DWD's Reviews

Perhaps the Beginning of a Beautiful Series? Published in 2011 by Baen So, David Weber decided to make a Young Adult (YA) series. Yes, a sci-fi author known best for his highly-descriptive military sci-fi works characterized by very long conversations is entering a field where too much violence and too much conversation are both problematic. Well, I thought, this should be interesting. Weber expanded a short story that first appeared in an short story collection More Than Honor from 1998 as part of the extensive Honor Harrington series. Eleven year old Stephanie Harrington is the main character in A Beautiful Friendship and she is an ancestor of Honor Harrington. Stephanie lives on the planet Sphinx, a fairly new colony that is part of a star kingdom called Manticore. Stephanie's family has moved to the planet because their skills are needed but Stephanie is bored by frontier life. However, she is intrigued by a mystery that is being reported across the planet - celer...

A near-great, but flawed, epic story Published by Macmillan Audio in 2010 Read by Charles Keating Duration: 16 hours, 48 minutes Unabridged Ultra-prolific author David Weber visits familiar territory in this audiobook. Weber is a master of the military-based science fiction story and Out of the Dark delivers Weber’s expertise and interest in weapons, weapons systems and military organization in spades in this near-great but flawed epic story that, according to Publishers Weekly, is actually the first book in a trilogy. The novel Out of the Dark is based on a short story of the same name that Weber published in 2010. The story begins with an alien survey of Earth (called KU-197-20) in the year 1415. The aliens are part of a multi-species alliance called the Galactic Hegemony. The aliens are exploring and documenting all habitable planets and rate all inhabited planets on a technology scale. David Weber They find the Earth of 1415 backward technologically but de...

A solid sci-fi story saddled with a fantasy genre name Published in 2000 by Baen Books. Just seeing the title of this book you would assume that David Weber's first solo novel is all about ogres, witches and elves. The cover shows differently, of course. The Apocalypse Troll   is an action-packed bit of sci-fi that includes time travel, a threat to planet earth and a lovely lady. Here are the plot basics: an alien race from the future lands on earth in an effort to destroy it and humans from the future arrive in an effort to stop them. But, their defense was less than successful so current day humans are left to fight on with the advice of a surviving human from the future. And this story works. Mind you, this is not "great" literature - but it is a romp through space and time with plenty of military action, a truly evil villain and lots of snappy dialogue. Be warned, there is not a lot of character development and the reader really doesn't know the enti...