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Big Willy Style posted:Sandy us usually short for Sandra and Alexsandra, I thought Sandy Mitchell was a chick at first too. Me too! I was like "Wow, women are writing WH40K-books, how cool!" Then I was severely disappointed. 
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Apr 20, 2015 02:12
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The first Gaunts books are certainly outclassed by later Abnett writing, but not to the point where I would call the first bad by comparison. If someone is able to read The Founding and not be hooked they may as well stop...
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Apr 20, 2015 03:52
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Libluini posted:Me too! I was like "Wow, women are writing WH40K-books, how cool!" Then I was severely disappointed. Sarah Cawkwell has a couple full-length novels out. They're not really that special but not awful eitehr.
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Apr 20, 2015 05:08
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Serpentis posted:Abnett has written an awful lot of one-offs I'd love to see sequels to, to be honest. Double Eagle being the top of the list - I still have the hardback with the two pages about I'm not the biggest Abnett fan, but I did love Titanicus. With the age black library is now, I'd have thought that they would be more focused on creating some books for adults to read. For me, at lot of the books are aimed younger teenagers who just want to see space marines twatting space marines. I've found it really hard to justify buying a Black Library novel recently. Not to mention the current state of the Horus Heresy novels. I know this is a basically a money making machine for them but really? loving 3 anthologies in a row that add nothing to the actual Heresy itself? gently caress right off. Plus, they can go gently caress themselves with their novellas as well. £30 for a limited edition never to be reprinted again book is fine. What's not fine is waiting 2 years and re-printing the story in a £7.99 anothology book like the first White Scars novella. It's an insult.
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Apr 20, 2015 13:50
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You seem to be hoping, as we all did once, that GW would focus on having a quality range of products to suit all levels of interest rather than trying to sell the most possible plastic spacemans to Jim McAverage 12 year old boy, who walked into the store on his birthday with bulging pockets and will leave, never to be seen again, with no money and instead a pile of plastic that will almost certainly never be assembled, painted or played with, leaving Jim to wish in later years that he hung onto that money to spend on booze or cocaine or something.
Arquinsiel fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 14:23
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Mange Mite posted:Cawkwell Poor girl...
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Apr 20, 2015 16:34
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Mange Mite posted:Sarah Cawkwell has a couple full-length novels out. They're not really that special but not awful eitehr. Nik Vincent has also done some 40K stuff. She's Dan Abnett's wife.
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Apr 20, 2015 18:30
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Im with the above posters i use to love buying black library novels when they were priced at mass market book value. I am so confused by 30$ for teen fiction. Its barely passable when its written by Abnett or ADB even then i would only pay 7.99 for it.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:43
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Greataval posted:Im with the above posters i use to love buying black library novels when they were priced at mass market book value. I am so confused by 30$ for teen fiction. Its barely passable when its written by Abnett or ADB even then i would only pay 7.99 for it. Or how about audiobooks straight to download for a mere 34 euros per MP3. Geeze I thought PC gaming was an expensive hobby at times. Black Library audiobooks ranks somewhere around "snorting gold dust" as expensive habits goes.
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Apr 20, 2015 20:55
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Looking at the prices on Audible (now owned by Amazon), that's about a 50% mark-up on what a similar length book would cost if you bought one there, of course you could get it even cheaper by using a Audible credit. Of course we can't do a direct comparison because the special snowflakes that are Black Library books are far to refined to be sold on the most popular audiobook site in the world. Edit: I have to agree with the complaints about the Horus Heresy as well. The stalling is just becoming insulting. Books like The Damnation of Pythos which don't advance the storyline an iota are bad enough. The fact that it was also tedious rubbish whose plot would barely stretch to have covered a novella doesn't help the situation any. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 21:59
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Deptfordx posted:Looking at the prices on Audible (now owned by Amazon), that's about a 50% mark-up on what a similar length book would cost if you bought one there, of course you could get it even cheaper by using a Audible credit. As I understand it, a large part of the holdup is that Abnett is booked for Master of Mankind, which is supposed to be the next overall plot-advancing story, and Abnett's busy with non-40k stuff these days.
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Apr 21, 2015 01:05
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Nope, that's on ADB's plate: https://aarondembskibowden.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/heresy-black-legion-chatter-in-the-mail-this-morning/
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Apr 21, 2015 01:35
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Oh dear god I can't believe the Lion punched Nemiel's head off What the christ. This character has been through two books already and is well established and this is how his story ends?
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Apr 21, 2015 18:00
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Gav Thorpe is a very bad writer who has no idea of subtlety.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:22
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Zephyrine posted:Oh dear god I can't believe the Lion punched Nemiel's head off Yeah I was super surprised at that, especially as I hadn't read Fallen Angels yet. Maybe he'll pull an Eidolon and get stitched back together.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:23
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MasterSlowPoke posted:Yeah I was super surprised at that, especially as I hadn't read Fallen Angels yet. Maybe he'll pull an Eidolon and get stitched back together. And it does absolutely nothing to carry the plot. Just "Here's an established character, Whoops now he's dead and lets never mention it again" I thought the story was building up to him facing his cousin since they had gone down such radically different paths. It feels like the author hasn't even read the previous. His Nemiel nothing like the person in previous books but I just assumed it was a character arc. Now it looks more like the authors are playing the "three word game" Previous author spends two books on a character, then they hand over the book and the latest one goes "and then his head fell off and he died" back to you. Zephyrine fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Apr 21, 2015 |
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Apr 21, 2015 19:18
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It is acknowledgement of how poo poo those 2 DA books were.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:37
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Big Willy Style posted:It is acknowledgement of how poo poo those 2 DA books were. ... Those books left me with a ton of question. Like why Luther and Zahariel were banished. Something that hopefully receives a very sensible answer later on. Or how I was probably half way through the first book before I had any idea what the culture on Caliban was like. First they're knights fighting dangerous monsters with swords and armour. I could accept that. But then they had guns... Alright I guess... Maybe they're some sort of flintlock pistol. Except the guns had magazines and how are they even maintaining or making ammunition for these things? Then all of a sudden the knights are out in the forest and one knight talks to another knight through his helmet vox. Which turned everything around again because as far as I knew there wasn't even electricity on this world but now they have power armour, bolt guns and vox units. Also there's the whole thing where the people living "on" Caliban refer to themselves as living "on" Caliban. People who live in places refer to themselves as living "in" places, not "on" places. Tourists are "on" places. A person from Ireland does not refer to themselves as living "on" Ireland while a tourist may have been "on" Ireland. An Irish person lives "in" Ireland. The people living there express themselves as if they just just landed on the planet last week. Except that Caliban is all they know or have ever known. Terra is just an old myth as far as most people are concerned. And why does Zahariel make a monologue about how harsh and unfair life on Caliban is? It's the only life he has ever know. He has nothing to make a comparison to in order to judge Caliban as unreasonable harsh. Oh and why would someone living in Caliban refer to a Lion as a "Calibanite Lion"? Wouldn't that just be a "Lion"? Zephyrine fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Apr 21, 2015 |
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Apr 21, 2015 19:59
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Voyager I posted:I read a Cain omnibus and it was pretty good for a laugh, but my god how many times is she going to recycle the "Cain volunteers for nominally dangerous assignment far away form where he anticipates main action > Cain uncovers additional, vastly more dangerous enemy plot > Cain is forced to engage and overcome newly discovered threat at great personal risk, is celebrated for heroism" structure? George MacDonald Fraser managed it for what 12 or so flashman books and they are all literally exactly that, and they are all brilliant. Sandy's not as good, cain is no flashman and the grim dark future is no 19th century, but they're fun. That's what they're supposed to be. Just that. A good pulp read. They aren't supposed to be anything else.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:15
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Zephyrine posted:... They're not fighting in medieval times They have power armour and stuff from before the Age of Strife, just no way of making new stuff, only repairing it. Probably best not think too hard about the ammo
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Apr 21, 2015 20:17
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Skarsnik posted:They're not fighting in medieval times Don't think too hard about their ages, either. Aren't they around 10 or 11 when their training starts?
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Apr 21, 2015 20:27
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Skarsnik posted:They're not fighting in medieval times Or the horses they ride
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Apr 21, 2015 20:30
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Skarsnik posted:They're not fighting in medieval times But the story makes it seem like medieval times for a very long time. They're knights in stone fortresses who ride horses while wearing armour and wielding swords.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:35
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Zephyrine posted:Also there's the whole thing where the people living "on" Caliban refer to themselves as living "on" Caliban. People who live in places refer to themselves as living "in" places, not "on" places. Tourists are "on" places. So you would say that you live in Earth?
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Apr 21, 2015 20:35
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Zephyrine posted:... Caliban is a planet, dude.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:38
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Zephyrine posted:But the story makes it seem like medieval times for a very long time. Yeah that was the point, its a common SF trope to depict an ancient or primitive society whilst showing them to have a few pieces of advanced technology to play around with. That's basically the whole set up of the Dune books, a Feudalistic society (thanks to robot rebellions) but with atom bombs and lazers. Quite a few words in the Imperium are depicted as ye Olde but with Laz-locks or a functioning communications rely and space port while the rest are turn of the century farmers or spear wielding tribes. The gradual reveal of the power armour and the like is supposed to be a surprise, one of the few things those books did well in my opinion. Fried Chicken posted:Or the horses they ride I just assumed they were descended from the horses the original colonists brought with them.
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Apr 21, 2015 20:46
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Fried Chicken posted:Or the horses they ride Power horses
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Apr 21, 2015 20:51
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Baka-nin posted:I just assumed they were descended from the horses the original colonists brought with them. Allow me to clarify - the horses they ride while wearing multiple tons worth of power armor. The horses that aren't squashed flat by this. Those horses
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Apr 21, 2015 20:53
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Those horses were raised or bred from stock that lived in much higher gravity enviorments and so as such have no problem carrying a few tons on their back.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:23
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Zephyrine posted:
This is the number one, all time biggest warning sign that an author is bad. You see it constantly in Scifi & fantasy, across film, TV, and literature. It is so obvious, so stupid, and so lazy. And yet it endures. It is the mistake of thinking that you cannot have something with a familiar name because that isn't exotic enough, so you stick a random planet (or whatever) name on to make it more distinct. It's loving silly. Either make up a totally unique name, or just call it a loving lion.
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Apr 21, 2015 21:29
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Fried Chicken posted:Allow me to clarify - the horses they ride while wearing multiple tons worth of power armor. The horses that aren't squashed flat by this. Those horses Yeah most breeds of horses are better at bearing weight then humans, which is why we ride them and use them to carry our stuff. If a human can carry a weight and still be able to move then there's no reason a horse couldn't. Granted it wouldn't be winning the Grand National or anything. I can't remember did the books say how much the armour weighed or did it just say the horses were armoured?
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Apr 21, 2015 21:42
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Obviously the horses also wear power armour.
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Apr 21, 2015 23:12
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"There are no horses on Caliban." 
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Apr 22, 2015 02:31
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Baka-nin posted:Yeah most breeds of horses are better at bearing weight then humans, which is why we ride them and use them to carry our stuff. If a human can carry a weight and still be able to move then there's no reason a horse couldn't. Granted it wouldn't be winning the Grand National or anything. I can't remember did the books say how much the armour weighed or did it just say the horses were armoured? The soldiers don't carry the weight of the armour. The armour has gyros and things that whirr all the time and give them additional strength.
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Apr 22, 2015 05:40
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Don't forget about it making your teeth itch too.
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Apr 22, 2015 06:25
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DirtyRobot posted:"There are no horses on Caliban." People, the solution is obvious. The 'Horses' are two guys in their own power armour in pantomine horse costumes.
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Apr 22, 2015 09:57
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Those aren't horses! You're just banging a couple of coconuts together!
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Apr 22, 2015 12:26
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Terra is only a model.
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Apr 22, 2015 12:34
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Baka-nin posted:Yeah most breeds of horses are better at bearing weight then humans, which is why we ride them and use them to carry our stuff. If a human can carry a weight and still be able to move then there's no reason a horse couldn't. Granted it wouldn't be winning the Grand National or anything. I can't remember did the books say how much the armour weighed or did it just say the horses were armoured? 1) humans aren't bearing the weight of the armor, the power armor is. That's why it is power armor 2) horses don't bear multiple tons on their spine when we have them carry our stuff
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Apr 22, 2015 12:52
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I don't think their power armor was anywhere close to approaching Astartes armor. I doubt it was multiple tons - I doubt Terminator armor is even a ton.
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Apr 22, 2015 13:03
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