This is a collection of 4 longish short stories set in the same world as Weber's Honor Harrington series. The stories are not all by Weber, one is by Eric Flint. The Honor Harrington books are military science fiction, in some ways like Tom Clancy's books set in the far future - though a bit less technical, and certainly not as long. The battles and spaceships (and other technology) are described in great detail, which I have to admit I sometimes skim over so that I can read more of the actual story (I do that with Clancy novels too!). The whole series follows the career of Honor Harrington, an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy. I've been told that it's based on a well known series of books about an officer in the navy during the last century (I think) but I can't remember exactly which ones it was supposed to be - probably the Horatio Hornblower series, but I don't remember who that's by.

The four stories are a set of unconnected episodes in this timeline - two of them don't deal with Honor Harrington at all, and one only really mentions her in passing. My favourite story was the one about the treecats (these are intelligent aliens, which are telepathic amongst themselves, and can form bonds to humans), which is partly because I like stories which are written from the alien's point of view. All four stories are well written and enjoyable. I think they (mostly) stand alone, and could be read with no knowledge of the other books in the series. However I'm not sure about that with 2 of them.