Who is David Weber?

After the demise of Doc Smith, there was very little in the way of good space opera being written. The tendency in SF seemed to lean towards less epic stories, describing the lives of people with no chance of significantly affecting the course of history. Stories are frequently set on the Earth in the near future, with space travel unimportant or not present. Where are the Galactic Empires? The clash of thousands of star ships? The beams and shields and the heroes?

Well, they're just starting to return. One or two authors are now writing good space opera again; Elizabeth Moon's Herris Serrano series (and the excellent spin-off, Once a Hero) are perhaps not quite as epic as the Smith stories, but certainly qualifiers. The crown, though, must go to David Weber; fitting, as he started out reading the Smith books.

David has written a large number of epic-scale space opera novels (plus two fantasy novels, innumerable technical essays on the premises of his universes, and a strategy board game). There are two main series, the Dahak series and the Honor Harrington series, as well as a currently stand-alone novel, Path of the Fury. The two series are on a truly epic scale.

Honor and her kingdon and it's allies are caught in a long, bitter fight to the death with a larger interstellar republic, a war that will last decades. We see the technology advancing through the books, with political decisions hampering military progress, petty spite, selfless heroism, well-thought-out strategy and tactics, and massive battles.

Dahak is the last surviving warship of the Fourth Imperium and has been masquerading as Earth's moon for the last fifty thousand years. He's got a bit of a problem: he can't leave his station, but he has to respond to a threat to the Imperium: a small matter of a few million hostile warships en route. So he kidnaps a NASA pilot to be his captain and resolve the deadlock. From then on, Colin discovers what has really been going on, why SETI never picks anything up, and what the ancient chinese curse about interesting times is like.

All David's universes have carefully worked out, internally consistent technology that advances with time. A popular topic on the newsgroup (alt.books.david-weber) is to try and work out what other bits of technology are coming, or, alternatively, to work out how the bits we get hints of will be used tactically. The discussions are spiced up by postings from David's brother and occasionally from David himself, explaining why something would or would not work.

War is hell. People die. A lot of nice characters in the books suffer messy ends; absolutely none of the characters have any guarantee of survival (including the leads). And occasionally someone on the newsgroup will get our ultimate accolade, the Order of the Red Shirt for services to nitpicking (ie, finding mistakes in the books; so far, these have almost all been typing the wrong thing, rather than a fundamental flaw in the physics or tactics). The Red Shirt is a public death in one of the novels, described in loving detail. Watch out for at least two deaths in the new HH book just out, Echoes of Honor. Never make a crack about an author's arithmetic...

There are some filk songs based on the novels here, and there is a thriving newsgroup, alt.books.david-weber with an FAQ (also available at a UK site here) maintained by someone who actually volunteered for the job...

The newsgroup is mourning the passing of Richard "Navbuoy" Maxwell, one of the most highly-regarded posters on the newsgroup. A song was written just after we heard of his death; you can find the lyrics here, together with RealAudio (200 Kb) and wav (5 Mb) versions of it.

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