Midst Toil and Tribulation [Hardcover]

Safehold has been a very intrieguing series, managing a hybrid of scifi and historical fiction that works quite well. The first few books were all excellently written, with the focus on the characters, the world, and their struggles, which is as it should be.

In this book, however, it feels like Mr. Weber (or his editor) has allowed a lot of exposition on the ins and outs of specific military technologies that would be better served to be placed off in an appendix or three. As a result, the story often seems to bog down a little bit, and it feels like character development and interactions have been given short shrift. Don't get me wrong; a lot of these relationships between technology and tactics, strategy, and logistics are facinating in their own right, and certainly deserve to be addressed... but it would be nice to pare that explanation down from 2-3 pages to a paragraph or two, and a reference to more detail in an appendix.

This book also suffers from switching points of view from character to character a little too quickly; often several times within a chapter. While the focus on the "man-at-the-front" is interesting, it gets fantastically confusing to have about 6 different front men in a single chapter (3 on each side; who is who again?). I would love to see Mr. Weber picking a handful of these people that he can develop enough to allow us to remember each one and look forward to getting back to their story. As a result of the brief time we spend with each, I find it hard to care about them, or even how the different technologies impact them, which is a shame.

In all, this is a reasonable entry in the series, but has strayed a little from what made the series great in the first place. I'm looking forward to the next entry, and hope that Mr. Weber and his Editor manage to find a better balance the next time around.

I have read pretty much all of David Weber's novels. I enjoy his style of writting. However, I am getting very frustrated with the Safehold series. As a previous reviewer said, how will this series end? After roughly 900 years, the human race is trying to recover technology to fight a genocidal alien species. The series is up to book 6 and we have rediscovered the steam engine. I guess at book 12, we will have bi-planes. When do we get to fusion engines? When do we get to confronting the Gbaba? Or do we?
This book started out okay, but really bogged down. It covers roughly 1 year, and all we know is that Mother Church is even more evil than we thought, nobody can figure out that the side that tortures people is bad and the side that doesn't torture people is good, and not one person (other than Merlin) can spell their name without using at least 1 Y. (It really slows down the reading when you have to struggle to figure out what someone's name is. Is it so bad to say Ferguson instead of Fyrgysyn?)
Please, Mr. Weber, advance this series! I enjoy reading it, but this book was a little hard to get through and I feel like nothing really happended!

In book 6, Weber got the feedback that long-winded expositions about wind, sail, gunnery exercises, weather, etc.... are very boring to readers of SCIENCE FICTION. Unfortunately, he simply moves that obsession with pointless detail from naval battles to land battles, focusing strongly on the Siddarmark situation. Now we get useless details on pike formations, artillery, howitzers, steam engines, etc.... Once again, I find myself flipping through pages until where the plot resumes and the technical treatise ends.

As far as plot goes, we get 3 major arcs divided into sub-plots. There's the Irys/Daivyn/Hector plot arc to humanize the story. It's interesting but overly wordy because Weber repeatedly bludgeons the reader over the head with the direction Irys is headed. That entire plot arc would have been much better with about 30% fewer pages. But look on the bright side - at least we were spared long meeting minutes. I'd rather read 10 excessive pages on how Daivyn enjoys himself while Irys watches Hector than discussions among council members of both sides.

Then we have the situation in Siddarmark before the Charisian Imperial forces land in force. There's way too much detail on geography and I can't be bothered to constantly switch to the map view to figure out where everything is. There's fewer detail on bloody torture, but Weber still spends absurd amounts of time on atrocities. We get it already, David. No need to hammer it in every time you shift narrative from one combat theatre to another one. The entire Glacierheart sub-plot was boring as heck, even if he threw in a couple of named-characters because it's hard to care about guerilla war in the mountains between dozens/hundreds when we just came from a massive naval engagement of 200+ ships.

Then there's all the logistics. Gah. It's boring to check maps and see why the Raven Lord sub-plot matters. It's boring to check the geography to figure where this Gap and that river is. We aren't all that fascinated by small advances in technology either, especially when we've all been expecting it.

The reader has to slog through about 2/3rd of the book before we get to the part everyone is waiting for - when the Charisian forces join the battle and the superior technology comes to bear in the land battle.

This is the only plot arc which lived up to the expectations of the series. We get a couple of sharp battles where new technology gets flaunted, new tactics get shown off, and some sneaky-deceptive strategy that Weber made his style in the Honor Harrington series. Once you get to June, the action and paces picks up sharply and the book becomes much more interesting.

That is the central problem with how Weber has written the Safehold series. Clearly he remains capable of spinning a good yarn, but it's all the fluff and tedium that's driving the loyal readers up the wall. If this book had been HALF the length with 60 pages of the political/personal arc, 60 pages of the Siddarmark situation, and the same 200 pages of the final third of the book - I'd give this book 4.5 stars.

As is - only 3 stars. More like 2.75.

One last point - the Gbaba has now re-entered the storyline which suggests that Weber realizes his readers are reading the 19th century stuff in order to move on to the 30th century stuff. So I hold out hope that we'll eventually get back to starship and Gbaba War, part 2.