Satan Sent Me to Save Capitalism from Catholics: Let's Read David Weber's Safehold

Off Armageddon Reef 3: Katanas Are Super Cool

It's time for Cayleb and Nimue to meet. The set-up is genuinely good! Prince Cayleb argues with his guards about how many men he has to take on a hunting trip, which establishes itself pretty well. There's a velociraptor-style creature called a slash lizard which has killed two people and might threaten more now that it has the taste. Cayleb heard about it, his guard leader hadn't, and he schemes to trick the guard into letting him hunt it himself, which shows both his cunning and establishes his sense of responsibility: Cayleb is nigh-eager to throw himself into danger to protect his people. He is Good Royalty, but this actually gives him some good characterizationa and positive qualities.

He successfully spears the lizard, and we cut to some assassins who think "well, it was a long shot that the lizard would get him, now let's crossbow the prince", but someone intervenes!

A dozen or so assassins attack the Prince and his two current guards, while a mysterious stranger shouts a warning and then starts cutting up the assassins. It's Nimue! Nimue has removed the robot boobs, added a mustache and beard, stuck a scar on, and (as we'll find out later) equipped a fully-functional robotic packer. Because Safehold culture is pretty male-dominated, Nimue has decided to go as a man named "Merlin", and tries hard to even internally only use this. For this reason, and another that won't make sense for, oh, several books, I'll be calling him "Merlin" and use he/him pronouns for him. This is our trans masc protagonist, just... written by a painfully straight guy. We'll get into the bisexual part later on.

Nimue had studied a bit of kendo, and now Merlin's body is a fusion-powered superhuman android with katanas made of space-age materials and equipped with an impossibly sharp cutting edge that will never dull, so Merlin saves the prince by carving up most of the assassins, then starts having to explain himself. These are the first katanas ever seen on Safehold, and it's part of Merlin's new mystique that he has such wonderful and strange swords.

You'd think that we'd have established things a bit in the previous hundred pages, but... we really didn't. Did you know that Safehold has a mythologized tradition of "seijin", who are wandering holy warriors and teachers with superhuman powers like seeing the future and past? Did you know that they have a theological explanation for their powers coming from God, that they're blessed with a lesser supernatural fire than the one that the Archangels are suffused with? Well, I didn't when I first got here, because it wasn't mentioned yet, not even the term "seijin". A hundred pages of exposition, and the moment our two primary protagonists meet each other, the author has to rush in and do all the important worldbuilding he forgot to do before.

Merlin gives a lot of 'technically correct' answers to questions that are very carefully phrased to allow him to be honest while being misleading. It's... fine. It's that moment in stories where we have someone show that they're wise and mysterious and in command of secret knowledge. This isn't a spectacular example, but it's not a bad example. I can nod along to the specifics of the case.

We cut to different groups of conspirators hiding out in Charis' capital, but the short version is that, yeah, there's a lot of people who want to kill the Good Royalty. Merlin then sits alone for a while thinking about how hot his post-transition body is and reminding us that Nimue never liked women romantically (this will come up later, hold tight), which is going to be funny and frustrating when we get to the payoff.

...Where was I? Oh, right, the narrative. The anti-tech thing already is breaking down a bit: Safeholdians have too-advanced metallurgy and even gunpowder, although it's low-quality gunpowder. Merlin stands around in his room and starts telling us about the geopolitics of Safehold, how the church is very bad and Charis is very good and very wealthy partially because the Church of God Awaiting can't leverage direct control over it (this was written by a Protestant lay speaker), then he spends a while just standing still, musing about a bunch of nations in the world. This means it's a bad version of what we'd previously seen the Temple higher-ups do more elegantly.

The world-building is... pretty bad. Despite the theoretical complete severance of Earth history and culture, most of the nations of Safehold are recognizably earth nations: Harchong is not!China, Siddarmark is not!Prussia/Germany, and so on. There's not!Spain, not!France, and not a single whiff of a not!Egypt, not!Brazil, any equivalent to native people on the American continents, etc. I'm not sure without refreshing my memory if we have a good Russia, but we sure don't have anything like Australia's native population or anything African-derived. When I read Safehold before, I noticed this but didn't really interrogate it. I'm not the most astute at noticing certain types of... problematic content, which I'll freely admit. I'll keep my eyes open on this because, like, this isn't a great choice. I'm still going to rely on the thread to check my work, because sometimes I'm not going to be the first one to notice something is wrong.

Anyway, that's enough complaining from me for today—next time... hey, wouldn't it be super-nifty if we had upcoming scenes of more people talking second-hand about the events I covered in this update? Maybe they can all be fat or stupid or something.

Off Armageddon Reef 4: Being Fat is a Moral Failure

I'm going to break from a completely linear reading for a little bit to dissect the next few scenes in a slightly different order, because I think it has something to show us about the writing of the series when we do that. In short: what happens next is that Merlin proves his utility and powers, Charis' leadership accepts him, and we see the gathering forces of anti-Charis starting to assemble now that we've had this confluence of Weird News: Merlin's presence, the assassination attempt on Cayleb, and the Church's growing displeasure with Charis.

One of the things that comes up annoyingly often is that you can judge how morally bankrupt someone is by how little they care for their body, in a way that feels like the author is making a statement. King Haarahld has a lame leg, lacks the ability to be fully mobile because of it, and is an administrator getting on in years. Nonetheless, our authorial eye can determine that he still has the remnants of a heroic physique—those two words are the book's. Cayleb is handsome and... honestly, I think Weber is going for "twunk", not that he would use the term. Merlin is physically fit and attractively androgynous, although he's cheating by literally having an artificial body he can directly modify... but Nimue was also fit, with lots of exercise-heavy hobbies. Meanwhile, Prince Nahrmahn (leader of one of the Bad Places) isn't just cruel, but actually somehow fat because he loves calorie-dense sweets and cakes even though he rules a very tropical place and is always sweating and the narrative thinks he's pretty gross for all that fat and sweat. Guess how pretty the Archbishops and Vicars and so on are, the ones that the Evil Church is ruled by? A sufficiently honorable military figure (and thus ontologically good) can be fit and handsome even if honorably serving an evil side, but for everyone else, their moral failings tend to be represented by them being fat or equivalently "appears bad because their sins are reflected on their bodies" gross. It's not a good look. The tiny piece that lightens this issue slightly is that injuries or various physical elements one can be born with aren't the result of turpitude, which is something, I guess.

We also get more reminders that Merlin is, essentially, narratively cheating in this section. Merlin commands a fleet of flying aircraft and/or spacecraft (called SNARCs, which is clearly a backronym) which can fly anywhere from "modern airplane" to "upper orbit" and their deployable fly-sized spy bugs. This isn't really given much description and functionally they're all just invisible spies, but, honestly? I've always been puzzled how this works. Are the spy bugs descending from geosynchronous orbit on their own power? Are the SNARCs diving from the sky to drop them off? Do they get recovered? What's their operational life? Do local insectivores (or cats) take a toll on them? How many SNARCs can Merlin have? We get reminded a bit later on that Langhorne has a series of automatic systems on orbital satellites to stop things like this, so the SNARCs have to be watching for both spy satellites and also never be seen by people below, because there's no aircraft here to have people look at it in the sky and not be freaked out. I mention all this to get to a point: this is cheating, narratively. All the questions above? If they're ever answered, I don't recall it, despite them being important practical questions. However, this topic still gets lots and lots of focus.

The story wants political rivals to use schemes, cut-outs, secret loyalties, and the mystery of who might actually be behind any given maneuver to build tension, but then we get Prince Nahrmahn and his spymaster saying "here is the name of our local spy leader in Charis" and then the narrative points at the spy bug in the room. This wouldn't feel like cheating if we just are told that this is a thing our protagonists have, but it's treated like there's rules and limitations. It's treated this way because we spend a lot of time talking about "Merlin deployed SNARCs" and pointing the reader at any relevant spy bugs and having scenes and offhanded mentions of Merlin spending a great deal of time reviewing his logs of surveillance data. He also spends several scenes abstractly describing his intel to the Charisian characters, claiming that they're 'visions' and describing how the visions work and how they come to him, with no ceremony or pretensions to make it a character beat. The only narrative purpose this can fill is to suggest that there's something for the reader to learn about what Merlin can and can't tease out of his records, that (whether knowingly or unknowingly) targets might slip something past Merlin by failing to expose knowledge to a spy bug or moving troops or ships in a way that orbital SNARCs can't watch.

But, having made this implicit promise to us, the book then doesn't really commit to that: there's rarely people going "you-know-who"/"right, of course", although later in the series we get some. In this book, we conveniently find that everyone conveniently clearly speaks full context whenever convenient, for our heroes' convenience. Either just hand-wave it or commit to some rules!

Merlin is accepted by Haarahld and Cayleb, of course. This is fine; there's a few quibbles I could have with the specifics, but trying to play into my quibbles would harm the story, because the book shouldn't lean into suggesting narrative beats it has no desire to follow up on, so I'm good with this. Merlin, the 'seijin', is accepted by Charis and intends to start helping them.

There's two pieces to this that I'd like to interrogate a little bit. One is 'why Charis', and the other will relate to a character named Maikel that I'll introduce you to momentarily.

Why is Charis the Best Place? Well, among their many virtues, Merlin gives one additional detail that we hadn't actually been told about before: most of the common folk on Safehold are serfs, meaning that they're legally bound to their land and cannot legally move away from or separate from said land, so they have to work for their landowners. Charis has done away with serfdom two Kings ago. I can believe that this would attract Nimue's/Merlin's favor, but the argument for why Charis did so is... weak, in character. They did this out of sheer moral goodness, because in Langhorne's Day of Creation the Archangels made everyone the same and together, rather than singling out noble blood for better treatment. Only Charis, the Best Place, has followed this theological fact out to its ultimate conclusion and decided to be more equitable, when even the Temple Lands (the places directly serving the Church of God Awaiting's upper clergy) haven't. This is... going somewhere. Let's leave the spoiler for the unspoken reason aside for now, since it will come up soon enough. Without that unspoken piece, this feels silly. We stress that, while the Good Royalty try to be Good, they are still bound by necessity and human foibles, and also say that, oh, yeah, many decades ago the crown decided out of its own sheer goodness to cut out its own power and the power of its nobles to control average people? Really? The book tells us that they're the white in its white-and-black morality, then tries to insist that this white is grey.

The other piece to Merlin settling in to help Charis is Bishop Maikel, the local leader and assistant to Archbishop Erayk Dynnys that we saw back in section 2. Maikel is there when Merlin met with King and Prince, and he is a genuinely pious and serious religious leader, if one that is steeped in the Church of God Awaiting. He's treated as wise and possessed of boundless love for people. He will be a very major character going forward.

Merlin is actually-Christian, and seeing the theology of the Church of God Awaiting and how it misuses people like Maikel and how it causes people like Clyntahn is deeply frustrating for him. We see him struggle with the Writ that is the holy book handed to mankind by the Archangels, which also serves to help us understand its place in the setting and to characterize things. This is one of the best pieces of the series, both in terms of its setting place and what I'd call overall writing quality. The Writ is a frankensteined creation of combining many religious traditions (though mostly Christianity, to be honest, with a light sprinkling of not-Christianity for flavor) and using advanced knowledge to demonstrate both its truth and to help people. The Writ tells people to have good sanitation and cleanliness: before assisting in childbirth, people need to clean up in properly-blessed holy water that has, like, "soap". There's instructions on how to turn Safehold-native soil into stuff that supports Earth crops, and it works. Modern psychiatry is turned into mental-health tools. Global maps of Safehold at its 'creation' are a centerpiece of every small church, demonstrating knowledge of all corners of the world. All of this is tools provided by our glorious Archangels. Pestilence and similar terrible things are the result of the evil Shan-wei's fallen Archangels when they slew Langhorne's physical form and forced Langhorne back up to an immaterial state at God's right hand. Thousands of communities all across the world have personal, written testimonies by their "Adams and Eves" about the Day of Creation, all of which agree perfectly with the official account and would be perfectly consistent with any archeological explorations, which would firmly support that there was a specific, singular day, the exact day we've been told, where humans awoke all across Safehold.

...But it's a lie. It was created to be a tool of control and suppression, built with a bunch of things to try to make scientific inquiry frustratingly hard to develop, along with explicit stuff that says "if you make technology with steam engines, or worse with Langhorne's sacred lightning (ie, electricity), then God will directly smite you", and there's automatic systems meant to do that.

Weber is actually usually pretty good about making believable religious developments in his sci-fi, at least if it's Christian enough. He has the grounding to understand that religious dogma does shift a little over time, as well was in what ways it might shift. He knows there are people who will genuinely seek truth and do their best to live according to their understanding. The Christianity-descendants of the Honorverse are pretty understandable to me, even when they have beliefs that the Protestantism that both Weber and I grew up in would say "hang on, that's slightly heretical..."

In Safehold, I like the tension between the self-apparently true theology and more complicated implementation of religion. This will have so, so much for me to complain about very soon, but Maikel? He's genuine, and he isn't unique. This is a religious world, and its religious leaders are kin to both the best and the worst examples of religious leaders in real-world history. The series won't live up to its promise, but there are some good pieces in here.

...Join me next time for some plot to happen, I guess? Merlin will meet a couple of Good Nobles and start using that spy knowledge.

On an unrelated note, I've just realized how funny it is that I'm working on one project for a franchise with a major character named "Maikel" and another project for a franchise with a major character named "Makiel". Weird bit of synchronicity, that.

Off Armageddon Reef 5: Duke Traitor is My Oldest Friend

One of the stranger interactions of Weber's fascination with worthy nobility/royalty combined with his Reagan-ish-era right-wing views are that it has to be possible for a sufficiently worthy person or family to ascend to elite status through business deals that invariably must reward people based on merit alone with no complicating factors that won't be swept aside fairly quickly. It is, of course, not an unheard-of thing in historical societies with a noble class to have pathways for the lower class to join them, but it's kind of funny here how high such people can rise and how much other Good Nobility/Royalty will be totally sanguine about this.

Another fun little bit of character in Safehold is how nobles are referred to. I haven't come across this elsewhere, but I don't know if it was a Weber creation for this series or if it has some good historical basis. Please do let me know either way if you have relevant knowledge. Many noble estates are given a two-word description of a major physical feature, adjective-noun, and the noble who holds its title can also be referred to this way: Instead of being "Baron of Wave Thunder", Bynzhamyn Raice is "Baron Wave Thunder" or just "Wave Thunder". We have "Gray Harbor", "Rainbow Waters", "Lock Island", etc.

These combine in the character of Wave Thunder. Wave Thunder was not born to nobility, but rather his father had been a ship master, he'd trained as a clerk, and he was so good at business that he got raised to nobility and then was given control of Charis' intelligence services, which is quite a career path that I can't help but feel is skipping some intermediate steps. He's exceptional, of course, but also not really. Surely any equivalently talented/loyal/dedicated person would be rewarded commensurately to him: someone 80% or 40% as worthy gets 80% or 40% as much payout. For society to be otherwise requires active, artificial interference by bad actors, like Communists or the United Nations.

Wave Thunder and Gray Harbor are the Good Nobles introduced here, with Gray Harbor being "the Earl who is effectively Prime Minister, but we haven't invented the term yet". King Haarahld drops Merlin off with them and Merlin starts naming a bunch of spies and informants in Charis, including the truly shocking discovery that [a guy we haven't heard about before] is a traitor! The write-up here is extremely funny to me with just how bad the as-you-know is here to help the reader understand this situation:

"I'm sure he didn't," Merlin agreed. "And I'm not surprised by your anger, My Lord. After all, you've known the Duke since he was a boy. Your daughter is married to him. And, of course, he stands fourth in the succession, and he's always been King Haarahld's staunch supporter, both in the Privy Council and in Parliament, as well. You've known me less than two hours. It would astonish me if you were prepared to take my unsupported word that a man you've known and trusted for so long is in fact a traitor. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the truth."

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This is a decent development even if it's delivered so awkwardly: the Prime Minister, Gray Harbor, is instantly, automatically, protective of Duke Traitor and assumes Merlin must be giving false accusations as a method of stirring up trouble in Charis at the behest of someone else. Merlin's integration into Charis is complicated by this clash.

Hilariously for tension, though, I turn the page and the next scene starts with Wave Thunder's second-in-command going "yup, Duke Traitor is definitely a traitor." He looked into things and there's so many little things adding up to a suspicious overall conclusion, including that he keeps hanging out with people who are definitely in Prince Nahrmahn's corner (Nahrmahn being Fat Evil Prince, if you don't recall).

Wave Thunder decides to try to trap Duke Traitor to test his loyalty: pass false information to him, see if it spreads after they do do. This sensible plan will not be implemented at all.

We take a quick mention to remind the reader that the Church is corrupt by saying that in Charis the secular authorities can only imprison someone with accusation/conviction and due process, but the Church can just say "we're God's agents, lock him up."

This is to lead into Wave Thunder asking Gray Harbor for permission to do more investigation, specifically the sensible plan from two paragraphs ago. Gray Harbor is a Good Noble, so he allows it, even angry as he is. But he'd be more accepting of this if he weren't so close to the accused. We see him stand around alone after greenlighting this, drinking imported liquor, until he finally ends up doing something rash.

We cut to Duke Traitor's mansion, because on a dark and stormy night a drunk Gray Harbor has decided to show up and go "dearly beloved Duke Traitor, since you're totally loyal, please stop associating with those friends of yours that I have discovered are traitors, please, I know you're totally loyal." Of course I am, Duke Traitor replies. Why would you think otherwise? And this is where Earl Gray Harbor spills the tea. You can't have expected me to miss a chance to make that pun, I mean really now.

Duke Traitor admits everything, deciding to 'go loud'. He has a not-entirely-stupid plan to win this arrangement: He'll kill off the King and Prince and Merlin and then as obvious regent for the King's younger kids (whom I don't think have been mentioned before this) he can blame it all on Merlin, stating Merlin 'saved' Cayleb only to get close to the rest of the royal family and kill them all at once, with Duke Traitor's forces only showing up in time to avenge them. With the dead king's loyal Prime Minister and the king's ever-faithful family member Duke Traitor to settle the ship, together we can rule the galaxy island nation as father-in-law and son-in-law! Gray Harbor, being a Good Noble, refuses absolutely, so Merlin jumps through the skylight to save him as Duke Traitor's fifteen veteran men-at-arms charge into the library.

This leads into an action scene I like, with Merlin having to fight not only against impossible odds, but to save Gray Harbor. Gray Harbor backs up a narrow metal staircase to prevent himself from being taken hostage as Merlin fights far too many foes. It does lead into a problem that's going to plague the rest of this book, though: Merlin's feats have been described as 'literally inhuman' in the book already, and it starts showing up here, too. The phrase shows up way, way too often. That aside, Gray Harbor redeems himself and proves he's still a Good Noble because he throws a knife and instantly kills Duke Traitor with the pitch even as Merlin finishes off the men-at-arms.

The set-up here is awkward, but I like the results. I can see why Gray Harbor was stupid in exactly the way that he was. It makes perfect sense to me, although the book should've sold me on the character of Duke Traitor before he was revealed as a villain, so that Gray Harbor's actions are more emotionally resonant. It has a good moment of someone saying "no, I will stand for what's right no matter how hard it is to do so!", it's an action scene I enjoy, and it gives Merlin even better reason to be trusted in Charis. He was the one who gave word that Duke Traitor was bad, but Gray Harbor, who doubted it, had it proved without Merlin's involvement. This is the sort of scene that makes me enjoy Safehold, despite its flaws.

Then I look over my notes and just start swearing under my breath. You know how Charis is England? And these traitors are all secretly loyal to a nearby island nation that should be loyal to England-Charis and isn't? And the reason they're disloyal is because they're too Catholic? And so that's why all these traitors do terrorist actions here or whatever? Yeah, that's why we have to defeat Prince Nahrmahn and the nation he rules, which is Emerald. That's the Safehold name. For what totally isn't the Emerald Isle, as England manifests its divine destiny to absorb Ireland and properly rule over it as part of our infinitely righteous United Kingdom.

Fuck.

Join me next time for some more stabbings.