But a war in heaven erupts between those coterie members who like playing God and want to keep the Safeholders permanently in the dark and those who want to prepare the Safeholders for the next encounter with the Gbaba, an inevitability hopefully many thousands of years distant. The Safeholders find themselves on their own, straitjacketed by a bogus culture they have been conditioned to accept as real.

After this breathless opening, Weber jumps ahead 890 years. In that time, the power of the ersatz Church of God has grown more rigid than ever, yet its absolute authority is brittle, challenged from without by robust monarchies on the European model and from within by rank corruption.

Enter Nimue Alban, a survivor of the Federation genocide ... or, rather, her PICA: a Personality-Integrated Cybernetic Avatar containing the essence of the long-dead original. Woken from a sleep of centuries, Nimue must single-handedly break the power of the Church and shatter the complacent ignorance of Safeholdian society. Because that society is patriarchal (though why the founders, products of an egalitarian culture, did not ensure gender equality remains a mystery), she utilizes one of the many cool apps of her artificial body and becomes physically male, morphing from Nimue into ... wait for it ... Merlin.

Manifesting the apparently supernatural powers of a Seijin, the Safeholdian version of a saint, Merlin appears in the Kingdom of Charis just in time to rescue the heir to the throne, Prince Arthur, I mean Prince Cayleb, from an assassination attempt. A maritime power reminiscent of Elizabethan England, whose king rules for the benefit of his subjects and chafes under the stultifying hand of Church repression, Charis seems the perfect lever with which to move a world. But Merlin must tread carefully, for any hint of forbidden technology will meet with swift and deadly reprisals from ecclesiastical and secular authorities ... as well as some nasty orbital fail-safes left behind by the founders.

The science fiction we deserve

If each generation gets the science fiction it deserves, then we must've been doing something right to get Off Armageddon Reef. While there's nothing terribly original about Weber's setup, he carries it off with the mastery one would expect from the author of the best-selling Honor Harrington series.

After their overwhelming initial appearance, the Gbaba vanish from the novel save as a looming threat never entirely absent from Merlin's mind. It's not clear how many volumes are planned for the series, but any new confrontation with the aliens seems far off indeed by the end of this one. I found that a bit counterproductive, but Weber is working on a grand scale here, replacing his usual canvas of vast spaces with one of vast time. It's jarring at first to go from interstellar battles to a planet-bound struggle in a pre-Industrial Revolution culture, but Weber makes it work. He lavishes his considerable powers of plot and description, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of naval warfare, on Merlin's efforts to upgrade the Charisian navy, culminating in a couple of rip-roaring set-piece battles that may take a little long to arrive but are well worth the wait. These aspects of the novel have the feel of alternate history, or even a fantasy like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as Merlin ransacks his databases to bootstrap indigenous technology right up to, if not a little over, the line of what the Church can accept.

Merlin is a familiar iteration of the omnicompetent man—except in this case, he's a she. Weber occasionally dips into the psychological effects of Nimue's transgressive transformation, but only fleetingly, and never deeply. Nimue/Merlin is romantically attracted to young Prince Cayleb, but there is little sense of what it might cost her/him to repress this attraction ... or act on it. Similarly, issues of survivor guilt, or just plain nostalgia and regret, are overlooked: Action, not introspection, is Weber's focus, though I did find myself wondering occasionally why he couldn't attempt both. Without this dimension, Merlin becomes a kind of deus ex machina, and Weber would be well advised to think of a way to curtail his hero's prowess, or give him more challenging obstacles, in the next book.

Weber's cast of characters is large and appealing—although, curiously, there is only one woman of note aside from Nimue in the man's man's man's world of Safehold. That, too, is something Weber might think about addressing in subsequent volumes.

But few readers will stop turning the pages long enough to worry about such trifles.