Black Library Weekly – W/C 13/03/17

Hello and welcome to another instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. It’s been a Titanic week (sorry) this time around, opening with a short story full of Heresy-era Titans and closing with no less than three Titan-related books. Good news if you like Titans – if you don’t…what’s wrong with you?! Anyway, let’s start at the beginning of the week as usual…

Monday
The pun-tastic March of the Titans carried on with a brand new Heresy story for Digital Monday – Rob Sanders’ The Ember Wolves, available as usual for £2.49 as a digital-only short story. If you’ve read Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Heresy novel Betrayer then you’ll be familiar with both the Titan legion in question (the hint’s in the title) and the style of engagement that takes place. There’s a fine line between a call-back and blatantly re-treading old ground, and this just about managed to stay on the right side of that line. It’s a fun story, and look past the familiarities to see an interesting take on how those loyal to Horus don’t always have it their own way.

Midweek
We’re probably still a week or two away from anything major happening during the week, so the only Black Library-related news was a week-long hype campaign for the new Limited Edition release of Dan Abnett’s novel Titanicus. Each day saw a quick interview question with Dan posted online, asking about his thoughts on the novel – there was nothing mindblowing in there, but it’s always nice to hear from Dan so we mustn’t complain.

That led up to the full release of the novel on Friday; the Limited Edition hardback has been available to pre-order for a while now, but it’s now ‘officially’ available. Priced at £30 it’s a little cheaper than the posh hardbacks usually are, but that’s presumably because a) it’s not a new title and b) it’s nowhere near as a nice an edition as the rest of the recent LEs. Judging by the photos on the Black Library website it doesn’t actually look that nice, so I’d suggest it’s more for the completists than anyone else. It’s currently down to ‘fewer than 100 copies remaining’ so if you really do fancy it – be quick.

Weekend
After Friday’s release, unusually the weekend stepped things up a notch and delivered a pretty impressive set of new titles – a new Space Marine Battles novel, a new Horus Heresy audio drama, and the hardback edition of a classic graphic novel. It’s great to have a Saturday with so many releases!

Starting with the new novel, we saw CZ Dunn return to his usual Dark Angels with The Eye of Ezekiel, available in ebook (£9.99) and hardback (£18) formats. Shortly after the news broke about Guilliman returning to 40k, Christian tweeted a short excerpt from this novel which looks quite intriguing:

The other brand new title was David Annandale’s latest Horus Heresy audio drama, The Binary Succession. As usual you can pick this up in MP3 (£9.99) or CD (£12) formats, and you absolutely should – I bought a copy at the Horus Heresy Weekender and it’s a damn fine audio drama! You can check out my review here.

Last up was the classic Dan Abnett graphic novel Titan, now available in ebook (£14.99) and hardback (£25) – just to hammer home the Titan theme! To be honest I thought this was already available as an ebook, although I might have got it mixed up with the last batch of old-school graphic novels like Daemonifuge. Either way, it’s a genuine classic and well worth checking out if you haven’t read it before.

Thoughts on the week
Well, this month is certainly living up to its March of the Titans moniker. That’s now three Digital Monday stories in a row, plus an audio drama and the re-release of two classic Dan Abnett stories. I’m a big fan of Titans, so this is all good as far as I’m concerned – it looks like this week was the heart of the new releases tied in with this theme, and I like the way that Black Library have combined things into a week full of cool stories.

There are still two Mondays left in March, so it’s going to be interesting to see if we get a further two Titan-themed short stories. I’d be (pleasantly) surprised if we get any more new novels linked into the theme, but I’m always happy to be surprised!

One other quick point to make about this week – as you might have spotted, Track of Words is going to be moving to a new home fairly soon. You shouldn’t see any major changes (I hope), but I wanted to let everyone know just in case. If you’ve got any questions about this, drop me a line at michael@trackofwords.com.

Coming up…
Next week’s major release looks like being the standard hardback and ebook of the third Horus Heresy Primarchs novel – Graham McNeill’s Magnus The Red: Master of Prospero, which has got me very excited! Can’t wait for this one.

That’s the only new book currently showing up on the Black Library website, although with the news this week of a brand new Age of Sigmar race (the awesome Kharadron Overlords, sort of steampunk-ish Dwarf sky pirates) there’s a good chance we’ll soon see some Black Library fiction involving these brand new characters. Whether that comes in the form of novels or short stories remains to be seen – if there’s no more Titan stories to come, perhaps there will be a Kharadron short story on Monday? If I were a betting man I’d suggest anything featuring these guys is maybe a couple of weeks away still, but who knows?!

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts on the week’s news and releases please do give me a shout to let me know!