David Weber
David Weber is an author.
Weber's career is essentially one long naval campaign. His first novel, written with Steve White, sold to Baen Books in 1989, and Baen has been his publisher ever since, which in practice has meant considerable freedom to write very long books. The Honor Harrington series is the center of it: military science fiction in which the fighting is done by starships operating under naval procedure borrowed fairly openly from the age of sail, and in which a great deal of page count goes to politics, procurement and who is briefing whom.
That is either the appeal or the problem, depending on the reader. Weber does not skip the meeting. He will spend a chapter on the parliamentary maneuver that makes a battle possible and then spend the battle itself on the mathematics of it, and the result is combat writing with actual physics inside. Readers who want lean action bounce off him hard. Readers who want an interstellar polity that behaves like a real state stay for book after book.
The catalogue is wider than the one series. Oath of Swords opens a secondary-world fantasy run, In Fury Born stands apart from both, and there are shared-universe anthologies and collaborations, including two titles here he shares with Timothy Zahn. But the reason people arrive at his name is Honor Harrington, and after three decades that series is still the argument for him and against him at the same time.
Books (12)
Where to start with David Weber
On Basilisk Station starts Honor Harrington and is the correct entry point, with one warning: the opening is a slow accumulation of orders, refits and personnel problems, and the payoff depends on every bit of it. Give it a hundred pages. If that accumulation is the part you enjoy, you have found a series that will keep you busy for years.
Honor Among Enemies and In Enemy Hands are middle-run books where the formula is at full power and the stakes turn personal rather than procedural. More than Honor and The Service of the Sword are shared-universe anthologies and a painless way to see the setting from other angles, while Fire season is written for younger readers and is the easiest thing here to hand to a teenager.
Away from that world, Oath of Swords is the fantasy, cheerfully broad and much funnier than his reputation suggests, and A Call to Arms is a collaboration with Timothy Zahn that begins a different naval story from scratch.