Series: Safehold

This note contains spoilers for the series.

Long long ago the Gbaba defeat Earth and her colonies and everybody else. A remnant of humanity flees to the planet Safehold to try to rebuild—but they have to avoid detection by the Gbaba while they do so.

One faction imposes their decision to keep the technology low forever by imposing a restrictive religion that controls all technology.

Hundreds of years later, the plans a few people made to stop them start to bear fruit, including the personality of a junior officer in a robot body waking up.

Meanwhile, the religion has become one of the most hellishly repressive and corrupt organizations ever created by man (who is suprised?). Overall, these are among the most depressing and consistently grimdark books I've ever read, and I sometimes wonder why I continue.

There are some lovely sections on figuring out what technologies can be introduced early (they can be produced without building too much new infrastructure) and what tactical innovations can be put in place to match them. The anti-church forces kick ass for quite a while.

I don't know what Weber's intended timeline is, but it's going to take a lot of technological advance to bring the people on Safehold up to the point where they can defeat the Gbaba. Dozens of books, centuries of time. And nobody has any idea how to develop high tech without being detected. Of course, he could just have them get out there to look and find the Gbaba long dead from no apparent cause or something, but that would tend to annoy his fans I rather think.