Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
It wasn't a bad book, it just didn't scratch the same itch as the other two. In fact, it felt very much like a dry run for Safehold.
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Same underlying themes, yes.
Underwhelming then, even more now.
Obviously it's a theme that is important to him but developing it over ten volumes is simply diluting the (reader's) fun 10 times. And he is nowhere near making good on the promise of the first Safehold book.
Safehold needed to be a generational saga, not an epochal war.
It's turned into a slog.
HEIRS isn't a bad book in itself; it is just the wrong story in the wrong series.
The problem with HEIRS is that it takes a series that ran at breakneck pace and brings it to a total halt. For two volumes he'd been working off the Doc Smith playbook of exponential escalation and then he... stopped... halfway. The framework he established called for one thing and he went against it. It might have been workable if he'd kept on writing in the Imperium millieau and eventually gotten back on track but as is he might have been better off leaving well-enough alone.
I think of it as Weber's VORTEX BLASTERS, a spinoff more than a core piece of the saga. And, unlike Smith, he's not finished the core saga.