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The strongest points of Helsreach are the characters. Grimaldus is suitably Grimdark and awesomely metal. The Salamander cameo is remarkably well done and the philosophical differences between 'victory at all costs' and 'protect His subjects' make for some good conflict that is resolved by the two sides agreeing to disagree. All the humans are making the best of a bad situation and are resolved to die hard out of sheer hatred and spite. It's a good book.
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Aug 15, 2016 00:51
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Orv posted:Helsreach to me felt like the hospital antiseptic smell of Warhammer novels. Everyone is very happy to serve the Emperor, but they're all privately upset about how they get to do it, but they'll die heroically/tragically anyway. The Space Marines are super soldiers that have no fear and praise the Emperor, but they do have human flaws. The Guard/city leaders are all way in over their heads, but they do their part admirably and serve the Emperor in it. The one techpriest that runs away from the Titan finds peace serving the Emperor in his own way and then dies shittily. It all felt very Warhammer formula, even if it had a bunch of individually good scenes and plot strings. I feel like once you've read one city siege 40k novel you've read them all, right down to the officer who breaks and goes "We can't win! There's no way we're grim and stoic enough to beat the bad guys" and then the main character summarily executes them to show what a hardass they are and how tWiStEd the 40k universe is.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:22
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Snollygoster posted:I feel like once you've read one city siege 40k novel you've read them all, right down to the officer who breaks and goes "We can't win! There's no way we're grim and stoic enough to beat the bad guys" and then the main character summarily executes them to show what a hardass they are and how tWiStEd the 40k universe is. But enough about Necropolis. Besides, Straight Silver and Armour of Contempt are both way better.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:49
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berzerkmonkey posted:I think Abnett has been busy with other projects (that probably pay more than BL.) Chris Wraight did The Path of Heaven in April. Master of Mankind went to print last week. Books take like two to three years from start to shelf, so there is going to be a delay from individual authors. From what I've heard through the grapevine is that the books pay better than the comics but Abnett just likes writing them more than writing books.
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Aug 15, 2016 16:59
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Cooked Auto posted:From what I've heard through the grapevine is that the books pay better than the comics but Abnett just likes writing them more than writing books. The only HOT EXCLUSIVE I can give is that I saw Dan Abnett hanging out with Alan Merrett and a bunch of other GW dudes at Bugman's when I visited Warhammer World in April. Dunno if he was just visiting or they were talking Heresy.
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Aug 15, 2016 17:13
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Cooked Auto posted:From what I've heard through the grapevine is that the books pay better than the comics but Abnett just likes writing them more than writing books. This must be what all those GRRM fans feel like...
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Aug 15, 2016 20:17
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Mikojan posted:Hey that Path of heaven book completely dodged my radar, thanks for that! but is it good though I'm only 1/4th of the way through, but so far I'm really digging it. Not only has the author managed to make the White Scars an interesting legion, but he also seems to be the only one who really writes the Death Guard well, in addition. One thing I really like about Wraight is that while a lot of authors gloss over the smaller details of all the changes going on during the Heresy, Wraight does a great job of illustrating the ways that individual people perceive everything that's going on. Like how the pilots of bulk carriers might not really see any change in their daily lives despite serving under traitor legions, how Navigators continue to function on both sides of the conflict and don't expect to face any real consequences if their ship is taken by the other side (and rightfully so), things like that which really help show the human consequences of the conflict. Add to that a bunch of different ways of looking at the inevitable corruption that's afflicting the traitor legions by the legionnaires themselves, it makes for some fun reading. I love getting into these human elements of this larger setting, and Wraight is great at that.
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Aug 15, 2016 23:01
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Snollygoster posted:I feel like once you've read one city siege 40k novel you've read them all, right down to the officer who breaks and goes "We can't win! There's no way we're grim and stoic enough to beat the bad guys" and then the main character summarily executes them to show what a hardass they are and how tWiStEd the 40k universe is. Every Ciaphas Cain book takes that from the perspective of the officer who breaks, runs, and accidentally trips on the actual major threat which then goes on to save the city from the siege but destroys the planet.
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Aug 15, 2016 23:16
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Every Ciaphas Cain book takes that from the perspective of the officer who breaks, runs, and accidentally trips on the actual major threat which then goes on to save the city from the siege but destroys the planet. I always took cain as someone who isn't a full coward/narcissist but is very self-effacing/self depricating person who just wants to live in queit place, but does the best he can when danger happens. as much as he pretends not too, he does care about his men and jurgen. the author says its open to interpratation. so who knows. I always liked the cain books even if they do get samey.
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Aug 16, 2016 02:20
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SnakesRevenge posted:This must be what all those GRRM fans feel like... Nah he's just busy with a bunch of other stuff like taking care of wolves and eating plenty of lemon cakes. SRM posted:The only HOT EXCLUSIVE I can give is that I saw Dan Abnett hanging out with Alan Merrett and a bunch of other GW dudes at Bugman's when I visited Warhammer World in April. Dunno if he was just visiting or they were talking Heresy. I'd would guess it was a bit of both. As it looks right now I'd probably get a straight up heart attack of they peeped anything about Gaunts Ghosts. To me Cain books work really well as a palate cleanser between other more "normal" 40k books so to speak.
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Aug 16, 2016 16:27
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I always took cain as someone who isn't a full coward/narcissist but is very self-effacing/self depricating person who just wants to live in queit place, but does the best he can when danger happens. as much as he pretends not too, he does care about his men and jurgen. the author says its open to interpratation. so who knows. I always liked the cain books even if they do get samey. Cain's still the guy you go to when you need someone to swordfight a World Eater and kill a daemon prince. He just doesn't like being that guy, and he's a pretty cool dude when he's not on the hero clock; he's a commissar who inspires rather than terrify.
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Aug 17, 2016 08:38
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not that he minds the occasional summary execution when it helps him make things easier for himself cain's commisarial strategy seems to be, as far as we can tell, to be as hands-off as he can possibly be and let things slide insofar as is possible - his whole Thing is being a basically decent chap with a talent for acting and swordplay cast in this massive larger-than-life propaganda role for which he feels terrifyingly inadequate (because he is! nobody's adequate to be Hero of the Imperium) and the self-loathing that goes with the knowledge that almost everyone's perception of him is based on a crock of lies and he's caught up in it all and oh my it gets to the point where his only actual friends are his soulless manservant and an inquisitor because he cannot trust anyone else not to expose him and he's not really sure himself how much of his act is an act, so he just sort of overcompensates and assumes that it's all an act (it's not) ciaphas cain is a genuinely good character, and one which would probably work outside the thoroughly schlocky setting of warhammer 40k (though of course he probably wouldn't be a comedic character in a post-soviet novel or something) V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 23:43
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I do kind of love how his method for getting the terrified soldier to go over the top isn't to shoot him as a warning to rest, it's to jump down and go "it's totally cool to be scared, because I am making GBS threads myself right now" and then the soldier assumes he's lying and it's not really that bad and goes and dies while Cain's just happy to have some other poor poo poo take the bullet for him.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:54
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My favorite thing about Cain is how good he refuses to realize he is. He goes on and on about all the "horrible" things he wants to do (avoiding combat mostly) while anything approaching heresy and even real dereliction of duty simply never crossed his mind. He's so incredibly stalwart in the things that he's been taught being right, all while constantly going with his I'm-just-keeping-up-appearances routine that he feeds himself just as hard as he feeds his hero status to others. It makes for some really fun reading for me.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:44
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I love how Cain keeps undervaluing, for example, he's like 2 meters tall, he sparred with a space marine librarian and he complimented his sword skills, killed a chaos lord in single combat and the inquisitor says that Cain is one of the best swordsmen she's ever met and he keeps thinking he's nothing especial. Cain is just too humble. Of course, Jurgen's the true hero there.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:45
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Cain is basically Errol Flynn with self-esteem issues.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:03
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Meanwhile I tell myself, "you should probably read one or two of those Ciaphas Cain novels," and go to the BL website, and discover that the omnibus editions still are available as actual printed books only, and that buying the individual eBooks separately would easily be twice as expensive as those print omnibuses, and so in the end I'm like and don't buy anything at all because god drat it BL. 
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Aug 18, 2016 01:16
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Just buy them used off of amazon. I bought the entire Gaunt's Ghosts collection for under thirty bucks doing that, if you don't mind buying used.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:31
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Angry Lobster posted:I love how Cain keeps undervaluing, for example, he's like 2 meters tall, he sparred with a space marine librarian and he complimented his sword skills, killed a chaos lord in single combat and the inquisitor says that Cain is one of the best swordsmen she's ever met and he keeps thinking he's nothing especial. Cain is just too humble. Of course, Jurgen's the true hero there. cain is perfectly aware of how good he is with a sword, but he's still frightened when going into combat with some massive monster composed exclusively of teeth and razor edges, which his myth states that he really shouldn't be the thing is, he's nothing special in that he's not particularly courageous or particularly self-sacrificing even though he's supposed to be - and he knows it. being handsome and good at fighting is a very small part of the commissar's perceived role, particularly that of the hero-commissar that cain's become. not being particularly brave (but having a very finely-honed fight-or-flight instinct) leads him to constantly undermine the moments of genuine courage that he occasionally displays, but the character ciaphas cain genuinely isn't a brave man - no coward, but not the gung-ho zealot he's supposed to be. of course, part of the reason he's so effective is precisely because he's not a gung-ho zealot, but he'll see that as a weakness cain isn't humble, he's just in a pit of self-loathing because he keeps getting people killed, he's heavily traumatised, he can't possibly live up to the absurd standards set before him and his life is a total loving mess in no small part as a consequence to those other things
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Aug 18, 2016 02:02
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I love how the cover of Hero of the Imperium is straight up a propaganda poster, posing with a bolt pistol on top of a mound of corpses - when he mentions explicitly in the book that he doesn't like using bolt pistols at all. It was a great touch with the Black Library model of him that he was standing on the pile of corpses, but there was a little stepladder behind them. I think that's a great touch that says a lot about the character and how the greater Imperium sees him.
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Aug 18, 2016 16:41
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SnakesRevenge posted:My favorite thing about Cain is how good he refuses to realize he is. He goes on and on about all the "horrible" things he wants to do (avoiding combat mostly) while anything approaching heresy and even real dereliction of duty simply never crossed his mind. Thats kind of the central joke of the whole premise. By the readers' standards Cain is an exemplary soldier. He is only a coward in his own mind because he is the straight man among the ridiculousness of the 40k setting where the only value an average human's life has is how much benefit his or her death can bring to a dystopian theocracy. Mr.48 fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 22:04
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MMAgCh posted:Meanwhile I tell myself, "you should probably read one or two of those Ciaphas Cain novels," and go to the BL website, and discover that the omnibus editions still are available as actual printed books only, and that buying the individual eBooks separately would easily be twice as expensive as those print omnibuses, and so in the end I'm like just search used book stores/bookstores in general. i found both omnibuses for 10 bucks in all. Angry Lobster posted:I love how Cain keeps undervaluing, for example, he's like 2 meters tall, he sparred with a space marine librarian and he complimented his sword skills, killed a chaos lord in single combat and the inquisitor says that Cain is one of the best swordsmen she's ever met and he keeps thinking he's nothing especial. Cain is just too humble. Of course, Jurgen's the true hero there. this. also i need to read flashman, the books cain is based off of. how are they?
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Aug 19, 2016 03:59
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Dapper_Swindler posted:also i need to read flashman, the books cain is based off of. how are they? The Flashman series is great, George MacDonald Fraser was a better writer than anyone at BL by several orders of magnitude. Flashman is not a good dude with a self-interested streak like Cain though, he's a cynical, manipulative sociopath.
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Aug 19, 2016 07:28
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The Malcolm McDowell movie is supposed to be pretty decent too.
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Aug 19, 2016 08:20
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I learned everything I know about 19th century British history from Flashman. It's a great series and I really enjoyed the hell out of it.
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Aug 19, 2016 15:58
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The Rat posted:I learned everything I know about 19th century British history from Flashman. What about Sharpe?
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Aug 19, 2016 18:42
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The Rat posted:I learned everything I know about 19th century British history from Flashman. yeah. I looked up the series and i am probably gonna order a few of them. I love 19th century history(the hosed up mix of progress/industry and imperialism/bigotry/hosed up ideals and most of it still affecting today.) should i read them in order or just get the first then some random ones. Mechafunkzilla posted:The Flashman series is great, George MacDonald Fraser was a better writer than anyone at BL by several orders of magnitude. Flashman is not a good dude with a self-interested streak like Cain though, he's a cynical, manipulative sociopath. yeah thats the impression i got. before i looked it up. i assumed it was like a hosed up blackadder version of Flash Gordon or other weird retro space stuff.
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Aug 19, 2016 19:39
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah. I looked up the series and i am probably gonna order a few of them. I love 19th century history(the hosed up mix of progress/industry and imperialism/bigotry/hosed up ideals and most of it still affecting today.) should i read them in order or just get the first then some random ones. Flashman is like a hybrid of Blackadder and Lord Flashheart.
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Aug 19, 2016 20:11
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Dapper_Swindler posted:yeah. I looked up the series and i am probably gonna order a few of them. I love 19th century history(the hosed up mix of progress/industry and imperialism/bigotry/hosed up ideals and most of it still affecting today.) should i read them in order or just get the first then some random ones. My favorites of the series are: Flashman Royal Flash Flash for Freedom! Flashman and the Redskins Flashman at the Charge However they don't really go chronologically, and you can generally pick up and read wherever you want in terms of the reading order. Just start with the first one first, and then go wherever from there.
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Aug 20, 2016 13:39
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Yeah Flashman the book first, then wherever you want really. Pick a part of the world, see what Flash was up to there. There are a very few that are explicitly in order that would be difficult to read out of order. Flashman at the Charge and Flashman and the Great Game follow on from each other, and have a lot of important plot connections to the first book. The America series - Flash for Freedom, Flashman and the Redskins and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, should probably be read in order. Most of the others are more standalone. The great thing about reading them out of order is that the chronological order isn't the publication order. Flashman pretty much grows up to be about mid-30s and then stays there, so you have late publication (but early chronology) books like Flashman and the Mountain of Light, where he's supposed to be young but is pretty much just the epitome of Flashy regardless. I'd say if you're starting, go for Flashman first, and then probably Flashman at the Charge and then The Great Game. I think they're easily the best ones, though the vast majority are great. And when you're done, pick up Mr American, a largely deathly boring book but the last hurrah of the Flash Gent. edit: He goes beyond being a bastard, especially in the first book. He's an out and out rapist, murderer and all-round piece of poo poo. He definitely gets better after the first book - no more "and then I managed to rape her" - and by the very end (Flash and the Tiger and Mr American) he's an old incorrigible alcoholic and much more mischievous than sadistic. lenoon fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Aug 20, 2016 |
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Aug 20, 2016 15:21
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New Abnett! Featuring Eisenhorn no less! Oh wait, it's an eShort. 
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Aug 22, 2016 03:26
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MMAgCh posted:New Abnett! Featuring Eisenhorn no less! On the bright side this means that not all hope is lost for Warmaster and Pariah.....right?..right???
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Aug 22, 2016 13:44
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At least it seems like the Horus Heresy is entering or nearing earth. http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/hh-praetorian-of-dorn-ebook.html I don't remember if it was mentioned, but Dawn of War 3 was announced too. ElPedro fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 13:47
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A few RPG podcasts have me diving into Warhammer lore. I have a job where I just listen to podcasts all day so Audiobooks are a go to. Since Eisenhorn doesn't have any audiobooks, I decided to start with The Horus Heresy and just finished Horus Rising. Are there any good stopping points for taking breaks in the series and what are the books that I can safely skip?
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Aug 22, 2016 20:41
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mango sentinel posted:A few RPG podcasts have me diving into Warhammer lore. I have a job where I just listen to podcasts all day so Audiobooks are a go to. Since Eisenhorn doesn't have any audiobooks, I decided to start with The Horus Heresy and just finished Horus Rising. Are there any good stopping points for taking breaks in the series and what are the books that I can safely skip? You can really pause at the end of any one, and not lose track of the story as a whole. They're disconnected enough that you're not going to come back a week or month later and be completely lost. That being said, the first three (Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames) were released pretty close together, so you can break after the third. The big issue you run into are with the shorts and novellas, since they take place at random times, and reintroduce characters you haven't heard from in some time. As for skipping books, personally, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's going to be personal preference - a lot of goons hate books like Nemesis and Flight of the Eisenstein, but if you've got the time, you might as well listen to them and decide what you think. Also, there are three Eisenhorn audio dramas: Regia Occulta, Thorn and Talon, and Master Imus' Transgression
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Aug 22, 2016 20:55
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I haven't looked at a single book since unremembered empire or scars, i didn't even know they were still releasing have i missed anything decent?
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Aug 22, 2016 21:09
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Waroduce posted:I haven't looked at a single book since unremembered empire or scars, i didn't even know they were still releasing Angels of Caliban was kind of neat if you like Dark Angels.
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Aug 23, 2016 06:52
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I'm going to recommend not reading The Honoured by Rob Sanders. One of the key events is really stupid: An Ultramarines Captain decides he's going to talk a Word Bearer Chaplain into committing redemptive suicide. It's halfway through the book and there's an okay book, The Unburdened, about exactly how stupid an idea that is.
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Aug 23, 2016 08:34
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Peztopiary posted:I'm going to recommend not reading The Honoured by Rob Sanders. One of the key events is really stupid: An Ultramarines Captain decides he's going to talk a Word Bearer Chaplain into committing redemptive suicide. Yeah it's a shame. And it started so strongly with the depiction of the race for shelter, before Calths now mini-Nova Sun rose.. Just reading the new Battles book Calgars Siege, which I was doubtful about because Ultramarines vs Orks doesn't sound especially gripping, but it was Paul Kearney whose own stuff i've liked before so I though I'd give it a go. Only about a third of the way in but it's pretty interesting so far. Turns out hiring proven authors who know how to tell a story and characterise their protagonists might be a good idea. If it holds up i'll let the thread know when I've had time to finish it.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:18
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Peztopiary posted:I'm going to recommend not reading The Honoured by Rob Sanders. One of the key events is really stupid: An Ultramarines Captain decides he's going to talk a Word Bearer Chaplain into committing redemptive suicide.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:35
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