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SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?

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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by n7axw   » Sat Nov 19, 2016 11:11 am

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evilauthor wrote:I seriously doubt that a pre-WotF version of the Writ would be ground shattering to anyone but academics. After all, the modern version of the Writ couldn't logically exist prior to "Shan-Wei's rebellion".

But its discovery (or recreation) would be just a bit more chipping away at the religion's edifice as people compare versions and debate the changes made in the modern one.

And if Duchairne really did open up the Church's secret records, a pre-Fall Writ would likely be just one more exposed lie in entire mountain of similar lies that everyone had assumed was true.

Remember that there's already textev of the modern Church prior to the current war insisting that modern Church doctrine had ALWAYS been doctrine despite at least the upper ranks of the priesthood knowing otherwise. No doubt, legions of scholars are going to go through those secret histories just to figure out and explain to everyone how the Church could have become so corrupt as to place Clyntahn in charge.


In response to the last sentence here, the corruption is inevitable when there is no accountability, no one to whom the leadership has to answer. Corruption runs rampant any time you have cronyism which develops when one group retains power over an extended period of time. It is as inevitable as sunrise.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by fossten   » Sat Nov 19, 2016 2:31 pm

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What I didn't like:

The spelling errors and misused apostrophes were quite distracting. It was rather poorly proofread. For a book that size, two or three errors is barely acceptable. I saw dozens.

I will have to go back through the book with the map to appreciate the military detail, I guess. Much of the discussion of strategy was a blur unless you had a chart right next to you while reading.

The Clyntahn finish was a little anticlimactic. I've seen bad guys in sci fi get what's coming to them, and for all his vicissitudes, Clyntahn got a very merciful death.

The technique of using two full pages to give background on a character who is being introduced for the first time and is also about to die is getting tiresome.

The real turning point for the saga was when the Charisians showed up just in time to save Siddarmark. After that the end is inevitable, as the tech advantage for Charis is too overwhelming. I mean, you simply cannot win when your enemy is able to, with invisible remotes, literally record your strategy meetings and view your maps.

Plot convenience: Weber has to pull back his King Haarahlds with a timely industrial accident or the final Dohlaran naval campaign would have been such a mismatch that it would have been boring.

Very little character development. I would have enjoyed a mental Merlin soliliquy on how a PICA develops a romance with a human, and the consequences/portents of such a relationship.

What I liked:

The story advanced and the good guys won.

I hope the next book finishes the series. Weber should take a lesson from how Robert Jordan ruined the Wheel of Time series by milking it instead of bringing everything to a satisfying conclusion. Hell, even Empire from the Ashes has a more satisfying ending.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by evilauthor   » Sat Nov 19, 2016 8:48 pm

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n7axw wrote:In response to the last sentence here, the corruption is inevitable when there is no accountability, no one to whom the leadership has to answer. Corruption runs rampant any time you have cronyism which develops when one group retains power over an extended period of time. It is as inevitable as sunrise.

Don

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Well sure, but Safehold didn't know that. Given the erasure of human history by Langhorne, Safehold didn't have the experience to know what happens when you give a mere mortal absolute power and no checks and balances on that power.

If anything, the entire tradition and religion foisted on them by Langhorne and company led them to believe the exact opposite: an absolute ruler - especially a clerical one - would be guided by the will of God and His Archangels and thus are infallible and everyone should follow them.

That's how Clyntahn got as far as he did. People who were politically unaware (and a great many who were politically aware) were simply unable to believe how corrupt the man was and were predisposed to believe anything he said no matter how divorced from reality his statements were. Heck, in this very book, we see people right in Zion still thinking that the Inquisition would honor the letter of the Holy Writ when they had every evidence showing that the Inquisition was doing the opposite.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by Keith_w   » Sun Nov 20, 2016 9:10 am

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evilauthor wrote:
n7axw wrote:In response to the last sentence here, the corruption is inevitable when there is no accountability, no one to whom the leadership has to answer. Corruption runs rampant any time you have cronyism which develops when one group retains power over an extended period of time. It is as inevitable as sunrise.

Don

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Well sure, but Safehold didn't know that. Given the erasure of human history by Langhorne, Safehold didn't have the experience to know what happens when you give a mere mortal absolute power and no checks and balances on that power.



No, but the guys who set it up did, and were wrong when they told Shan-wei about how they were going to lock in the cultural matrix. Just goes to show, never trust a sociologist or psychiatrist.
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A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by n7axw   » Sun Nov 20, 2016 3:10 pm

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People on Safehold understood what was going on in Zion. They just didn't have the handles to do anything about it.

Don

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When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by Chester Moyle   » Tue Nov 22, 2016 11:00 pm

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I will have to say I am a bit disappointed in the book. I got the book Saturday and read it Sunday. It started off very slow and never quite got going full speed. I was surprised to see main characters missing in so much of the book ( Caleb, Sharelyn ) and Merlin barely making it in.
I am going to assume it had a lot to do with the book company rushing Mr. Weber to complete the book at all cost.
This was easily the worst book of the series. Mr. Weber stated that there would be more books but I would rather he took his time and held to his old standards. He is much to fine a writer to do this without extenuating circumstances.

Chester Moyle
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by evilauthor   » Fri Nov 25, 2016 7:03 am

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Chester Moyle wrote:I will have to say I am a bit disappointed in the book. I got the book Saturday and read it Sunday. It started off very slow and never quite got going full speed. I was surprised to see main characters missing in so much of the book ( Caleb, Sharelyn ) and Merlin barely making it in.
I am going to assume it had a lot to do with the book company rushing Mr. Weber to complete the book at all cost.


I think this has more to do with Weber padding the series as a whole. It was supposed to be a trilogy, but got blown up into a 9 (I think it's nine) volume series. And most of that padding is battle scenes that could easily be deleted in favor of a single paragraph or two infodump.

None of relatively little of that padding is expanding on what the main characters are doing.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by Bluesqueak   » Fri Nov 25, 2016 10:08 am

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evilauthor wrote:
Chester Moyle wrote:I will have to say I am a bit disappointed in the book. I got the book Saturday and read it Sunday. It started off very slow and never quite got going full speed. I was surprised to see main characters missing in so much of the book ( Caleb, Sharelyn ) and Merlin barely making it in.
I am going to assume it had a lot to do with the book company rushing Mr. Weber to complete the book at all cost.


I think this has more to do with Weber padding the series as a whole. It was supposed to be a trilogy, but got blown up into a 9 (I think it's nine) volume series. And most of that padding is battle scenes that could easily be deleted in favor of a single paragraph or two infodump.

None of relatively little of that padding is expanding on what the main characters are doing.


But it depends what readers like. Someone mentioned that they don't like the authorial habit of introducing a character and then killing him two pages later. For me, that constant reminder that wars kill real people, not numbers, is the thing that stops the Safehold series turning into war porn.

Furthermore, the reality in a World War is that it stops becoming about two or three main characters: if you're simultaneously fighting in Gorath and the Dohlaran land border and Siddarmark and Chisholm, the main characters of Sharleyan and Cayleb have basically reached the point where they're seeing that the right supplies reach the right armies. They're working out of offices (dull) rather than being hands on. They don't lead fleets or fight off assassins any more because the war's too big and that's no longer their job. It's nice to see a series that acknowledges that - that moves Cayleb, for example, away from personally leading his armies.

The 'office scenes' that are really dramatic by the end of the series are the ones with the Group of Four/Three - because 'office politics' in Zion can lead to you being tortured to death with your family. The good guys just can't provide that level of drama; not when they are a) winning and b) basically all like each other.

Merlin and Nimue get more screen time - but mainly because their PICA status means there are still 'hands-on' tasks that only they can do.

I'd say that Cayleb and Sharleyan's story arc completed in Hell's Foundation Quivers. This final book is partly about Hektor finishing his midshipman-to-royal-duke arc - but mainly about the COGA characters.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by Randomiser   » Fri Nov 25, 2016 1:09 pm

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You see the same thing in the Honorverse, as time goes on and Honor becomes Admiral Lady Dame Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, it's just no longer credible to have her leading nail-biting single ship or flotilla actions. Instead she moves into the background and any action scene with her is about strategic deployment of Grand Fleet. The newer characters get much more screen time in the later books. Once the EoC start winning and the war becomes a multi-front land campaign C&S take less and less part in the action. All we and they get are High-tech staff meetings. I seem to remember the same change is seen even in Hornblower, one of the original inspirations, although Forrester pulls of some dubious plot devices to get him isolated enough to be in action himself in some of the later books. In that regard his lack of clout with the Government also helps keep his sphere of operations limited.
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Re: SPOILERS: Anyone else... disappointed?
Post by rdelorme16   » Fri Nov 25, 2016 7:29 pm

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I was not surprised by the ending, some of it was the obvious direction the story was taking in the previous book. I would like to have seen a few line concerning the dispersal of the army of the holy war, but to be honest having Charis constantly pounding and out maneuverings its opponents was getting a little old and thin. But trench warfare is a bit depressing and poor reading.

As for the "King Haarahlds" class; they are classic pre-dreadnaughts circa 1885 to 1900: I suggest looking at ships like the Royal Sovereign Class Battleship 1890, Admiral class Battleships 1888, or Indiana-class battleships 1895 or any of the French battleships of the era.
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