I personally really, really enjoy the wildly expensive but utterly stunning Horus Heresy editions by forgeworld, starting with this one: So a couple of big hitters in the next 12 months. Then next year we are very likely to get Master of Mankind by Dembski Bowden, the book everyone is looking forward to, The Crimson King by Graham McNeill, which follows Magnus the Red's story leading up to the Siege of Terra, and the sequel to Scars by Chris Wraight is also due in 2016. key words: Night Lords, Ultramarines, Yellow Fists, Primarch battles. Out before the end of this year apparently. The next one is Pharos, by Guy Haley, book 33. It really seems like you have to look at who wrote it more than what legion or war its about.Īfter a quiet 2015, there are a couple of very good ones coming out next year by the way. There are apparently a lot of duds in the range, which you would expect as well. Scars by Chris Wraight is about the White Scars and that has received a lot of praise. The one you read was book 27 and the last one by Abnett, it has had mixed reviews.
The fact that his stories are still amongst the best in the series just makes this worse.Īnyway, I enjoyed most of the stories by Abnett, Dembski-Bowden and to some extent McNeill, but I'm currently wary of picking up stuff from anyone else.ĮTA: Since I'm lazy, I meant to ask: is there a list of future releases for the Heresy series? The last one I read was Unrembered Empire, which was okay-ish, but having a slightly clearer idea how much they're going to stretch the story would help keep me interested, I think. ADB (for a completely random example ) wasn't part of the original group, so he basically gets to write stuff nobody laid immediate claim to. I read somewhere that when they originally launched the series, they assigned key events and certain factions to the original writing team in advance, which means that a lot of the stuff I want to read about has been (and will be) written by fairly mediocre writers (James Swallow apparently gets to write all things Blood Angels related.). Now they really seem to be milking it for all it's worth, though. The Heresy series itself kind of seems to be slowing down, both in terms of publication and in terms of quality, though the latter was always very variable. Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Talon of Horus has been out for over a year with no paperback version in sight, and while I think he's the best writer in the BL stable, I've got too long a list of stuff I want to read to pay hardcover prices for 40k novels. They're terribly slow with putting out paperback versions of their more recent novels. I've kind of drifted away from the Black Library output. Everybody is a bastard and Chaos will ultimately triumph (unless the Nids eat everyone before that happens). It can be a lot of fun, but I don't consider it particularly thought-provoking. I don't think the setting is that deep, to be honest, it's just been around for 30 years (plus of course it drew on Warhammer that preceded it) and can draw on all that accumulated background material.
it's fantasy with a sci-fi paintcoat, like Star Wars. There's magic, demons, ancient artefacts of evil, there are space orks and space elves, there used to be space dwarves. The setting started essentially with the idea of "what if we took all our elves, orcs and knights and gave them guns and spaceships?". Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. It's sort of part of the mission statement, even:įorget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. I'd say 40k is woefully lacking in the science aspect of the science fiction designation.