Black Library Weekly – W/C 23/07/18

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. It feel like this week has edged a little closer to normal after a couple of slightly odd BL-related weeks, so without further ado let’s jump straight in…

Monday
After two weeks with no Digital Monday short stories, this week we’re back on course with not just one but two brand new stories – hurrah! Let’s take a look first at Choke Point by Mike Brooks, which is available for the usual £2.49 in ebook only. Labelled as a Kill Team short story, as you can probably guess from the cover it’s also an Astra Militarum (or Imperial Guard, if you’re old-school like me) story, featuring both the Kilgannor 27th regiment and the Tempestus Scions of the Delphic Lions, battling against orks. It might not be quite what you think based on its Kill Team label, but it’s a thoroughly entertaining story that does a good job of making the orks feel like genuinely terrifying foes from the perspective of its protagonist, Lieutenant Kaseen. It’s only Brooks’ second BL story, but you can tell he’s an experienced, accomplished sci-fi storyteller outside of BL. Have a read of my review here.

The second of Monday’s releases was an audio drama, in the shape of Guns of the Black Eagle by CL Werner, available for £3.99 in MP3 format. If you’ve read Clint’s Age of Sigmar novel Overlords of the Iron Dragon then you’ll know that he’s got a good handle on the Kharadron Overlords, and this just reinforces that fact – it’s only 20 minutes long, but it’s packed full of excellent voice actors (John Banks, Steve Conlin and David Seddon) having a blast voicing a trio of grumpy duardin sky-merchants/pirates arguing about honour and profit. On the one hand £3.99 feels like quite a lot to spend on something that only takes 20 minutes to consume – I mean, I’m a fast reader but a £2.49 short story like Choke Point takes me longer than 20 minutes, for example – but on the other hand when those minutes are filled with as much entertainment as this, it’s hard to complain. Check out my review here.Midweek
It felt like quite a quiet midweek period so I don’t have much to talk about here, although the two things I do have are strangely both featuring a certain John French. First of all, I’m sure anyone who’s met, spoken to or read anything by John will join me in congratulating him on winning a Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (an organisation whose long-winded name isn’t helped much when abbreviated to IAMTW), for the genuinely brilliant audio drama Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies. These awards recognise writers who work in the field of licensed tie-ins, and it’s great to see Warhammer 40,000 represented alongside the usual suspects – Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars and so on. Great work, John – it’s a fantastic story, and very much deserving of the award.

The second piece of John French-related news came on Wednesday in the shape of a Warhammer Community article – Ask the Author: John French. You might remember a month or so back on the Black Library Facebook page there was a call for fans to submit questions to ask John, and now you can check out the chosen questions and John’s answers. I was delighted to see a question about Ahriman right at the top, and I would certainly be VERY keen to read more stories about my favourite Thousand Sons ne’er-do-well! There’s plenty more cool stuff in amongst the rest of the questions, so do yourself a favour and go have a read…

Weekend
After the week starting off strongly with two brand new releases, the weekend finished off in a slightly different manner, with four paperback editions – a new omnibus, a Horus Heresy anthology and two 40k novels. I’ve said this plenty before, but it’s worth repeating – brand new novels are always exciting, but there’s lots to be said for paperbacks getting books into more people’s hands! Likewise with omnibus editions, especially those that collect together stories from lots of different authors, and stories which have often only been available in digital format or relatively expensive editions.

Sticking with the omnibus topic, let’s look firstly at War For Armageddon: The Omnibus, which is available for £15 in paperback or £14.99 in ebook and collects together one novel, four novellas and nine short stories. For a start it’s DAMN good value, as those fourteen stories between them would set you back almost £50 if you bought them individually. If you still need convincing, take a look at the contents:

  • At Gaius Point by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
  • Blood and Fire by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
  • Helsreach by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
  • The Relic by Jonathan Green
  • The Eternal Crusader by Guy Haley
  • The Glorious Tomb by Guy Haley
  • Only Blood by Guy Haley
  • Season of Shadows by Guy Haley
  • The Third War by Rachel Harrison
  • In the Depth of Hades by Nick Kyme
  • Vengeful Honour by Nick Kyme
  • Angron’s Monolith by Steve Lyons
  • Dante’s Canyon by Josh Reynolds
  • Unbroken by Chris Wraight

Yep, so that’s both Helsreach and Blood and Fire, plus three further Space Marine Battles novellas (The Eternal Crusader, Angron’s Monolith and Dante’s Canyon), the prose version of The Glorious Tomb, and SO much more. It’s cool to see so many factions represented here, not to mention so many different authors. I’m already itching to pick up a copy and revisit some great stories (and read a couple for the first time)!

Next up let’s skip backwards by about 10,000 years and take a look at The Burden of Loyalty, book 48 in the Horus Heresy, which is now available to order in trade paperback for £12.99 – alongside the previous formats, i.e. ebook (£9.99), hardback (£20) and MP3 audio (£29.99). As always, I should point out that this is the larger paperback format, and that the next Heresy title to get the smaller, mass market (or legacy) paperback edition is – I think – Garro by James Swallow, which I’m guessing will land in the next month or two. As you may know, The Burden of Loyalty is an anthology of novellas and short stories, including prose versions of some audio dramas, and contains no fewer than eight stories, each from a different author. I won’t list the contents here, but instead I’ll link to a Rapid Fire interview I did with Laurie Goulding, who edited this anthology, and which links out to all of my reviews for the different stories within. Click here, or on the link below, for that.

The remaining two releases are both 40k paperbacks, and available for the usual £8.99 each – Lukas the Trickster by Josh Reynolds and Knightsblade by Andy Clark. They’re each very different types of story – Lukas is about a single Space Wolf and set almost entirely on Fenris as it’s invaded by Dark Eldar pirates, while Knightsblade is about massive Knights stomping around fighting orks, but they’re both hugely entertaining books, and very much worth checking out. You can have a read of my reviews of both of these – Lukas the Trickster and Knightsblade.

Thoughts on the week
First of all, I’m so pleased to see Digital Monday happening again – I’ve talked in previous instalments of Black Library Weekly about this, but there’s no doubt that I’ve missed my fix of new (or new-ish) BL stories every Monday! It’s great to see not BL getting back on track with this once again, and treating us to two brand new stories – although I’d love to know if the plan had always been to release both Choke Point and Guns of the Black Eagle on the same day, or if that ended up as a way of compensating for the last couple of weeks’ absences!

Speaking of Choke Point, I’d like to draw your attention to this Twitter thread from Mike Brooks, in which he discusses gender in Black Library fiction, and specifically this short story.

It’s a topic that deserves more attention than I can give it right here and now, but suffice to say I was really impressed by the subtle but effective way Mike handled it in Choke Point, and the honest, straight-up manner in which he discussed it on Twitter. In my opinion there’s room for everything in BL fiction, which means there’s absolutely room for characters of all gender, binary or otherwise, but likewise I’d love to see more authors do cool, clever things like what Mike did in this story. Check out the short story, have a read of the Twitter thread, and let me know what you think…

I think I’ve covered the weekend’s releases in enough detail without going over anything again here, so all I’ll say is that if you haven’t read The Burden of Loyalty, Lukas the Trickster or Knightsblade yet, now is a great time to think about picking them up! Likewise War For Armageddon, which I suspect is going to be one of those omnibuses/anthologies that I dip back into on a regular basis. Can’t wait to get hold of that…

I’ve had a relatively quiet week myself in terms of reading and posting on Track of Words, but here’s what else I’ve posted so far:

Coming up…
Next weekend is going to be an exciting one for a lot of people, with both book 51 of the Horus Heresy – Slaves to Darkness by John French – and the latest Age of Sigmar novel – CL Werner’s The Tainted Heart – going up for pre-order.

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.

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