Hello and welcome to another instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. After the excitement of that last couple of weeks’ #new40k goings on, things are starting to get back to normal – as such it’s been a pretty quiet week, but there are a couple of interesting things to talk about. Let’s get straight down to it…
Monday
It looks like the domination of Blood Bowl over the Digital Monday short stories might have finally come to an end; for the first time since early April there have now been two weeks in a row without a Blood Bowl story. After last week’s Horus Heresy short, this time it’s back to 40k with Left For Dead by Steve Lyons (£2.49 as always), a Death Korps of Krieg short story. Lyons has tackled these guys before, and done a good job, so it’s great to see him returning to them – and he’s done an excellent job of telling a really unusual 40k story. Definitely check it out.
Midweek
There wasn’t a lot of Black Library-related activity going on during the week, but one thing did sneakily appear on the website, a little under the radar. For a while now there’s been an Authors page on the main menu, including individual pages for some of the best-known Black Library authors…well all of a sudden it rather grew! Now expanded to include over 40 authors, it’s actually quite a useful little resource. You can take a look here:
http://www.blacklibrary.com/authors
I particularly enjoy the author pages where the bio has a little bit of a sense of humour, and I’m HUGELY pleased that Ian Watson has been included. It’s been a long time since Black Library released any of his work, but those early novels – Space Marine, and the Inquisitor trilogy – are both hugely influential and genuinely great stories.
In theory, each author’s page should include all of their work that’s currently in print (physical or digital), but as usual that’s not quite the case. Taking Ian Watson for example again, his page lists Draco and Chaos Child, but not Harlequin…although if you search for it, it’s available elsewhere on the website. Still, it’s useful to have most (if not all) of each author’s work in one place.
Weekend
Just the one new release this weekend – Book Four in the Horus Heresy Primarchs series, Perturabo: Hammer of Olympia by Guy Haley. Three months after its initial limited edition release, it’s now available in the usual hardback (£12.99), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 (£19.99) formats, while if you’d prefer the posh version it looks like there are still some of those left for £40. On the assumption that most people probably don’t want to pay £40 for their novels, it’s great to see this now available in standard formats that everyone else can enjoy. I’ll be picking this up soon, so will hopefully have a review coming in the not too distant future…
That was essentially it for the weekend, barring a couple of German editions – including Abyssus, which I’d argue sounds much better than Battle for the Abyss!
Thoughts on the week
Overall I’d say it’s been pretty standard for a quiet-ish week. It was nice to see a brand new, not-Blood Bowl short story on Monday – while I absolutely love Blood Bowl, I think it was about time the focus turned to somewhere else. I’d really like to see Steve Lyons write another Death Korps novel, and given that a lot of the 40k short stories in the last six months or so have been tie-ins to existing or new series…that’s not such a wild idea.
The biggest news of the week is, of course, Perturabo. In its limited edition form it’s already garnered excellent reviews (it averages over 4 out of 5 on Goodreads), and I think a lot of people are going to be very excited about this one…myself included. I’ve said it before, but I’m very pleased that Black Library are sticking to their release schedule with this series, putting out each standard edition just three months after the limited edition. Sure, you might argue they could put them out together, but personally I don’t mind waiting three months.
Coming up…
Looking ahead, next weekend should bring with it the latest T’au novel – Farsight: Crisis of Faith by Phil Kelly. I’ve only loosely followed the T’au arc of late, but I thoroughly enjoyed Phil’s Space Marine Battles novel Blades of Damocles, so I’m interested to see what this one is like. Other than that, only time will tell what else happens…keep your eyes peeled!
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!