At the Sign of Triumph is the ninth book in the Safehold series and, with each book a seriously weighty doorstop, that represents a truly massive word count. And that per book word count has increased, as far as I can see, more or less in line with the series’ popularity and Weber’s own ascent of the bestseller lists. His writing has undoubtedly become self-indulgent and undisciplined. More than any other author I’m reading these days he desperately needs an editor brave enough to bring his work back under control. This is sad as he still spins a good yarn; his plots are well constructed and interesting, his characters, though mostly rather black and white, are engaging, and, when not getting bogged down in detail he can still produce some good action sequences. But the way his writing has been going over the last seven or eight books I’m really not sure whether I can continue with any more.
As I say, he can still write very good action prose; it’s just that it tends to get lost in the massive information dumps that he continually throws at his reader and his growing tendency to treat a good fifty percent of his narrative as fictional historic text rather than story. Another appalling habit is his overuse of point of view characters. I wouldn’t want to count but I don’t believe there can have been less than twenty different point of view characters in At the Sign of Triumph. These characters frequently appear, have their back story and motivations introduced, participate in a little action and then are either killed off or simply never appear again in the entire book. And all of this taking place within a single scene spanning no more than three or four pages. I know of no other author quite as profligate with his point of view characters as Weber.
Then there is the apparently complete lack of editing, of both copy and content. I would guess he as at least run it through a spell checker as there were almost no spelling mistakes but there were masses of typos; wrong, though correctly spelt, words, missing words and words in the wrong order. There were also numerous sentences that any decent editor would have corrected such as: “And there’s a much smaller but still significant number of people who find themselves actively opposing him, passively at least.” (My bolding). And if I have to read any more instances of how much someone’s smile would make a Kraken proud I truly think I’ll scream. Another annoying aspect that continually pulled me out of the story was his use of emphasis; it nearly always seemed, to me at least, to be on the wrong word, for example: “That’s what this morning is about.” Maybe it’s just me but when talking I might emphasise “that’s” or “this” depending on the context but never “what.”
Maybe I’ve just outgrown Weber or he’s outgrown me but, with another five books (no doubt all in the 1000 page range) before Safehold gets into space and then more after that fighting the Gbaba, I think I’m going to draw a line under this series here. This book has, after all, ended at a reasonable conclusion point. And I will have to consider carefully whether I want to spend my money on any more of Weber’s books in any series. There was a good book submerged somewhere under all the verbose info dumps and unnecessary details, which I did enjoy, but digging it out no longer feels worth the effort; there are plenty of other good books and authors out there.
2/5 stars
As I say, he can still write very good action prose; it’s just that it tends to get lost in the massive information dumps that he continually throws at his reader and his growing tendency to treat a good fifty percent of his narrative as fictional historic text rather than story. Another appalling habit is his overuse of point of view characters. I wouldn’t want to count but I don’t believe there can have been less than twenty different point of view characters in At the Sign of Triumph. These characters frequently appear, have their back story and motivations introduced, participate in a little action and then are either killed off or simply never appear again in the entire book. And all of this taking place within a single scene spanning no more than three or four pages. I know of no other author quite as profligate with his point of view characters as Weber.
Then there is the apparently complete lack of editing, of both copy and content. I would guess he as at least run it through a spell checker as there were almost no spelling mistakes but there were masses of typos; wrong, though correctly spelt, words, missing words and words in the wrong order. There were also numerous sentences that any decent editor would have corrected such as: “And there’s a much smaller but still significant number of people who find themselves actively opposing him, passively at least.” (My bolding). And if I have to read any more instances of how much someone’s smile would make a Kraken proud I truly think I’ll scream. Another annoying aspect that continually pulled me out of the story was his use of emphasis; it nearly always seemed, to me at least, to be on the wrong word, for example: “That’s what this morning is about.” Maybe it’s just me but when talking I might emphasise “that’s” or “this” depending on the context but never “what.”
Maybe I’ve just outgrown Weber or he’s outgrown me but, with another five books (no doubt all in the 1000 page range) before Safehold gets into space and then more after that fighting the Gbaba, I think I’m going to draw a line under this series here. This book has, after all, ended at a reasonable conclusion point. And I will have to consider carefully whether I want to spend my money on any more of Weber’s books in any series. There was a good book submerged somewhere under all the verbose info dumps and unnecessary details, which I did enjoy, but digging it out no longer feels worth the effort; there are plenty of other good books and authors out there.
2/5 stars
