hard to follow. This, combined with the almost total lack of character development, made it simply not worth the time to try to pay attention to who all these people were. Bouncing around between viewpoints can be effective, but if you're just giving me a glimpse of a cartoonishly evil villain every now and again whose name is indistinguishable from the other villains, I'm going to stop caring (and I did).
The main character performs as a literal deus ex machina. Merlin (sigh) is an android that can do anything, be anywhere, and know nearly everything, while remaining morally virtuous and... that's about it, I guess. This is a good demonstration, in some sense, of the maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and this might have been an interesting setting/premise to explore that, but instead the result is that Merlin's presence and stated goals make the story utterly, tiresomely predictable, and remove any and all stakes from the story. We don't need to worry if the protagonists succeed because how could they not?
The flatness of the development of the characters simply serves to bring two more flaws to light: first, the protagonists are almost completely without moral blemish, making them boring, and second, there are no women in this book. Merlin is ostensibly a woman, in that he is actually an android version of Nimue Alban, but he becomes a male because society is male-dominated and he needs to be a man to operate in it. So, aside from the first few sci-fi chapters that establish the book's premise, there is nary a woman to be seen. I mean this almost literally - there are essentially no women in this book *at all* once you get to the Safehold part of the story until near the very end.
Aside from the fact that this is stupid, it is unrealistic (there are women in the real world, I promise!), and it is a-historical. For a book obsessed with the minutiae of technological details, the total abandonment of an entire gender just seems stupid. Maybe he didn't want to write women? Maybe he felt like making Merlin a woman-not-woman was good enough?
The intrigue that takes place in the book is deeply uninteresting, because we, as the readers, know that Merlin is using technology to make success for anyone else essentially impossible. Uninteresting, too, because the intrigue is clumsily done. The potentially interesting premise of the book is undone over time, as it becomes clear that the author just wants to write an 18th century naval epic, with a villainous stand-in for the Catholic Church on the one side, and a glorious stand-in for England on the other. As someone who normally enjoys both those things as topics of fiction and non-fiction, I found their depictions here derivative and exhausting.
When Merlin does finally get around to introducing new technology, it is explained in excruciating detail. It very much seemed like the author wanted to demonstrate how very much research he'd done to get all these things right. However, aside from being absolutely miserable to read, it also made the rest of the books unrealism stand out. I'm perfectly willing to suspend disbelief, but if you insist on rubbing my nose in how accurate these tiny details are, I'm going to start questioning whether or not you know anything about the bigger picture you've presented. The situation becomes more and more unrealistic as the book goes on - we're expected to believe, for example, that an invincible android is here to force a society industrialize (fine, I'll go along with it), while at the same time accepting completely preposterous strategic and naval scenarios (you really want me to believe that a fleet of non-ocean-faring galleys is going to make a trip of ten thousand miles?).
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. It's a book desperately in need of an editor. The technological advances could've been done with a montage. The character development is absent. There are no women in this story (!!). Everyone is neatly divided between good and evil. The premise is interesting and ultimately collapses under its own weight. There's a naval epic at the end that is undermined by its own ridiculousness. There are no stakes, because one side has a nigh-omniscient, omnipotent robot.
I cannot recommend this book in good conscience. It is a mess, and it is a slog. It is entirely possible that Weber has virtues as an author, but none of them are on display here.