I had to put this book down because the spelling errors were distracting me from the story. Seriously, if an AUTHOR can't figure out the difference between "then" and "than", and their book gets published with multiple (I stopped after the 3rd then/than mixup, maybe 120 pages in) identical mistakes, they can't have cared too much about the book OR the story.

Do they even use proofreaders anymore? Did the editor even read the book? I tried to give it a chance, but this kind of problem just shouldn't happen, so .5 stars because I couldn't rate it 0. ( )

World building, for both Science Fiction and Fantasy, take a lot of work to develop the story to the point where the action can move without having to explain a lot of what one wants to have happen. David Weber has shown a knack for building amazing worlds with Honor Harrington, The Oathriders, and the Dahak series. This new series proves no difference than those listed. The world is detailed, and extensively designed by a man who has something to say about the Church and its strangle hold on political practices. This is a series about making a statement.

Of note, Mr. Weber does a masterful job with naval battle description and vivid detail to put you on the bridge of the ship in question. Doesn't matter if the vessel is naval in the nautical sense or the space faring sense. The important part of these descriptions is the ships, their distance, and their tactics. When the battles get down to actual hand to hand connections, they do have a little difficulty.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though admit it took time to spin up its drive and get going to decent action. Now that the world is built, the rest of the series should flow much smoother. ( )

Too many characters, not enough character developement. Didn't get interesting untill the last few chapters, yet I finishedf it because I love most of his books. ( )

(Alistair) Well, you might be a little surprised at my liking for Off Armageddon Reef, given that I'm not so much in favor of worlds (or universes) in which Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong With The Plan.

And in this universe, oh, my, has something gone horribly wrong with the plan. Twice. First in the form of the Gbaba, the Extremely Hostile Aliens who pretty much wiped out all of humanity, everywhere except for the one special colony set up to evade them by not exceeding more than a low level of technology; and then second, by Certain Megalomaniacs involved in that very colonial mission rather exceeding their orders in re technological depletion, wiping out the people who disagreed with them, brainwashing all the colonists to believe they'd just been divine-fiatted into existence, and instituting an extreme theocratic regime with themselves cast as the Archangels.

Sounds like we're heading for a pretty crapsacky Crapsack World, doesn't it?

Fortunately, that distaste of mine doesn't seem to apply nearly so much when there is the promise of said world being fixed, and since in this case one of the good guys - or a mind emulation of one of the good guys, but that's the same thing - is left over as an ace-in-the-hole, and this is, of course, a David Weber book, one can look forward to the decent chaps winning out in the end.

But not before, coincidentally enough - and I remind you again that this is a David Weber book - some thumping good Napoleonic-era naval battles, although this time not in space.

Myself, I just love that kind of thing, and so found the book entirely satisfying even before you account for the major plot thread involves in literal and metaphorical terms beating the living crap out of a bunch of retrogressives, and you know how I feel about retrogressives, right?

Recommended.

(One other quirk worth mentioning: Weber does some interesting mutations on people's names - looks to be just people's names, which is a little odd - to show linguistic drift in the time the colony's been established over: Norman -> Nahrmahn, Jennifer -< Zhenyfyr, etc. I still haven't decided whether that's kind of neat or really irritating.)

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... )

(Amy) I was actually a little surprised at how much I liked this book. I mean, OK, Weber writes good stories, but they are frequently so far buried under strata of oppressivly detailed description (SHOW DON'T TELL, for god's sake, and leave some things to the imagination) and lovingly depicted gore-coated battle scenes that my eyes glaze over and I have to drag myself through however many pages it takes to reacquire contact with the plot. And, well, that's not untrue of this one, sad to say. But the plot under all that cruft is well worth the effort (and, to be fair, my husband actually likes all that suffering-for-the-author's-research garbage, so I suppose Weber may just be targeting at not-me), and I'm quite looking forward to continuing the series.

The basic concept: Humanity is all-but-wiped out by an OMG SCARY KILL EVERYONE alien species, which has an uncanny ability to find inhabited planets that make much noise, so this colony is to hide with only pre-electric technology until it's ready to play catch-up, sprint for space, and kick some alien butt. Things don't go quite according to plan, though, because the guy running the colony decides to go even farther back, technologically speaking, and also wants to be the Voice Of God. Some of the members of the original colony object to this, though, and hide a PICA (android, basically) to wake up about seven centuries later and Fix It.

I really did enjoy this a lot, though there are quite a few technical areas of Weber's writing that don't particularly work for me (dialogue is a big one, internal monologues included). I also confess to rolling my eyes at a) the presence of baseball (which wouldn't have bothered me if Grayson, in the Honorverse, were not also a fallen-technology world that kept baseball as one of the few bits of original culture it still remembered), not to mention the exhaustive - and exhausting - play-by-play of the game. Thanks, Dave, we get it. They play baseball, and they don't even have the designated hitter rule. Let it go, already.

Recommended nonetheless, for people less eyerolly than I am or just equally willing to look past the eyerolling to the excellently plotted and executed story.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ) ( )

Weber does it again, with a very solid start to what promises to be an Epic Scifi series.

If you like "lightweight" Scifi, this probably isn't for you.

In the first half this book does suffer a little from the introduction of many new Characters, most with difficult names, and it is made more confusing still by Weber's tendancy to interchange titles with names. For example one moment a character is called "Grey Harbour" (a Title for Earl Gray Harbor) or "Wave Thunder" rather than the Characters given name (such as Bhnzhamyn Raice).

Having said that, the book really takes off in the second half, once the background setting and character establishment is over, and delivers the sort of novel we've come to expect from the Author. It's full of well thought out and detailed intrigue, this time political and even religious, as it tells of a corrupted church having absolute domination over effectively a captive people kept under control by a rigorous restriction on the development and use of any sort of technology. Action is there too, in the form of Naval battles, and it makes me wonder how Weber visualises these skirmishes as he writes.

I can't wait to read the next in the series (Schism Rent Asunder) and see where it goes... ( )