So let’s say you’ve looked at David Weber’s books with some interest, but haven’t wanted to commit to reading the dozen-book Harrington series or the unfinished Safehold series. Well, then David Weber’s Empire From the Ashes is the book for you, because it pretty much encapsulates his entire career in a single (omnibus) book.
It’s got the interstellar war, with epic huge battles against insuperable odds. It’s got the Safehold-style colony that’s lost its tech base and has a religion preventing them from developing new tech. And, because it’s one of Weber’s early books, it also has in it a touch of everything that David Weber thinks would be awesome — a secret base of immortals on Earth, ancient cosmic secrets on the moon, hidden mysteries in the Antarctic, ancient alien civilizations that scour the galaxy of life, superpowered astronauts — and if you can’t appreciate this on at least some level, you may not have a soul.
About the only downside is that the third part of the omnibus also accurately captures Weber’s late career propensity for writing bloated books with lots of repetitive and dull conversations in them. But it still has enough awesomeness to power through the dullness.
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