Tag Archives: Graham McNeill

QUICK REVIEW : The Staff of Asclepius – Graham McNeill

The final 40k story in Black Library’s 2015 Advent Calendar comes from Graham McNeill, who returns to the Ultramarines with the micro-short The Staff of Asclepius. Fleeing through his ship carrying the precious gene-seed of his fallen brothers, apothecary Isstvan Cantaro races against time to keep his cargo from the grasp of the Emperors Children fleshsmith Dzyban and his horde of cultists. With hope fading fast, Cantaro faces the possibility of failing in his duty to safeguard the chapter’s future.
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Meduson – Black Library Anthology

Of all the ‘exclusive’ products Black Library have released, perhaps the one most likely to rouse the anger of fans is Meduson – a venue-specific Horus Heresy anthology that can only be purchased in person from Games Workshop’s headquarters in Nottingham. Released to celebrate the re-opening of Warhammer World and the dedicated Black Library shop within, it’s a move designed to draw out the diehard fans and encourage visitors, but is bound to annoy those fans not willing or able to make it to Nottingham. Exclusivity aside, any new Heresy release is always going to be of great interest to fans of the series, and this is no exception. With a selection of brand new stories from some of Black Library’s most respected authors, this review is a little longer than usual in order to give as clear a picture as possible of the anthology.

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QUICK REVIEW : With Ice and Sword – Graham McNeill

While it’s perhaps surprising that the short story With Ice and Sword is Graham McNeill’s only contribution to the End Times series, it’s no surprise to see him involved in some way. Here he draws upon characters from his Ambassador Chronicles novels as he tells a tale of Kislev’s final days, as a ragged band of survivors reach the shelter provided by the Ice Queen and her remaining forces. Vast numbers of beastmen are drawing close even as the Kislevites reach the ruins of Erengrad and a potential lifeline.

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QUICK REVIEW : The Kaban Project – Graham McNeill

A prequel to the novel Mechanicum, available as a standalone ebook after previously being released in both Collected Visions and Shadows of Treachery, Graham McNeill’s The Kaban Project is a tale of loyalty and what it means to be human, even amongst the ranks of the Mechanicum. It features Adept Third Class Pallas Ravachol, a low-ranking tech priest on Mars who accidentally strikes up a friendship of sorts with an artificial construct that he fears has broken the Emperor’s ban on the creation of artificial intelligence.

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QUICK REVIEW : The Devine Adoratrice – Graham McNeill

Originally part of 2013’s Limited Edition The Imperial Truth, Graham McNeill’s The Devine Adoratrice is one of only two of the included stories to have found a general release so far, alongside Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Lord of the Red Sands. A direct prequel to Vengeful Spirit, it follows the young siblings of House Devine as they prepare for the ceremony that will bond the brothers with the warrior-spirits of their Knight armour. Meanwhile, hidden factions on Molech work to direct events to their own ends, and the day doesn’t go quite as smoothly as all involved had hoped.

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Blades of the Traitor – Black Library Anthology

A few months after Death and Defiance, the first novella-length, non-limited edition Horus Heresy short story anthology, comes Blades of the Traitor, a collection of five short stories from some of Black Library’s best-known authors. Interestingly, Black Library are offering readers a choice straight away of how to purchase these stories – the physical book is due for release soon (after pre-release at the Horus Heresy Weekender) while the ebooks are available either as a well-priced collection or as individual stories. It’s therefore up to readers whether to cherry pick the stories they’re most interested in or read them all as a collection.

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QUICK REVIEW : Wolf Mother – Graham McNeill

Graham McNeill’s Horus Heresy novel Vengeful Spirit spun together a huge number of character threads, some of which were left crying out to be followed up in later stories. With Wolf Mother, McNeill picks up a few of those characters in the immediate wake of Vengeful Spirit’s conclusion, focusing on Alivia Sureka as she is forced to work alongside the Knight Errant Severian in order to rescue her adopted daughter from a resurgent fragment of Molech’s Serpent Cult.

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Honour of the Space Marines – Black Library Anthology

Black Library tend to release a short story anthology to coincide with each of their events. The 2014 Weekender was no different, with Honour of the Space Marines available, a six-story anthology featuring everyone’s favourite 41st-millennium super soldiers. As with the other ‘…of the Space Marines’ collections (except perhaps ‘Treacheries of…’) the title is a bit misleading, as this only loosely a themed anthology. It’s more about showing the next steps in story arcs that the authors are already known for, from long-established characters to newer, less familiar faces.

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Legacies of Betrayal – Black Library anthology

2014 was a bumper year for the Horus Heresy. We saw the 29^th and 30^th books in the series released, Vengeful Spirit and Damnation of Pythos respectively, as well as a goodly number of novellas, anthologies, audio dramas and short stories. Now, on the one hand many Black Library fans are the kind of people who in the interests of completion will buy any new story as soon as it’s made available, while on the other hand many fans are unwilling or unable to fork out vast sums of money for limited edition releases, or just can’t get their head around audio dramas. If you’re Black Library, what do you do? How do you cater to both sets of fans? Well, with Legacies of Betrayal sneaking in just before the end of the year to make it 31 in the series, it looks like you release as much as you can in as many different formats as you can, then bring out an anthology that collects a bunch of those stories together in one place.

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The Seventh Serpent – Graham McNeill

The Horus Heresy series grinds ever onwards with the release of the eleventh (!) limited-edition novella, The Seventh Serpent, the first such novella from Graham McNeill. Black Library kept this one nice and quiet and sprung it as a surprise for those attending the Black Library Weekender III event (2014), prior to its general release. The typically brilliant Neil Roberts cover art appears to show Alpha Legion fighting each other, with a handful of Iron Hands thrown in for good measure, though as ever with the XXth Legion things are possibly not quite what they seem. Underneath the dust jacket the book’s cover shows an Iron Hands legion symbol, cracked and shattered, while the back cover sees a scrawled message of ‘For the Emperor’.

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