Do any of these books have a good story or any sort of merit? Or is it just to get you to buy toys? Ive never read any of this stuff, but I have been listening to youtube lore videos at work and it seems interesting
Do any of these books have a good story or any sort of merit? Or is it just to get you to buy toys?
Do you like gritty sometimes pulp fantasy? Yes. Otherwise feel free to skip.
I like starship troopers, it was a little corny. I kind of wanted more grit
just read the wiki, you'll get bored and move on
The best lore was the oldest shit. The way it used to work is, people played the tabletop, so they needed rulebooks, and to spruce up the rulebooks GW filled them with concept art and lore and wrote them in the style of the setting with in-setting propaganda interspersed with the technical stuff. The people writing these things weren't highly paid commissioned authors trying to make a space opera for homosexual 13 year olds whose mom bought them a $4000 pre-painted Ultramarine army they never play, they were just nerds, so they wrote shit that was usually cool and creative, sometimes so weird or even semi-moronic that it stretched the setting's parameters themselves. Bit by bit the setting was stretched in every which way by these nerds, evolving organically as even the weird and moronic shit was folded back in and meta-explained by even weirder shit (which is how you get Noise Marines, a really cool and well-developed concept, from some initial nerd making up some bullshit because he liked hair metal and wanted to make electric guitar-guns).
This built up a lot of good will and a sense of being part of something organic in the early and mid 2000s. 40k fans talked about it endlessly and made wikis like Lexicanum, extending the initial nerds fleshing out lore made by other nerds cycle even further by involving the whole community in making concept art and freely speculating and telling stories. Any fun lore shit you get even today, like those youtube videos, is simply riding on the massive store of this good will and organic community from back then.
Games Workshop, the owner of the IP, was always predatory and notoriously doesn't give a frick, so as the 40k community grew its attempts to rape and prostitute out 40k for more money grew apace. This started with major annoying interventions to "tidy up" the lore by people like Matt Ward and the horrible Newcrons. But it really culminated in the recent state of 40k, which is now a mixed bag, the old greatness being slowly drowned in new crap targeted at 13 year old Smurf playing homosexualS, which to be fair is kind of understandable because the only way to profit off this cultural phenomenon because older homosexuals like me don't want to buy plastic doodads anymore and just want to hang around talking about 40k with other old homosexuals until we're all dead.
The Horus Heresy books are a result of the mid-to-late "tidying up" phase. They are pretty good if you really really like scifi pulp and 40k, and you're the kind of person who will keep reading to find out what happened to Lorgar after his latest gay tantrum. But in my opinion they actually neutralize what was great about 40k by over-explaining something that was always meant to be unknown and shrouded in legend and mystery.
Similar to how in Stargate, in Halo, and in Mass Effect, the Ancients/Precursors were these mysterious shadowy beings and then oh it turns out they were just a Jamaican guy nevermind.
Also the reason that Astartes animation video series on Youtube that blew up is so good is because it PERFECTLY captures the feel of 40k that only the original organic community can recognize by instinct in its heart. Compare that to any of the cinematics for the games. While sometimes cool, they inevitably turn Space Marines into space marines, lumbering fatties and expendable space-soldiers, instead of the demigods they're supposed to be. This is because the animators of those commercial cinematics, like the modern lore creators and GW overseers, don't understand or care about 40k, they just see it as "space marine soldiers fighting alien, got it, well he's fat and bulky so I guess he would move slow." Because they never read the lore fluff bit by bit as a kid, they never learned that Space Marines are inhumanly fast and give Eldar a run for their money (the Eldar also look like slow shit in those cinematics). =
The Astartes thing makes them into the demigods they're supposed to be, that's how 40k FELT in 2008. The Dawn of War 2 cinematic is how 40k FEELS now. Slower, clunkier, more generic. The Astartes cinematic is so amazing because it captures the SPIRIT of old 40k: the fact that it almost makes no sense and is semi-moronic that such big bulky guys should move as fast as the lore says they do, or be as inhuman and mechanically precise as the lore says, so you have to stretch your imagination and find ways of depicting them that live up to the FEELING. Instead of reducing it to a generic Halo 5: Call of Gears 2 cinematic.
Also if you want to understand why the Horus Heresy books are flawed, apply the same principle by analogy to the books. The Astartes videos are to how the Primarchs and the Primarch era felt in 2008 as the commercial cinematics are to the Horus Heresy depiction of the Primarchs. Something is lost in translation, the original mystery and larger than lifeness is gone.
It's like how if you grew up reading LOTR, even thinking about LOTR will give you a frisson and almost transport you to another world that's so much bigger than you and bigger than your ability to contain it in one glimpse. But if you grew up on the LOTR movies, Legolas is a thin gay man he shoot orc, Gondor is two fields and a wall
Yeah I kind of got that corporate juicing feeling. I will never play the table top game, I just liked the lore in the same way I like real life ancient near East history.
>Do any of these books have a good story or any sort of merit?
I guess. The entire 'franchise?' was fan driven from the very beginning, so it had an organic component which was unparalleled - more recent 40k administration has destroyed this completely. I was never all that into it but JAQ DRACO: INQUISITOR stands out as one of the most fun and coolest book I ever read as a kid, whilst THE LAST CHURCH by Graham McNeil is on my top 10 of all time.
>The Astartes cinematic is so amazing because it captures the SPIRIT of old 40k: the fact that it almost makes no sense and is semi-moronic that such big bulky guys should move as fast as the lore says they do,
That's because they're genetically enhanced super humans; like... it's the superman theory, if you grew up on a planet where your physiology was attuned under earth-like conditions but if the gravitational physics was a little different; more gravity, and then you arrive on earth you'd be running super fast because your physiology had developed against a resistance that no longer exist, for example. It's all more or less believable - or plausible science anyway - for the space marines.
wait i got a better one
e.g.
> the fact that it almost makes no sense and is semi-moronic that such big bulky guys should move as fast as the lore says they do
If you're 6 and looking at a pro athlete it almost makes no sense that someone so huge (by comparison to you at age 6) could move so fast. same thing. i think.
Dan Abnett is generally considered the best 40k writer. His two most famous series are Gaunt's Ghosts and Eisenhorn.
Gaunt Ghost and the Night Lord serie are good.
Soul drinker serie too, although a bit more all over the place.
>Night Lord
AVE DOMINUS NOX
AVE DOMINUX NOX
they chanted the words in worshipful thankful monotone
gayest legion with objectively the shittest fighters, coolest primarch though
aren't they basically the single in-tact chaos space marine legion within chaos who didn't succumb to to the ravages of chaos? something like this?
You aren't going to find anything incredible, but there's an argument to be made that Gaunts Ghost's and Ciaphas Cain are the spiritual successors to Sharpe and Flashman respectively.
Warhammer 40k books are a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi genres. The PC game was similar to Warcraft absolutely, but books differ. Different authors -- different stiles.
Read the Eisenhorn trilogy, it basically popularized the game beyond being something only known by a niche group of nerds who like models by expanding and codifying the lore and then making it accessible to nerds who like Sci-Fi in general and not just a much smaller off-shoot of them.
Why did they edit out Trump's face on god-emperor
There are countless different 40k authors, and a lot of the books, while not exactly being hard sci-fi like Asiimov or Clarke, are really damn good stories. You could say that they're just a way to propagate the 40k franchise and sell more miniatures, but then again, the books have always been a rather essential part of the 40k experience. I haven't read/listened to a lot of them, but I can STRONGLY recommend the Twice-Dead King series.