Black Library Weekly – W/C 11/06/18

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. I’m writing this week’s post the morning after Black Library Live, a little bleary eyed and rather lighter in wallet than the day before, but still feeling good after a great event. Even without BL Live, however, it’s been a pretty good week – so let’s take a look at what’s been happening…

Monday
It’s been less than a month since the release of Gav Thorpe’s Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah, so I was a little surprised to see the ‘bonus’ short story from the Special Edition hardback – By Your Command – released as this week’s Digital Monday short (£2.49 in ebook as usual). I haven’t actually read Imperator yet, but I did grab the SE hardback and settle down to read the short – which was excellent fun. I’m probably not the only person who looks at a story about a Kastelan robot and wonders where the relatable characters are going to come from, but I’ve got to hand it to Gav – Alpha-6-Terror makes for a brilliant protagonist!

While this was bundled up with an Adeptus Titanicus novel, it’s definitely an Adeptus Mechanicus story – it’s set inside a Titan, but it’s about a Kastelan, its maniple and its datasmith. It’s classic Gav really, demonstrating the sort of deep understanding of 40k that still sets him apart from most other authors, and occasionally allows him to write something that I genuinely don’t think anyone else would have written. This is absolutely worth getting hold of, especially if you’re a particular fan of the Adeptus Mechanicus but really just if you’re a fan of 40k in general. Click here to have a read of my review.

Midweek
It wasn’t the busiest of midweek periods, in terms of Black Library content, and most of what did happen was related to Black Library Live…so there doesn’t seem much point going into detail on that here. If you entered the competition on the Black Library Facebook page to try and win a copy of Soul Wars then you might have spotted that the deadline passed – it looks like this is going to be a regular feature, so it will be interesting to see what the prize is next time!

One thing which is worth noting is that on Friday, Josh Reynolds recorded an interview for Warhammer TV, talking (I assume – I haven’t seen it) about Soul Wars. This went out live on the Twitch stream on Friday, but should be available to watch back for anyone who has a subscription to Warhammer TV on Twitch. Josh is always good fun in interviews, so if you’re a subscriber then I’d definitely recommend checking it out!

Weekend
After that fairly quiet midweek period, there was plenty to talk about over the weekend – brand new books, a new omnibus, a new Heresy paperback…and then there was Black Library Live too! I’ll talk a little bit about BL Live at the end of this section, but I’m going to write a separate post about the event so I won’t go into too much detail here.

Release-wise, the big stories for the weekend were two brand new books available to order – one for Age of Sigmar and one for 40k. For Age of Sigmar, and tying in with the release of the latest iteration of the game, comes Soul Wars by Josh Reynolds – available in Special Edition hardback (£40), standard hardback (£18), ebook (£9.99) and MP3 audio (£29.99) formats. It’s also, in a classy move by Black Library, available in French and German editions straight away, so there’s no need to wait if you’re French or German and would prefer to read it in your native language. The Special Edition hardback is limited to 2,000 copies and looks absolutely lovely! If you’re after a bit more info, check out my quick Rapid Fire interview with Josh by clicking here or on the banner below.

The weekend’s brand new 40k release was the third instalment of the Space Marine Conquests series – War of Secrets by Phil Kelly, which is available in paperback (£8.99) and ebook (£6.99) formats. I do like the fact that this series is released in paperback straight away – I’m sure some people will miss the Space Marine Battles hardbacks, but I think it’s great that a series which will almost certainly serve as an entry point for a lot of readers is priced at an accessible level – I think that’s a good call. I’m looking forward to reading this, as I think that of all the big 40k Chapters, it’s going to be particularly interesting to see how the Dark Angels handle the integration of Primaris Marines.

So that was it for brand new titles, but on the 40k front there was also the release of Yarrick: The Omnibus by David Annandale, collecting together both of David’s Yarrick novels, the novella Chains of Golgotha, and no fewer than seven short stories. That’s available in paperback (£15) and ebook (£14.99) formats, and looks like being a typically hefty tome. I really enjoyed the novella and the first novel, plus all of the short stories that I’ve read, and I’m looking forward to whenever I get round to completing the series – it’s a little different to a lot of David’s more recent work, but worth taking a look at if you fancy some Imperial Guard action.

Last, but by no means least, is the latest Horus Heresy book to be released in mass-market paperback format – book 41, The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden. These small-format paperbacks are great value at £7.99, and it’s good to see that BL are keeping up with making sure all of the main-range books are still published in this format. If you’ve been holding off reading this novel until it’s out in this format, you’ve got a great experience ahead of you! Here’s my review from back when it first came out.

So those were the weekend’s releases – a pretty good haul overall, I’d say. Keep an eye out for a review of Soul Wars reasonably soon, as I picked up a copy at Black Library Live and I’m hoping to get stuck into that pretty quickly. Speaking of which – how was the event, I hear you ask? Well, if you happened to pop onto my Twitter feed yesterday (Saturday 16th) you’ll probably have spotted that I was tweeting like crazy from all of the seminars I attended. Hopefully it was clear to see just how much cool stuff came out of those seminars – not just the exciting news from the Coming Soon seminar, but also thoughts and ideas from loads of different authors in all the rest of the sessions.

Like I said earlier in this post, I’m going to write a separate article with an overall review of BL Live, so I won’t go into loads of detail here. Suffice to say I was really pleased with how it went, from the organisation of the event and the content of the seminars to the MANY cool advance releases that were available to buy and – arguably most importantly – the really, really lovely people I met and chatted to on the day. I would definitely recommend coming along to one of these events in future if you have the opportunity – but if you can’t make it, I’ll do my best to provide updates of any further events I go to as well! Take a look at the #BlackLibraryLive hashtag on Twitter if you fancy checking out what I was tweeting about from this year’s event – and keep your eyes peeled for my full review of the event coming soon!

Thoughts on the week
As you can see, there’s been plenty to talk about this week – it’s been good fun overall! Starting at the beginning, I want to reiterate that By Your Command was really just brilliant fun, and definitely worth checking out! As I mentioned earlier, however, it’s odd to see this released only a few weeks after its inclusion in the Imperator Special Edition hardback. As far as I’m aware, the idea is usually that these bonus stories remain exclusive to the SE hardbacks for quite a long time, so that they contribute to the ‘special’ status of the hardbacks. I can’t think of any other bonus story in a recent Special Edition (going back to maybe…Primogenitor, even?) which has been released separately yet.

So that’s a bit weird, really. On the one hand I’m very happy that By Your Command is available widely, because it’s such a good story, but on the other hand it does devalue the SE hardback a little, considering the gap. As a one-off I’m not too concerned, but I do hope the bonus short stories are generally released a little later than this one was. I reckon a gap of six to nine months would be good, as that means anyone who buys the SE knows they’re getting content nice and early, but everyone else doesn’t have to wait too long. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts on this!

Moving on to the weekend’s releases, I’ve covered most of what I wanted to say in the section above. I will say, however, that I picked up the SE hardback of Soul Wars and it is GORGEOUS! It’s a bit different to the leather-bound luxury of lots of the other SEs, but no less beautiful an object for that – and it’s a beast of a book as well. It really looks great on the shelf, with about the only criticism I can find being the fact that it’s a completely different size and format to the existing Age of Sigmar SEs – I think BL call this a ‘Royal hardback’ (the same as all the 40k SEs) while the other posh AoS hardbacks have all been A5-size. It’s a (very) minor point, but worth noting if you’re obsessive about how books look on the shelf!

As always, here’s what else I’ve been posting recently. Not so many posts this week, but there might be a few more next week!

• Neferata: Mortarch of Blood by Josh Reynolds
• QUICK REVIEW: By Your Command by Gav Thorpe
• RAPID FIRE: Josh Reynolds Talks Soul Wars

Coming up…
While the Black Library website (as I write this) currently lists it as being available to order from the 16th – i.e. yesterday – I think next weekend’s main release will be Chris Dows’ Martyrs of Elysia audio drama. This is the third and final instalment in the …of Elysia trilogy, and I know I’m looking forward to finding out what happens at the end!

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the week’s news and releases please do get in touch via the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.