What do you think?
Rate this book
605 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
The Space Opera – An alien race is exterminating humanity and to survive as a species a group of individuals is sent out to establish a low-tech safe haven (hence the name) where they can hide for a few centuries before carefully building back their technological base. The first several chapters deal exclusively with this, which makes it a bit of a jump when we go to the actual story – the leaders of this group have a falling out, with the victor being a megalomaniacal man with a god complex who’s convinced that the only way to preserve humanity is to ensure that it never develops technology again and that the best way to do this is to mindwipe everyone and establish a theocratic state based on the suppression of innovation with himself and his assistants as angels. Oh, and he has the weaponry and inclination to murder anyone who opposes this plan. By the millions.
The Fantasy – Which brings us to the current day, which is nine centuries after these events. The Church rules a decidedly medieval world and has done since the creation of the universe (so far as anyone knows) but a crewmember from humanity’s pre-Safehold days has been preserved in a robotic body and programed to awaken and make Safehold into what it was supposed to be using what technology she has on hand. She calls herself Merlin and is basically a figure out of a fantasy novel – someone who can fight at a superhuman level and observe people at great distance using remote drones.
The Alternate History – To achieve this she needs to introduce a whole lot of novel concepts and technologies and teach people how to develop and build on this innovation themselves. In this (which is most of the novel) the book feels a lot like one of those alternate history novels (the 1632 series for example) featuring time-travelers stuck in the past and gearing down all their tech to allow it to be mass produced and used by contemporaries. The whole thrill of these novels is seeing the inventive ways modern (or somewhat premodern) technology and techniques can be incorporated into old approaches.