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David Weber with his wife Sharon. David Weber is a best selling Author of Science fiction and Fantasy. Known for showing his work in Infodumps, even when in reality Space Does Not Work That Way. Has a thing for Asian female protagonists. Due to injured hands, he dictates (into a computer) Door Stoppers of ever-increasing length. Is also a Naval Historian.
He has several major series including:- Honor Harrington, his most popular series, detailing the career of a starship commander. Earlier stories fall into Recycled In Space Horatio Hornblower. Space Is an Ocean is a major trope of the series, with the FTL and Reactionless Drive technology designed to produce some navalish battles. Thirteen mainline books, and two spin off series and counting. The historical analogies are never played completely straight, and the correspondences change as the series goes on. For example, the equivalent of Napoleon does not come to power, because the bad-guy's secret police win an Enemy Civil War.
- The War Gods: Fantasy novel set in an original world created by David Weber for gaming purposes. Uses the 5 Races of Man with the equivalent Orcs as the 5th race. Notable as being set After the End of a Magitek empire. Word Of God confirms a novel and novella are in the works, and a 7 part series is planned eventually.
- Empire From The Ashes (or the Dahak series): The Moon is a Spaceship (Qualifies as a Cool Starship) from a long dead human empire across hundreds of worlds. The moon has active countermeasures to appear perfectly harmless. Modern humans are the descendants of the loyal crew from the mutiny which stranded them. The rebels are the Ancient Conspiracy controlling our history.
- Starfire: Weber was one of the designers of the tabletop space combat game Starfire before he was an author. His first novel was essentially a compilation of some backstory for the game that that he and Steve White came up with over email. He has since co-authored three other books in the same universe.
- Safehold: Set on a Lost Colony that was deliberately lost to hide it from the aliens who destroyed the rest of the human race, and who seem to be able to detect any large-scale use of high technology. The plan was originally to rebuild humanity and develop a way to defeat the aliens while hiding from them, but the project is hijacked by individuals who brainwash the colonists and found a new religion with themselves as gods and designed to permanently lock the world in Medieval Stasis. 800 years later the plan is starting to show cracks, and the original pro-technology faction's last-ditch effort wakes up: an android containing the personality of a young female military commander, and equipped with a very few useful gadgets...
- Hells Gate: War between two parallel Earths that have been exploring portals between parallel worlds. Until they meet all the worlds have been uninhabited. One side has magic, the other psychic talents. Word Of God states a technological faction will be forthcoming.
- Bolo: David Weber is one of the most prolific writers of Bolo stories since the death of the original author, Keith Laumer. Bolos are large sentient tanks with weapons in the Megatonne per second level of firing. Notable due to the large level of Humans Are Bastards in the stories with the Bolos often being the most sympathetic characters.
- The Empire of Man: Co-Written with John Ringo. Royal Brat Prince Roger, third in line to the throne of the Empire of Man, is targeted for assasination. It doesn't fail by much, and he's stranded- along with the Marine battalion responsible for keeping his sorry ass alive- on Marduk. Marduk being a Death World with distressingly unfriendly natives, it gets worse from there. On the upside, Roger belatedly gets better in a big way.
- 1632: Co-written with Eric Flint, the creator of the series. In the year 2000, a coal-mining town from West Virginia gets hurled across space and time to Germany in the 1630s, bringing half a millennium's worth of scientific knowledge and an iron-clad belief in the equality of all human beings to the church- and aristocrat-dominated 17th century.
- Out Of The Dark: Genre-bending new series. Aliens invade the Earth, kill 3 billion, and fight the rest as pockets of resistance. The great leader of human forces rises...
- The Apocalypse Troll
- In Fury Born
Some tropes common to David Weber's works are:- Absolute Xenophobe — all over the place
- Ancient Conspiracy — the Mesans (Honorverse), the Church of God Awaiting (Safehold), the Mutineers (Empire from the Ashes)
- Apocalypse How — planetary-level class 3, 4, and 5 happens in the backstories
- Large-scale assassination attempts (enough to classify as minor military actions) in the Empire from the Ashes, War Gods, and Safehold series.
- Author Catchphrase
- Let's be about it.
- One tries.
- ...With contemptuous ease...
- ...Never-to-be-sufficiently-damned...
- ...Such as it was, and what there was of it.
- Or "such as they were, and what there were of them."
- And "such as he was, and what there was of him."
- When someone messes up badly, they've "screwed the pooch" or "screwed up by the numbers".
- Maybe I can, and maybe I can't (or variations thereof with the form conditional adverb - pronoun - verb, conditional adverb - pronoun - negated verb)
- Anything that's really difficult or grueling has a tendency to be a "copperplated bitch".
- Sometime, phrases are capitalized when normal rules of grammar wouldn't have done so. For example, people have a tendency to note that an impish person is Up To Something. Or, occasionally, Up To No Good.
- Also occasionally, a character will note that Something Was Up.
- And something has been Serious Business at least once.
- "[doing something dangerous/unwise] would have come under the heading of a Really Bad Idea."
- "For [group], those who had chosen to make themselves enemies came in two categories: those who had been properly dealt with, and those who were still alive."
- The Good King: To the extent that one can make judgements about an author's politics from his works, Weber is a not-so-closeted monarchist (though it's important to note that he's a constitutional monarchist - all of his protagonist royals preside over some form of representative republic and either have limited powers, or wield their theoretically absolute power in an enlightened, limited way).
- Mole In Charge — Giancola (Honorverse), Kahlvyn Ahrmahk (Safehold), Lawrence Jefferson (Empire from the Ashes), The Voice of Lillinara (War Gods), Subrahmanyan Treadwell (Fury)
- Omnicidal Maniac — the Gbaba (Safehold), the Achuultani (Empire from the Ashes), the Troll and the Rish (The Apocalypse Troll)
- Semper Fi — marines serve as the primary ground combat force in all his books, except In Fury Born, which has the Cadre, which are marines but more awesome.
- Space Amish, or at least wannabe Space Amish. The planets of Grayson, Pardal, and Safehold.
- Technically a Smile: Often in the Honor Harrington books and sometimes in the Safehold books..
- Telepathic sidekick to the protagonist, with Nimitz, Walsharno, and Tisiphone being clear examples. Owl is a technological example.
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