Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
I think Weber has gotten lazy in recent years. Just as Out of the Dark is an expansion of a short story, so have been a couple of others, like A Beautiful Friendship. In addition to short story expansions, he has gone off the deep end with neverending detailed explanations of how things work. This is a real problem in the Safehold Series. It is almost as if he has lost sight of what makes for a good novel.
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Well, Beautiful Friendship and Fire Season and the sequels to come are a collaboration to address a set of characters/milleau he's been meaning to deal with but hasn't had the time. (Because Safehold and Honorverse are eating it up.)
To be a bit kinder, I suspect that because he can craft these detailed worlds and scenarios (and do it well) and draw readers in he feels comfortable (compelled?) zooming-in to that level. And since the stuff sells, the publishers don't feel the need to... encourage him... to change. "Why mess with success."
The problem is one of scale: the approach works with The Honorverse because the scale of the story is vast enough that zooming-in on specific theaters and plot-lines is essential to appreciating the conflict itself and doesn't bog you down with minute by minute updates. And so far all the threads are relevant. (Though a few less strtegic briefings here and there wouldn't hurt.) But Safehold is a much smaller story to start with and zooming-in just bogs you down; we do *not* need to experience the plight of every last villager at risk of starvation.
I've said it before: Safehold needed to be a generational saga. One volume, one generation, each highlighting a new stage of the struggle to get mankind back up in space and ready to rain righteous retribution upon the aliens.
He is good at the technique but he is applying it to the wrong story.
The technique he needed for Safehold is the fast-forward he used with the first two Dahak novels.