There's an absurd amount of Warhammer books out there. Which ones are worth reading?
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WH40K
There's an absurd amount of Warhammer books out there. Which ones are worth reading?
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Schlock
Goes without saying. But there's good trash and bad one. I want to know which ones are fun to read.
Start with Eisenhorn, then couple from horus heresy to get an idea of what you want.
I read the first 8 books of Horus Heresy and thought they were more or less ok, some of them pretty good. Now I'm stuck with the first one about Ultramarines and somehow lost interest. But the 30k universe is fine because you already know how it ends and you just want to see what's going on until Horus dies. What I'm wondering is how good the 40k ones are since the authors have to come up with more stuff on their own without being allowed to mess around too much with the current timeline.
30k being extrapolated on was an irrepairable mistake
I guess it's Darth Vader all over again. But aren't there like 60 books just for the heresy and siege of terra? That's such a lore overload that it is just too much to ruin the story in a comprehensive way.
I can't say I understand the reasoning behind your sentiment. I remember being enamored with the long distant past, promarchs being obscure mythos, insane technology that you *don't* see on the 40k lore. Extrapolating that takes the mystique out if it. It's like if we knew exactly how the pyramids were constructed, it removes the sense of wonder. Maybe I'm just being a nostalgia gay
What I meant is that compared to Star Wars, where they managed to ruin with only three prequels the mystique of Anakins story, the amount of books that one would have to read to get the whole story is just way too much so that any of the oldheads would stop early enough before they get the whole picture and ruin it for themselves. Why read 50+ books if one hates the idea anyway? I guess it would be easy enough to ignore the whole thing and just stick to your head canon.
>head canon
this is true.
When the last priest on terra obviously committed suicide because the emperor burned his church down, but the emperor obviously walked into the fire and saved him and he became malcador the sigilte.
some conclusions are just self-evident.
I liked the idea of the Tts podcast where it turns out that he became in afterlife a chaos priest and got some new sound arguments in a second talk with the emperor.
I like that too, it was even more of a refutation of religious beliefs; as his beliefs and desire for gods proven interchangeable with actual demons and he went along with it lol
i.e. he would have been a priest of moloch sacrificing babies to gods, when the emperor found him first, if he hadn't grown up in catheterism and clung to 'that' religion instead.
TTS is very clever, i find no faults 😀
don't engage with the gay, he's memeing you
>memeing
>homosexualry
your cultural concepts are always inaccurate uses of words which apply to your dishonest behavior and so mean nothing, god-botherer.
imagine the comedy of a person reading 40k and trying to utilize 40k as a political trope to aggrandize the catholic church and the concept of heresy in ideological differences, when in the next book the emperor burns down a church.
The answer is semi-disappointing in that most fiction just stays away from ever turning over to the 41st millenium. Dan Abnett, who in general is the go-to recommendation for WH40k, pretty much created a sub-setting called the Sabbat Worlds where a lot of his interconnected stories take place. But in that sublet of the universe he's pretty much able to depict a spectrum of the Imperium from the air force to the Inquisition to normal soldiers.
Ciaphas Cain is another way of doing it, they're all memoires written by the most charming HERO OF THE IMPERIUM ever, and also don't really mess around with any of the big players.
Personally I'll recommend the Warhammer Horror line, its got some great stuff that I think stands out and you don't hear it recommended as much as the others. Peter Fehervari is my current favorite with his Dark Coil series which are thematically interconnected novels with a horror bent to them, he manages to be the best writer of the Tau out there while doing so. Fire Caste was my first entry into that work, and I like to recommend it because the horrors of a Space Vietnam is a pretty easy elevator pitch to make.
This is really bad advice, those books are boring canon-fluff by contrast to the earliest 40k books, like Inquisitor. Not that they're 'bad' but they're no way near as Excellent as the earliest stuff; you can kind of tell in some titles it's just become a job for them to write a set formula.
if Inquisitor isn't fun enough try Death Wing ....... or the Night-Haunter trilogy(?) is pretty deep.
My favorite will always be Last Church.
last priest on terra to emperor
"are you trying to debunk the miracle that this church was founded upon!?"
I haven't read many but you're safe skipping the first two Gaunt's Ghosts. They're fixups of serialized short stories and a) they're extremely hacky and b) minimal attention was paid to stitching togethering the stories in a cohesive way
Anything by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. His Horus Heresy books are some of the best in the setting and the Night Lords Trilogy is great.
all of them are super pulpy also the answer is eisenhorn
the Lexicanum wiki
The level of autism fueling that wiki is truly astonishing
I’m a 1dIQfy man myself.
Eisenhorn/Ravenor if you want a spy/detective series, Ciaphas Cain if you want swashbuckling adventures with the biggest chad in the imperium. Enjoying some of the other series will probably be dependent on what your favorite factions are in the setting.
Gaunt's Ghosts series (regular trooper stories with really good characterization)
Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin series (spy/detective thriller from the same author as the Ghosts)
The Siege of Terra series(if you want your soul to be ground down by violence and death)
The Devastation of Baal (Blood Angel 40k lore)
the following are preferably read before reading the Siege of Terra
the first four books of the heresy
Legion
Mechanicus
A Thousand Sons
The Burning of Prospero
The First Heretic
Unremembered Empire
Master of Mankind
Know no Fear
Praetorian of Dorn
The Buried Dagger
Wolfsbane
books I've repeatedly heard are good but have not read yet:
The Infinite and the Divine (Necrons)
Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh (Orks)
Brutal Kunnin' (orks)
The Night Lord trilogy
the Ciaphas Cain series
Severina Raine series
Vaults of Terra series
books that have good/fun/interesting parts but are otherwise mid for some reason or another
Forge of Mars trilogy
Darkness in the Blood (continuation of the Devastation of Baal)
The Dawn of Fire series (ongoing, it's really hit and miss - some books are really good, some have really good depictions of Chaos but are otherwise trash)
The Plague War trilogy
most of the Heresy books (one notable exception is THE OUTCAST DEAD - we do not speak of that one)
What's wrong with The outcast dead? Haven't read it but McNeil seemed to be one of the better authors.
Outcast dead has the most obvious continuity error in any book I've read. It's kinda meh overall but the chapters with the Emperor are cool.
Are the books of Ian Watson really as bad as they say or is that just a meme?
Kubrick wanted to make a movie out of those
I thought he meant that in a more sarcastic way
He meant it in a "maybe" way. After all he adapted horror schlock by Stephen King.
Would have been fun to see his idea of a slaneesh planet. Although now that I think about it I'd really like to see a David Lynch movie in a 40k setting.
Whatever you do, do not start with horus heresy, it's some of the most mindbogglingly boring tripe that surely will sap all interest to continue.
Go eisenhorn and gaunts and whatever else first.
>Which ones are worth reading?
Matthew Mark Thomas and John.
btw, if anyone at the moment is still following Games Workshop - have they gotten around to making any Custards literature yet? Constantin Valdor and the exploits of the Custodians?
i keep wanting to walk into GW and comission a custodes miniature and an imperial fist centurion with rogal dorns head and a banana mobile.
Watchers of the throne and master of mankind are great.
wow, thank you, this is exactly what i was looking for,
>We fought as we had always fought – methodically, precisely, falling into the numerology of the near future and racing ahead of mortal thought. These warriors were used to slaughter, either in the Eye against their own kind or against the mortal defenders of His realm, but we had been made to hunt them. That was perhaps the darkest of the many secrets we carried – that from the very beginning, from even before the Great Crusade itself, we had been prepared for this and engineered to surpass them. To the galaxy at large these warriors were the greatest of His created weapons, the apogee of His martial genius. We considered them only as our natural prey.
>How easy, all of a sudden, to see how Constantin Valdor, the Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, was considered an equal of the primarchs themselves in matters of blade-work, when any Custodian could be as skilled as this.
>Had the Emperor foreseen this? His thoughts curdled, growing gravid with treason. Is this what they were made for? This annihilation? This slaughter of legionaries?
and here is a cool reward for telling me about those titles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-Ge4CQ4BhA
thanks, fellow custodes appreciator. I'll listen to this while I paint up my custodian wardens.
Frick me, who's supposed to read all of this? And that's only 40k, as I understand those same authors shit out tons of novels for wh fantasy as well?
I agree with a lot of this but he's got some things mixed up
Ghosts is God-Emperor tier and he's missing Echoes of Eternity in Great and The End and the Death (part 1) in God-Emperor
Don't know what was wrong with McNeil when he wrote the Outcast Dead but it's got some hilariously moronic lore takes and overall reads as if he let his teenage son write it
Good to see that the grand finale seems to turn out well. Keeps me motivated to keep on reading.
Echoes would be in God-Emperor tier if it weren't for ADB's retcon of a certain important thing from the Fury of Magnus novella
I love Echoes beside that but there are moment where you can somehow feel ADB's redditness
I don't get it. They obviously got the task to come up together with an epic tale of Horus' fall to chaos. Why can't they be more consistent and have to retcon each other?
that's just ADB being his usual cringe self
I thought he was one of the good ones?
I feel like I'm the only person who didn't like the NL trilogy, and it feels weird bc I have liked everything else I have read by ADB.
I don't get it. It reads like a bad soap opera, the protagonist is a gary stu who is barely likeable, and the side plot of the human romance is so fricking CHEESY
I'll advocate for it, I suppose.
The story itself is the strongest parallel to reality, I think. Growing up in a truly rotten pocket of humanity and criminality one cannot help but be the protagonist the moment they reject of all that and immediately become an actual monster in the perception of others.
Kurze is completely flawed, of course, he's supposed to be bad and "is insane because of his visions of the future (which are accurate visions of the future)", but even then the story salvages his character and that of his soldiers; they were never corrupted or misled by chaos and din't need to be, they knew the truth of how bad humanity could be already and this led them to merciless war against humanity; maybe with the zeal of the black templars against mutation or aliens, the night lords merciless cruelty came from their zeal against 'criminality' first and foremost.. as like a penal legion fitted with bomb collars and tasked with suppressing crime, they were ruthlessly effective and seized their enemies by the throat without caring for conventional warfare; terror troops wielding psychological terror and brute force to reduce an enemy to surrender without even firing a shot.
There was a good argument made, somewhere by somebody, that the night lords are the 'least' terrible of the legions for this reason, that: they did not set out ever to massacre whole populations (although they did) as their tactics, numerically speaking, spared hundreds of billions from dying through waging war by the tortured of a single city instead to achieve compliance.
STILL they're not portrayed with this level of depth lol but it's there if you can read between the lines.
And Kurze is kind of a pessimist.
The infinite and the divine is a pretty great look into necrons and explores some of the consequences of turning into immortal robots without devolving into constant angst
Also the protags and their rivalry is just really entertaining
Is it from the perspective of a necron?
Perspective shifts between two different necrons who several times go from working together to working against the other because of both external factors and an more or less irresolvable difference in personal philosophy
Anything similar to the ciaphas caine stuff in tone?
I felt the levity really added to the more grim stuff and kept the books from just being depressing.
Doesn't exist, sorry. If it does, I don't know about it. Cain is a fluke, I don't think there's a genre niche similar to it even outside of the 40k license
Space Wolf Omnibus
The only books 100% worth reading is anything with Ciaphas Cain. Get them all. It doesn't really matter what order. Ciaphas Cain is 100% top-tier goofy action schlock.
If you want something more serious, Eisenhorn is a good read. Ravenor is a plot continuation with a different main character and it's so-so, not my favorite. It's like Batman detective with his team and he has some psychic powers (more with Ravenor).
If you want the grimmest darkest most depressing soldier tales, then I guess Gaunt's Ghosts would be good. At that point you're better off reading about real soldiers.
Space Marine books have the enormous downside of all the characters being far too similar. The "Space Marine" short story collection isn't great but at least you don't have to put up with any characters for very long. The Salamanders omnibus was alright, maybe, but the whole Space Marine book premise is shit. Everyone is devoted, brutal, tough, holy. Who gives a frick they're all the same.
I've heard of some book about Tyranids and Necrons being awesome. Some super-fan would know about it. I haven't read any of the Horus Heresy stuff, that all seems like Space Marine trash to me. Basically, Eisenhorn and especially Ciaphas Cain are the only solid recommendations that I can guarantee.
>40k book featuring normal people
>the protagonist and a normal background character relate
>book is good
---
>40k book about space marines
>AH HELLO TINY HUMAN PLEASE POINT ME TO THE ALIENS
>AH YES IT IS TIME TO KILL 100 XENOS WITH MY MASSIVE SPACE MARINE wiener
>OH HELLO FELLOW MARINE I COME FROM A DIFFERENT BACKGROUND THAN YOU 50 YEARS AGO AND YOU STILL RESENT ME FOR SOME REASON
>OH YOU WERE TRANSFERRED TO A DIFFERENT SQUAD I GUESS THAT CONFLICT WAS RESOLVED QUICKLY
>COME QUICKLY SERF MY ARMOR WAS DENTED
the fact that so many morons here have read these books only tells you how far IQfy is from becoming a serious board
woah there
r/hemingway is up your ass
If I should guess I'd say that you've been here for about 2 months.
>a serious board
I don't know what website you think you're posting on, but this one is called IQfy.
Imperial Glory by Richard Williams. It's more sentimental than any other wh40k book I've read.
Start with a pirated copy of the Imperial Guardman's Uplifting Primer, then read "Thirteen Hours."
The former is an in-universe perspective propaganda rag given to Imperial soldiers, the latter follows a conscript from civilian life to his first battlefield where you get to discover just how bad the situation is along with the protagonist, having just as much information as he did.
Non. Listen to some vods or podcasts about lore. If anything, half of it is onions individual hero drama.
Master of Mankind
I'm on legions and I feel moronic.
The one about the Alpha Legion? That's the first time I started to care less about the HH series. Can't say I'm a fan of that Grammaticus dude.
Yeah about Alpha legion.
I enjoyed everything up to this point.
I just can't get into the groove of this one.
I like fulgrim and I want to read more about slaanesh.
It reminded me somehow of metal gear solid with twist after twist and you can't trust anyone blah blah blah. Just without the silly charm. And when it comes to women and sex it gets really cringy.
Fulgrim is cool but did I get that right that the real Fulgrim got trapped inside his own mind and some demon took over? Lessens the whole corruption thing somehow.
That's how I read it.
That he was influenced by the sword all the way up to killing his brother. I am not sure if the demon withdrew its influence to make him willingly give up his body or if he realized what he had one and wanted to kill himself but ended up giving up his body on accident.
I felt like he was conflicted about joining horus but I wish they showed him struggling with it more. It felt like he couldn't process it and went into denial while going along with the plan.
Afaik there are some short stories around that time when he gets corrupted. Haven't read them yet but maybe they go into more detail. Would be a bit lame otherwise.
Eisenhorn books are good. Forges of Mars trilogy is good.
Horus Heresy is really only recommended for true fans or people who want to read nothing but battles and brotherhood. I've listened to a few at work with my audible credits and they are more entertaining in that format.
I thought horus heresy would be something like the start with the greeks meme.
It's unironically like the Iliad
The history of the holy roman empire.
W40k is targeted at teens and kids.
Should be right up your alley