Book: Off Armageddon Reef
Author: David Weber
ISBN: 978-0-330-452182
Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber is the first novel in the Safehold series.
The Terran Federation knew of the alien Gbaba for a decade before they actually met them, after discovering the remains of a civilisation that the Gbaba had already annihilated.
When they actually met, the Federation lost ground initially, before rallying and pressing the offensive. And this is where the series takes a different spin to the norm.
Usually, in a science fiction series of this type, Earth would successfully defeat the alien menace. Here, they don’t.
A last, desperate attempt to survive the threat sees a colony fleet dispatched thousands of light years away, where a new planet will be colonised. As a previous attempt had failed, due to the Gbaba detecting the technological emissions of the colony, this new colony will not use any advanced technology. Some of the colony’s administrators take things a step too far, creating a religion that enshrines them as archangels.
Almost a thousand years after the colony is established on Safehold, an android is awakened in a hidden cave, and sets out to complete the hidden mission that had been planned – to eventually take the war back to the Gbaba, and this time defeat them. First, Safehold needs to develop a technological base, and as technology is considered the plaything of evil, this will not be an easy matter.
The book does have science fiction elements, but the majority of it is set at a much lower technology level, more at the level of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. Given that the Kingdom of Charis, where much of the book is set, is primarily a naval and trading power, combat is between fleets of actual ships, rather than spaceships. The novel is quite combat heavy, with clashes between opposing navies.
Rather like the Star Kingdom of Manticore in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, the Kingdom of Charis, and especially its navy, seems to have a definite British and Royal Naval influence.
Off Armageddon Reef is not the book you might expect from the way it starts.
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