No idea who that author is, or what those books are...
But I'm starting to want to read them! They sound pretty interesting.
Just for the benefit of anyone who hasn't read through this whole thread yet, or otherwise doesn't know, david webber wrote some of the fiction/backstory for one of the versions of Starfire which Aurora is loosely based on.
The space combat scenes are rather good if you can stand all the political stuff that the books tend to be overloaded with.
Also, telepathic treecats <3 .
Actually, I prefer the Honorverse over his Starfire novels because the FTL system is much more interesting than the Starfire/Aurora one, but then the politics for the most part are expressed as "almost everyone but the military centrist-royalists who admire Honor are insane or misguided or evil", rather than "liberals are evil corporate pawns". It was especially jarring to have to read the portrayal of Hauptman in
Honor Among Enemies; it almost felt like I was reading a suefic for a while there. Except for Haven, of course, who are his token misinterpretation of 'Arch-Conservative vision of Socialism presented as reality'. I suppose the Greysons shouldn't have surprised me, either, as the religious anatagonists are always portrayed as a bunch of ignorant, misguided good people being mislead by a few evil individuals, just waiting for Weber's gloriously multicultural, tolerant-yet-badass, near-infallible heroine to save them from themselves. (Seriously, I think the only instance where this isn't the case when dealing with religion is in
Heretic, because there really aren't any central hero/ine characters, just, well, naval officers. And the evil, liberal, corporate dogs who keep butting their stupid heads in, making decisions that would feel right for suefic antagonists.)
Ugh, it makes me snarky to think about this. Time to go nuke something.