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I really couldn't get into the Ahriman books either, I've never understood the praise they get in the thread. The vocabulary was mediocre at best, and I got real tired of reading the same phrases and sentences seemingly over and over. I like John French but he really needs a thesaurus or something.
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Jul 18, 2015 06:39
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Demon Of The Fall posted:I really couldn't get into the Ahriman books either, I've never understood the praise they get in the thread. The vocabulary was mediocre at best, and I got real tired of reading the same phrases and sentences seemingly over and over. I like John French but he really needs a thesaurus or something. I feel like repetition of certain words or phrases is a pitfall of our fine 40k literature. I first noticed it with Abnett when he used the word proffer/proffered (my wife's surname, which is how I picked up on it) a bunch of times in one of his novels. After I noticed that it was something I started to look for while reading his books and repeated words or phrases seem to crop up quite a bit in his earlier stuff (I haven't read Pariah or the newer Ghosts books yet).
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Jul 18, 2015 20:49
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Abnett's wet leopard growls and his various ways to inform us that Kurze was really shadow-like killed me. Listening to the Unremembered Empire audiobook really shows how bad it was.
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Jul 18, 2015 21:12
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:I feel like repetition of certain words or phrases is a pitfall of our fine 40k literature. I first noticed it with Abnett when he used the word proffer/proffered (my wife's surname, which is how I picked up on it) a bunch of times in one of his novels. After I noticed that it was something I started to look for while reading his books and repeated words or phrases seem to crop up quite a bit in his earlier stuff (I haven't read Pariah or the newer Ghosts books yet). *wet leopard growl*
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Jul 18, 2015 21:16
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Between Space Marines and Sigmarines fighting the unwashed non-human hordes, GW seems to be getting a little Stormfront-y.
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Jul 18, 2015 21:27
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Azran posted:Between Space Marines and Sigmarines fighting the unwashed non-human hordes, GW seems to be getting a little Stormfront-y. Getting? You just started noticing this? The KKK hoods, calling orks greenskins, the peaked caps and black leather trenchcoats, etc. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Jul 18, 2015 |
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Jul 18, 2015 21:47
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Azran posted:Between Space Marines and Sigmarines fighting the unwashed non-human hordes, GW seems to be getting a little Stormfront-y. That's all by design though? And yeah supremacists are big fans of the games, the whole racial purity genocide thing that they don't realize is being mocked
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Jul 18, 2015 22:06
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Fried Chicken posted:the whole racial purity genocide thing that they don't realize is being mocked To be fair, neither do half or more of the writers these days.
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Jul 18, 2015 22:54
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:I feel like repetition of certain words or phrases is a pitfall of our fine 40k literature. I first noticed it with Abnett when he used the word proffer/proffered (my wife's surname, which is how I picked up on it) a bunch of times in one of his novels. After I noticed that it was something I started to look for while reading his books and repeated words or phrases seem to crop up quite a bit in his earlier stuff (I haven't read Pariah or the newer Ghosts books yet). Pariah actually seemed almost like it was written by someone other than Abnett, other than the (well, slightly less this time) abrupt few end pages. And it's written from the perspective of a character that only understands the 40k universe from the limited viewpoint of a common citizen's (well, a common citizen in a secret society's) view of things. Don't go in expecting the same sort of story as in the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, but rather an interesting new way to write a book in the 40k setting, and it's pretty enjoyable for that aspect alone.
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Jul 19, 2015 04:06
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I'm thinking about finishing the Gotrek & Felix series, the last one I read was Zombieslayer, as far as I know, the following books are: Road of Skulls (it appears to happen some time after the first book) City of the Damned The Serpent Queen And the final chapters, the Doom of Gotrek: Kinslayer Slayer Someone can confirm this? I don't know if I should bother with the fodder or just jump straight to the final books.
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Jul 19, 2015 12:05
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Do we know why William King stopped writing the Gotek and Felix books? He didn't have a falling out with BL as he's written stuff like the Macharius books. Did he just get tired of writing them? I wonder if they asked if he was interested in writing the final books.
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Jul 19, 2015 20:33
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Mange Mite posted:The KKK hoods, Mange Mite posted:calling orks greenskins, Mange Mite posted:the peaked caps and black leather trenchcoats, etc. Yes, the fictional Imperium of 40K is a horrible, vile place, but you're really stretching here by accusing the setting of being a clever front for white supremacists and naziism.
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Jul 19, 2015 23:15
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berzerkmonkey posted:What are you talking about? Who wears hoods? Redemptionist fanatics wear pointy hoods and carry torches The whole Imperium is a mashup of all the iconic bad things from human history - Nazis, the Soviets, the Spanish Inquisition, every pseudo-historical stereotype about the Dark Ages, the old-school British empire, etc. That's the joke.
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Jul 19, 2015 23:26
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Mange Mite posted:Redemptionist fanatics wear pointy hoods and carry torches Yes, but Redemptionists (which haven't even been seen since Necromunda) are supposed to be crazy fanatics, not taken seriously. From your post, it seemed like you were agreeing that GW is a front for extremism, and not just cherrypicking crazies from history to populate their crazy dystopian future.
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Jul 20, 2015 01:25
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Redemptionists are totally not crazy fanatics, in the context of the setting they're a legit and praiseworthy arm of the Adeptus Ministorum, which is why you can take their wargear in the Inquisitorial lists.
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Jul 20, 2015 01:52
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Deptfordx posted:Do we know why William King stopped writing the Gotek and Felix books? He didn't have a falling out with BL as he's written stuff like the Macharius books. Did he just get tired of writing them? I wonder if they asked if he was interested in writing the final books. He doesn't know.
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Jul 20, 2015 03:58
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berzerkmonkey posted:
He was saying that GW picked stuff from all the historical crazies/bad things and created a ridiculous and hosed up universe of horror, danger and never-ending war because that was the only way you could justify having those beliefs (hello 1980s satire) and that a number of actual real crazy people with horrible beliefs don't quite get the latter part of that and just think it's awesome that they can draw up an army that canonically is motivated by the desire to 'purify' the human race. The fact that black people will still be humans is probably glossed over by them.
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Jul 20, 2015 07:30
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Good lord... the redemptionists and the others that wear the hoods aren't nods to the KKK. They're wearing capriotes, which are still worn (and can look pretty scary) today. As with so much else of inquisition stuff, it's catholicism cranked to 11.
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Jul 20, 2015 12:15
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There's probably something very wrong with you if you're interpreting GW's portrayal of the Imperium as an aspirational manifesto.
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Jul 20, 2015 14:57
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Mechafunkzilla posted:There's probably something very wrong with you if you're interpreting GW's portrayal of the Imperium as an aspirational manifesto. Hasn't stopped people yet. Or doing the same with Star Wars' Galactic Empire or Weber's Star Kingdom of Manticore, or the factions in any Pournell books, any other group in scifi. Go into fantasy and it's even worse. And steampunk is all explicitly "hey the worst atrocities of humanity were great" Norman Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream with good motivation
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Jul 20, 2015 15:20
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There are people who think Twilight is aspirational and people who see Gor the same way. The one standard about bad ideas is that you can always find someone who didn't really stop to think when they first heard them.
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Jul 20, 2015 16:14
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Lincoln`s Wax posted:Good lord... the redemptionists and the others that wear the hoods aren't nods to the KKK. Arquinsiel posted:There are people who think Twilight is aspirational and people who see Gor the same way. The one standard about bad ideas is that you can always find someone who didn't really stop to think when they first heard them. berzerkmonkey fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jul 20, 2015 |
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Jul 20, 2015 16:19
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Arquinsiel posted:There are people who think Twilight is aspirational and people who see Gor the same way. The one standard about bad ideas is that you can always find someone who didn't really stop to think when they first heard them. The problem with 40k is the same as with Twilight: sometimes the authors don't get the message that their story is a satire or a cautionary tale. Remember that Stephanie Meyer explicitly stated that if she met Edward in real life she'd immediately leave her husband for him.
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Jul 20, 2015 16:49
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Cythereal posted:The problem with 40k is the same as with Twilight: sometimes the authors don't get the message that their story is a satire or a cautionary tale. Remember that Stephanie Meyer explicitly stated that if she met Edward in real life she'd immediately leave her husband for him. 40k ain't a satire or cautionary tale, though. Maybe it was once back in the '80s, but these days, it's entirely a mechanism to encourage teenagers to get their parents to buy over-priced minis. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Jul 20, 2015 17:43
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jng2058 posted:40k ain't a satire or cautionary tale, though. Maybe it was once back in the '80s, but these days, it's entirely a mechanism to encourage teenagers to get their parents to buy over-priced minis. Nothing more, nothing less. It's both. ADB is one of the more grim and gritty, "treat the world as real" authors for GW and he still had them use the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in a recent novella. Most ork things are still a series of dick jokes. A recent book had a not subtle description of Boris Johnson as a bloated incompetent governor.
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Jul 20, 2015 18:40
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jng2058 posted:40k ain't a satire or cautionary tale, though. Maybe it was once back in the '80s, but these days, it's entirely a mechanism to encourage teenagers to get their parents to buy over-priced minis. Nothing more, nothing less. That would be my point. 40k started as a satire of 80s UK (warboss Margaret Thatcher), but somewhere along the line they lost track of the joke.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:10
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I just realized while reading some Guard stories that they don't listen to Ride of the Valkyries/Saints, and I can't recall mention of any sweet regimental rock & roll either. My fake military verisimilitude, ruined.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:20
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Cythereal posted:That would be my point. 40k started as a satire of 80s UK (warboss Margaret Thatcher), but somewhere along the line they lost track of the joke.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:50
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Cythereal posted:That would be my point. 40k started as a satire of 80s UK (warboss Margaret Thatcher), but somewhere along the line they lost track of the joke. Yeah that's kinda feeling I've gotten with a lot of the latter writing in the codex. The GW writers have bought so much into 40k being grim and serious that they've lost the little gleam in the eye so now we have people being ground into mortar because they had a fault batch of mind control drugs that was used to make them into stormtroopers. It's just so overly serious it becomes laughable.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:36
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victrix posted:I just realized while reading some Guard stories that they don't listen to Ride of the Valkyries/Saints, and I can't recall mention of any sweet regimental rock & roll either. You have to read through the 1d4Chan article on the Guard, they've got a large selection of music that they think could fit nicely with the Guard.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:11
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I always assumed the Bela Lugosi's Dead constantly loops throughout the Imperium
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Jul 21, 2015 01:26
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Don't be silly. That's Ork music.
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Jul 21, 2015 01:28
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One Legged Cat posted:Pariah actually seemed almost like it was written by someone other than Abnett, other than the (well, slightly less this time) abrupt few end pages. And it's written from the perspective of a character that only understands the 40k universe from the limited viewpoint of a common citizen's (well, a common citizen in a secret society's) view of things. In almost every 40k book, no matter who the protagonist, there's an extremely talkative Omniscient Narrator handily filling in all the details for the reader. Rookie guardsman has no idea what the background is to the conflict that he's about to be plunged into? No problem, the O.N. will brief you with a potted history! Pariah is very unusual in that it's written solely from Bequin's point of view and contains only what she knew at the time of the events, or what she came to understand later on, with the effect that her world seems much stranger and more mysterious than a typical 40k novel. I thought it worked very well and wish Abnett would crack on with the drat sequel.
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Jul 21, 2015 07:29
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 Also if anyone want dawn of war or dawn of war 2 for 75% of I got steam coupons for each.
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Jul 21, 2015 12:41
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Pistol_Pete posted:In almost every 40k book, no matter who the protagonist, there's an extremely talkative Omniscient Narrator handily filling in all the details for the reader. Rookie guardsman has no idea what the background is to the conflict that he's about to be plunged into? No problem, the O.N. will brief you with a potted history! Pariah is very unusual in that it's written solely from Bequin's point of view and contains only what she knew at the time of the events, or what she came to understand later on, with the effect that her world seems much stranger and more mysterious than a typical 40k novel. I thought it worked very well and wish Abnett would crack on with the drat sequel. I concur. Pariah may not have been a very good 40k book, but it was actually a drat fine science fiction novel instead! Except for the very end when Gregor and Gideon show up to make a hash of things, Abnett could easily have made this a stand-alone novel totaly divorced from 40K and the the earlier Eisenhorn and Ravenor books. Which, I grant you, is why so many people were annoyed about the book....because it WAS so different. But I personally prefer it when my sequels are different than what came before them. Of course I also prefer Ocean's Twelve to Ocean's Thirteen for the very same reason, which is another minority opinion. 
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Jul 21, 2015 21:58
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Pariah was just about as close to literature as we're going to get in the 40k setting. So the bolter porn crowd wasn't going to take it well. The slow burn was definitely an adjustment but goddamn was the payoff in the cathedral amazing.
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Jul 21, 2015 22:27
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Pistol_Pete posted:In almost every 40k book, no matter who the protagonist, there's an extremely talkative Omniscient Narrator handily filling in all the details for the reader. Rookie guardsman has no idea what the background is to the conflict that he's about to be plunged into? No problem, the O.N. will brief you with a potted history! Pariah is very unusual in that it's written solely from Bequin's point of view and contains only what she knew at the time of the events, or what she came to understand later on, with the effect that her world seems much stranger and more mysterious than a typical 40k novel. I thought it worked very well and wish Abnett would crack on with the drat sequel. Yes! That pins down the feeling I had throughout the whole thing. The change from a well-informed and talkative narrator down to a single character's perspective. Which is probably more in tune with any actual Imperial citizen's view of 40k, since in just about any book, you really have to assume that many, if not most of the characters don't have nearly as much context as the reader/narrator about the setting they live in. It's far more standard to be kept from any relevant info except on an absolutely-must-need-to-know basis in 40k than for a character to know all sorts of things, like that there was a grand rebellion of the Emperor's sons, the nature of chaos and xenos life, etc etc etc. You'd get executed for knowing even a fraction of the things that are written in any of the Codexes, so it's often easy to forget that frontline trooper #14289636781523 has no idea about any species he's actively being sent to fight, that Orks grow bigger when they've accomplished something their genes deem Ork-worthy, that there are distinct chaos gods, and so on. Even if the main character's an Inquisitor, there's still a hell of a lot more that they don't know about the 40k setting than they do.
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Jul 22, 2015 00:20
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The Emperor never had sons, and none ever fell to chaos. Wtf is chaos bro? Space Marines are holy angels and none have ever turned from the Emperors light. Burn heretic
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Jul 22, 2015 00:26
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Waroduce posted:The Emperor never had sons, and none ever fell to chaos. Wtf is chaos bro? Space Marines are holy angels and none have ever turned from the Emperors light. *Atop execution pyre* YOU REALIZE THIS ONLY PROVES ME RIGHT!
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Jul 22, 2015 01:17
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Most people didn't like it, but me, being a huge nerd, loved the "CCCP" bit.
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Jul 22, 2015 06:59
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