I picked this book up because I found it as an ebook for $2.99 and I have enjoyed Weber's other books.

In this story an alien race that has destroyed other civilizations is doing the same to humanity and a desperate escape to a new system where they hope not to be found. The leaders of this escape plan the new colony to be devoid of technology to keep the aliens from ever becoming aware of them. This suppression of technology occurs via a church directed towards keeping science from ever being developed with people pretending to be Archangels to fool the colonists unaware of its own history.

Setting up this story and a long period of history developing means that the first section of the book had to spend much time on setting everything up before really the prominent story line come about. But the wait to get to the main story is worthwhile. You get almost a mix of Asimov's Foundation series in guiding civilization (on a much smaller scale) along with efforts to introduce technology in what would be a 18th century sea faring culture which reminds me a bit of S.M. Stirling's Nantucket series. But mostly I was reminded of the Patrick O'brian Aubrey/Martin series involving 18th century British sailors.

As always with David Weber you know you are going to get a good amount of military action and tactics along with well developed characters. This book is no exception and once the real story started I was sucked into this universe and really enjoyed the book which is part one of a series of at least 4 books. Plenty of room for development of this world and of course the final showdown with the aliens. I will certainly be continuing the series.

Now I try not to read to much of an author's psychology in a book to keep from reading into it. I must admit that some aspects of the story annoyed me. A world wide church modeled much like the Catholic Church though without a pope is used to keep science down - the typical meme that has the difficulty of not being true considering the massive amount of science developed by Catholic priests and laity. Since David Weber is a lay Methodist preacher this view is not exactly surprising and I found one bit of preaching in the story regarding bishops and them needing to be married. But this did not annoy or really distract me from a book that I enjoyed .