This is book 1 of the "Safehold" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

First of his new series from Tor Books.

The promotional material for this series seemed to me to be mostly about the background society, which I'm guaranteed to hate. It then said, fairly briefly, that an uploaded human would be working across considerable time to fight that society. I like that part. Having read the book, I can correctly say that I figured it out. But just weighting by verbiage, I'd have had to conclude I wouldn't like it.

This one has one of the same stupid name plays that Haven in the Honorverse is rife with, except in this case it's a legitemate joke between the character (and author) and the reader; nobody else knows what it means, so they can't think it's weird, funny, or whatever, so they don't have to react to it. (In this one, a woman named Nimue is uploaded, and to work in a patriarchal society chooses to modify the apparent sexual appearance of her PICA to be male; and names herself "Merlin".)

What I like, of course, is bootstrapping the industry and the military organization and tactics. And I like the idea of eventually taking on and flattening the Church, naturally. The native characters are pretty sensible given their backgrounds, so that's nice.

All in all, this was fun. Dunno how long it's gonna be, though; the story is barely started.