Book Review

By Schism Rent Asunder transitions away from naval battles pretty quickly, and becomes a book about politics instead. It’s still really good and the story hasn’t gone off the rails yet, but this is where I can feel the brakes going on.

That’s the honest summary. Off Armageddon Reef ended with one of the best age-of-sail sequences I’ve read, a small force of galleons annihilating a much larger galley fleet at Darcos Sound, and then this one opens with the paperwork. Charis has beaten the Church’s navy. Now it has to survive having done that, which turns out to involve a great deal of law, theology and diplomacy and almost no cannon fire at all.

Growth across the whole cast, and Weber earns most of it

What the book has going for it is genuine development, spread widely. Cayleb and Maikel Staynair stop hedging and declare the Church of Charis in schism, and Weber writes it as a legal and theological argument rather than a riot, which I liked more than I expected to. The claim is careful: Charis isn’t leaving Mother Church, it’s refusing four corrupt men who’ve hijacked her. That’s a real distinction and the whole book turns on it.

Sharleyan of Chisholm arrives properly here and immediately becomes the second most important person in the series. The marriage starts as a straight political alliance between two realms that can’t survive the Church alone, and turns into something a lot more convincing than Weber usually manages with relationships. He’s not generally good at this. This is the exception, and it works because both of them are competent adults treating a dynastic arrangement as a job before they treat it as anything else.

Nahrmahn of Emerald switching sides is the one I keep going back and forth on. He tried to have Cayleb killed, surrenders, is spared, and ends up as the imperial spymaster and one of the most enjoyable people in the whole run. Is that earned? Just about. Weber makes his reasoning coherent, and the argument that a professional schemer with no illusions is more reliable than an idealist is a decent one. It’s still fast.

Rhobair Duchairn is the quiet standout. The Group of Four’s treasurer starts genuinely reckoning with what they’ve done, and it’s the beginning of a slow-burn conscience that I suspect will run for a very long time. He’s the most human thing on the Church’s side of the board.

The Reformation parallel is doing a lot of work under all of this, and I’m mostly fine with it. Charis is England, the Church of God Awaiting is Rome, Staynair sits somewhere between Cranmer and Luther, and Clyntahn is the Inquisition with the subtlety filed off. It’s not disguised and it isn’t trying to be. What saves it from being a costume is that Weber is genuinely interested in the mechanics of a schism rather than just the aesthetics. Who has the authority to appoint bishops, what happens to church revenues, how a state church funds itself once the tithes stop flowing to Zion. Those are the questions an actual reformation runs on, and this book asks them.

Erayk Dynnys gets the best exit in the series

I flagged Dynnys as an unexpected favourite after book one, and this is his book and his ending. He’s tried in Zion and executed under the Punishment of Schueler, which is every bit as grim as it sounds, and Weber doesn’t flinch from it.

What makes it land is that he refuses to give Clyntahn the confession he wants. A venal, absentee churchman who spent his whole career coasting finds something like courage at the very end, and gets a written testament out to Staynair’s people on his way to a horrible death. It pays off the interest I had in him completely. It’s also the moment the series decides the Church’s rank and file are victims rather than villains, which matters enormously for everything that comes after. Fistful of Wits made a good observation about this book that its climactic weight sits in the middle rather than at the end, and Dynnys is a big part of why.

The Ferayd massacre does similar work in the opposite direction. The Inquisition orchestrates the killing of Charisian merchant crews in a neutral port, and that’s the point where the war stops being about tariffs and trade routes. It’s ugly and it’s meant to be.

The problems are the same problems, slightly worse

There’s still too much navel gazing, exactly like book one. Characters thinking at length about what they’re doing and why, over and over, and with the battles gone there’s less to break it up. When the plot is already talk, pages of internal deliberation on top of talk start to pile up.

The other thing that nags at me is the number of convenient turns. There seem to be potentially too many miracles that happen to let the good guys consistently win. Merlin’s remote sensors mean Charis knows things it has no business knowing. The Brethren of Saint Zherneau turn out to have been quietly holding the actual truth about Langhorne and Shan-wei in a Tellesberg monastery for eight centuries, waiting for exactly this moment. Individually each of those is fine. Stacked up, they mean the heretics keep drawing the right card, and a war where one side has satellite coverage and a hidden order of allies isn’t as tense as it should be.

There’s a structure problem underneath both of those, and it’s worth naming plainly. A book where the protagonists have better information than everyone else, and where the opposition is split between one genuine fanatic and three men of varying uselessness, has to generate tension from somewhere other than uncertainty. Weber’s answer is to make the stakes moral rather than tactical. Will Charis become the thing it’s fighting? What does Staynair owe a church that tried to kill him? That mostly works, and Dynnys is the proof it can. It’s just a thinner engine than a fleet action.

The comparison I keep making is to Mistborn, and I think it’s absolutely the right frame. Sanderson’s Lord Ruler and Weber’s Langhorne are fundamentally the same idea, a real person who made himself a god and then wrote the scripture to prove it. The Final Empire puts the god on stage and lets you watch the machinery run with him in it. Safehold’s god is dead and the machine kept going anyway for eight hundred years, which is arguably the bleaker version and definitely the stranger one. Both books are about the way a manufactured religion stops growth on purpose, and the parallel holds right down to the details.

Three and a half

I gave this four out of five initially and I’d probably reduce it to a 3.5 now. It’s still good. It just started to slow down, and it doesn’t have anything like as much action.

I want to be fair about what it’s doing, though. This isn’t a book that fails at being a war novel. It’s a book that deliberately isn’t one, and the shift from clever android upgrades a navy to a story about institutions is a real ambition. Almost every meaningful change here is somebody deciding what they owe an institution that’s failed them, and Dynnys, Staynair, Duchairn and Nahrmahn all answer that question differently. That’s a better spine than most series manage in book two.

Is this where the series peaks? I don’t think so, not yet. It’s still climbing here, and the pieces being set up are more interesting than the ones being used. But the pace concern I had at the end of book one has got louder rather than quieter, and if Weber spends another eight volumes on committee meetings, we’re going to have a problem.

Charis spends two books being the wronged party. The small clever kingdom that got jumped by four corrupt men in Zion, that only ever hit back, that had the moral high ground handed to it by people who tried to burn it off the map first. And then this one opens with the Charisian navy sailing back into Delferahk and hanging churchmen by secular authority, the first time anyone on Safehold has done that in eight hundred years of written history, and I sat there for a second going, hang on, are we still the ones I’m cheering for.

Killing off the villain, killing off priests, killing off people I was fairly confident had plot armour. It doesn’t seem like what the good guys would do. But that’s absolutely what happened in this book, and what I like is that Weber doesn’t soften it, doesn’t hand Cayleb a speech that makes it all fine, doesn’t cut away. Charis does something it cannot walk back and the story just sits with that for a while.

By Heresies Distressed is a really good continuation, and I want to say that up front because the rest of this is me being pleased about specific things. The previous book put the brakes on. It went from broadsides to committee rooms and legal argument about who owns a bishopric, and while I didn’t hate that, I could feel the pace bleeding out of it. This one gets the momentum back and then some. Nothing here felt like treading water or refilling pages that were already full.

The land war turns up, and Weber can actually write it

The bit I enjoyed most is the transition. Two books of age-of-sail brilliance, galleons doing appalling things to galleys, and Weber has a deserved reputation for that going all the way back to On Basilisk Station and the Honorverse. So the honest question going into Corisande was whether he could do the same thing with infantry, because plenty of writers can only really see one kind of battle.

He can. Cayleb takes the Imperial Charisian Marines through Zebediah and into Corisande and the whole technological argument the series has been making at sea comes ashore at once. Rifled muskets against matchlocks. Mobile field artillery against pike blocks. Something very close to modern light infantry doctrine walking into formations that were state of the art a generation ago and are now just targets standing in a field. The Corisandians aren’t stupid and they aren’t cowards, they get routed in the open, they pull back behind fortifications like sensible people, and then they get surrounded anyway. King of the Nerds called it the strongest book in the series largely on the strength of that land campaign and I’m not going to argue.

It’s a very different flavour of war writing from the one I usually reach for. Starship Troopers sits inside one man’s head for the whole book and you learn about the war through him, whereas Weber is up at twenty thousand feet with the map spread out, moving regiments and telling you what the artillery is doing to the left flank. Both work. They’re just not doing the same job at all, and if you only like the Heinlein version you’ll find the Corisande chapters cold.

The other thing the campaign does is hand the series two proper soldiers in Eastshare and Green Valley, which it badly needed. Up to now the military competence has mostly radiated out from Merlin, who knows everything because he has satellites, and that’s a hard thing to build tension around. Generals who are simply good at their jobs, arguing about supply and ground and how fast infantry can actually move, give the war a texture it didn’t have when the answer to every question was that Charis already knew.

Hektor dies and Clyntahn wins the part that matters

Then there’s Hektor. Two and a half books of being the antagonist, and Weber gives him a genuinely affecting last stretch as a father, getting his children out of the country before the end arrives, knowing exactly what’s coming for him. And before he can surrender, Clyntahn’s people murder him and his heir, and the whole world decides Cayleb did it.

That’s the smartest thing in the book and possibly in the series so far. Charis wins the war and loses the peace in the same afternoon. Clyntahn takes a straight military defeat and turns it into a martyred prince, an occupied province with a reason to hate its occupiers, and a story that travels faster than the truth ever will. He’s not a fanatic who believes, which would be the ordinary version of this character. He’s a man who uses other people’s belief and knows precisely what it’s worth.

Irys and Daivyn getting out with the Earl of Coris is the other half of it. A furious teenage girl and a small boy, running a blockade, landing in Delferahk with a claim and a grievance and nothing else. Coris is one of the quiet successes of the whole run, a spymaster who ends up as guardian to two children with a price on their heads and takes it seriously. I could see even at this stage that Irys was going to matter enormously, and I say that as someone who is usually wrong about which characters get promoted.

Letting more people in on the Grand Secret

The other thing I thought was handled really well is the widening of the secret. After the attempt on her life, Sharleyan is taken to the Brethren of Saint Zherneau and told all of it. Nimue, the Gbaba, Langhorne, the eight hundred year lie sitting underneath every church on the planet. And she doesn’t break, she doesn’t spend forty pages in denial, she absorbs the worst thing anyone has ever been told and starts working out what to do about it.

Bringing more people inside was the right call and the way it’s done makes sense, which is not a small thing. A secret this size is a plotting problem. Keep it too tight and Merlin has to be everywhere personally, which gets silly and makes everyone else furniture. Open it too fast and you lose the tension entirely. Weber threads it, and the people who get told are the people who obviously should be told, and each of them reacts like an adult with a job rather than like a device.

Siddarmark quietly deciding to keep trading with Charis despite the embargo is the small thing I noticed and filed away. It’s barely a subplot here. Money beating doctrine, a few paragraphs of merchants and harbour numbers, and you can feel it being loaded for later.

What all of this adds up to is the series growing a conscience it didn’t really have before. The first two books had a fairly clean shape, four corrupt men in Zion versus a kingdom that hadn’t done anything to deserve what it got, and you could enjoy it without doing much moral arithmetic. This one takes that away. Charis works out it’s capable of doing genuinely terrible things for reasons it believes are good, and Clyntahn works out he doesn’t need to win battles as long as he controls what people think the battles meant. Those two discoveries happen in the same book and they’re pointed straight at each other.

Four out of five, and still climbing

I gave this four out of five and it holds up. Really enjoyed this one. It does the thing a third book in a long series most needs to do, which is prove the whole enterprise still has somewhere to go, and it does that by changing the kind of war it’s fighting rather than by making the existing war bigger.

The gripe is small and it’s the same one the series has always had. Weber does not use an editor with a sharp enough knife, and hankrules2011 was blunter about that than I’d be, though the complaint is fair. There’s still a lot of people thinking at length about things they’ve already thought about. It bothered me much less here than in book two, because now there are things happening between the deliberations.

Three books in and the pace and momentum are genuinely still there. It isn’t dragging, it isn’t recycling, and the pieces being set up are more interesting than the ones already in play. If you bounced off book two for being all law and theology, come back for this one, because the war shows up and it brings the moral cost with it.

Off Armageddon Reef opens with humanity losing, and I loved it for that. Not losing a battle. Losing the war, completely and permanently, over decades, to an alien species that doesn’t negotiate and doesn’t innovate and simply grinds the Terran Federation down until there’s nothing left. It’s a genuinely bleak hundred pages and it’s the best thing David Weber has written outside the Honorverse. It’s superb.

I’ve reread this one several times now, which is not something I say about many doorstops. The concept is what keeps pulling me back. One colony fleet escapes by faking its own destruction, reaches a world ten thousand light years out, and then the administrators in charge make a decision I’ve never fully made peace with: humanity must never industrialise again, because industry has an emissions signature and the Gbaba follow signatures. So they wipe the colonists’ memories, tell them God made them a few days ago, write themselves into scripture as archangels, and build a church whose entire purpose is to make sure nobody ever invents anything.

The setup is the standout, and it isn’t close

The Terran Federation and the Gbaba are what I’ll remember from this book in ten years. What gets me is the sadness of it. Humanity takes the fight to Gbaba worlds, wins engagements, does everything right, and it doesn’t matter, because the enemy replaces losses and humanity can’t. Weber spends real pages watching the species lose in increments, and I felt every one of them. It’s genuinely grim.

I’ve seen the starting-over-on-another-planet idea done several times and done well. Doug Dandridge’s Exodus is a good example of the same instinct, a fleet running from something unbeatable and trying to build a future somewhere else. What Weber adds is the twist of deliberate stagnation, and that’s where the book stops being comfortable.

I found it genuinely hard to swallow. Millions of people held in the Dark Ages, forever, for their own protection, with a religion built specifically to punish curiosity. Pei Shan-wei’s faction wanted the knowledge preserved and released when it was safe, and Langhorne killed them all for it by sinking an entire landmass from orbit. He’s the villain of that exchange and he might also have been right, which is the uncomfortable bit. My own position lands in the middle. Hold them down five hundred years, let the Gbaba lose the scent, then let humanity start learning again. That seems obvious to me and it’s what neither faction in the book was willing to do.

There’s a hole in the premise that I want to flag, because it’s the sharpest criticism I’ve seen levelled at this book and I think it’s fair. The Federation could copy a human mind into a PICA. That technology existed. It was apparently used for recreation, so people could go rock climbing in a body that wouldn’t die, while humanity was simultaneously losing a war of extermination for want of good people. Nobody thought to make twelve copies of their best physicist. Nobody made twenty of their best admiral. The book’s answer, as far as it has one, is that it just didn’t occur to anyone, and that’s thin.

Does it sink the book? Not for me. It’s a real hole and I can live with it, partly because the story Weber wants to tell needs Nimue to be singular and unrepeatable, and partly because “nobody thought of it” is depressingly plausible for a bureaucracy in a losing war. It’s the kind of flaw that bothers me more when I stop and think about it than it ever did while I was reading. But it’s there, and if it’s the sort of thing that ruins a premise for you, you should know going in.

Characters I actually got attached to

Cayleb and King Haarahld are the two who got me. Haarahld especially. He’s patient and sharp and he’s the first person to work out roughly what Merlin is without being told, and Weber kills him at the end of the book, which I think is the strongest decision in the whole novel. Cayleb goes from a likeable prince to a king in the space of one battle, and the film of that transition is convincing.

Merlin himself is interesting for reasons the plot doesn’t spend much time on. Nimue Alban died covering the evacuation eight hundred years ago, and what wakes up in the cave is an android carrying her personality and memories. Whether that thing is still Nimue or a very good recording of her is the only genuine interiority in the book, and it’s mostly left sitting there. Her decision to present as male, because a woman won’t get a hearing in a medieval patriarchy, is a practical choice the book treats practically. I’d have taken more of that and less of the cannon.

The odd one out for me is Erayk Dynnys. He’s the absentee Archbishop of Charis, corrupt and weak and not remotely admirable, and I found myself drawn to him anyway. He’s the first real sign that Weber isn’t going to write the Church as a monolith of villains, and there’s something in a man who’s been coasting his whole life suddenly having to look at what he’s part of.

The scattered use of lost technology through the book is a real plus too. It’s never a magic wand. It’s a cave, a library, an armoury, and a lot of restrictions, and the fun is watching Merlin work out what he can push through the gaps in a scripture that banned specific things and never thought to ban the rest.

The naval writing is exceptional, and there’s too much of it

The descriptive writing on the space battles and then the naval battles is genuinely superb. Darcos Sound is the payoff, where a small force of galleons annihilates a much larger galley fleet because galleys simply cannot answer a broadside, and the whole sequence is clear and tense and horrible. I found myself wincing for crews who never even got names. Reactor’s write-up called it sea battles and grand emotion, which is about right for the last third of the book.

The rigging of the ships is described exceptionally well. I did not need to know how ships were set up on every other page. That’s the trade with Weber and it always has been. He’ll spend twenty pages inside a character’s head on the development of a cannon, and about six of those pages are interesting. Six. The middle of this book sags badly under it, and the climax earns it back, and I understand why he does it without wanting quite so much of it.

The other thing that keeps throwing me out is the names. Cayleb, Haarahld, Zhaspahr Clyntahn, Erayk Dynnys. The in-world justification is that spelling drifts over eight centuries, which would be fine except it only ever applies to people’s names. Everything else on Safehold is spelled normally. I got used to it eventually. The first third was a fight.

Four out of five, and one warning

Good book, engaging story, and I’ve gone back to it more than once. That’s the real test. Four out of five.

There’s a lot of self-reflection in here that I could have done without. Characters thinking about what they’re doing, at length, repeatedly, and it’s a real waste that extends these books as a whole. If you like Weber you already know this and you’ve decided it’s worth it. If you don’t, this is the thing that will stop you.

The warning is about the series rather than the book. Don’t drag it out. If it takes a dozen novels to get Safehold back to twenty-first century technology, I’m not going to be along for the ride, and I say that as someone who’s just told you he’s reread the first one several times. There’s a version of this story that runs four books and lands hard. I’d like that to be the version I get.

If you’re coming to Weber for the first time, I’d still point you at Honor Harrington and On Basilisk Station before this, mostly because it’s a leaner introduction to how he writes. But if the premise here appeals at all, start here instead. It’s a better idea than anything in the Honorverse. And if you want the other famous novel about a small group engineering a civilisation’s recovery on a schedule, the Foundation books are the obvious companion piece, with the crucial difference that Seldon’s plan is designed to shorten the dark age and Langhorne’s is designed to make it permanent.