Kissing the tarmac once again

This afternoon, I cycled to Hele. The ride wasn't bad, although some of the hills were pretty tough and the weather wasn't particularly pleasant, but I rather enjoyed it. Or at least I did, right up until the last hundred metres.

Having forgotten that the road was wet, I took the last left turn rather too fast, only for the wheels to lose their grip. The bike went into a slide, I connected with the tarmac and ground to a halt. Relatively little damage was done, although my knee and elbow were pretty badly cut up, but on the whole I feel I got off pretty lightly...

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ETA: Actually, my arm was bad enough to need bandaging up. Fortunately, I've got enough stuff left over from last time to do the job for now.

By Schism Rent Asunder

Happening across an import of David Weber's By Schism Rent Asunder, his second Safehold novel, in my local bookstore, I simply had to buy it. And I'm rather glad I did.

The book follows on from Off Armaggeddon Reef, tracking the progress of the island kingdom of Charis as it attempts to stabilise its position following a recent demonstration of its naval might. Forced to confront the corruption of the hierarchy the universal Church of God Awaiting, the Archbishop of Charis charges the four most powerful members of the vicarate with complicity in the recent naval attacks and calls upon them to reform, quoting Martin Luther's famous words in the process.

Although there are some minor irritations — mainly the names, which Jo Walton touches on in her comments on Armaggeddon Reef — Weber's general world building and descriptions of (re)industralisation are wonderfully compelling. He really captures the feeling of a world on fire with curiosity, one where people who've been held back by a fake religion designed to keep them confined to medieval levels of technology are suddenly able to blossom when provided with a few choice hints about which ideas to pursue.

Weber obviously has fun with the Church of God Awaiting, setting up it up as a pastiche of the worst excesses of medieval Catholicism and peopling its Vicarate with cynics and degenerates and politicians. Equally the opponents of the church are all good Lutherans, with their strong belief in personal conscience and freedom of choice; for, as one character notes, belief means nothing unless people are free to choose to disbelieve. But despite all this, the clerics never quite fall into parody because even the worst of them retain at least some sense of belief in their purpose — even the almost clownishly horrible Grand Inquisitor pursues his twisted faith with a genuine zeal and responds with grudging respect when one of his colleagues rediscovers his own sense of faith following a particularly unpleasant episode.

The cast of characters is vast — the book helpfully includes a 12 page listing of the dramatis personae but despite this, the main characters are well drawn and generally convincing. As noted, Weber shies away from creating two dimensional villain because, after all, no-one is a villain in their own head, no matter how appalling they seem from outside. But the heroes too are generally well rounded with, as Weber has noted elsewhere, the vices of their virtues. He even deals rather elegantly with the tricky problem of Merlin, applying convincing limits to his capabilities that prevent him from simply turning into a deus ex machina and genuinely making him work to achieve his goal of helping Charis towards industrialisation.

I'm certainly looking forward to reading the next book. The bookstore had a hardback copy of the third novel the other week, but I balked at the price — well over twenty quid — especially because I hadn't (then) read the second. Perhaps I'll wait until it comes out in paperback and, in the meantime, get down to some work on my to-read pile...