Tag Archives: John French

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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Sabbat Crusade – edited by Dan Abnett

From humble beginnings back in the 1990s, there are now eighteen books set within the Sabbat Worlds, a region of space originally invented by Dan Abnett to provide a suitable setting for a story about a Commissar who was also a Colonel, and the ragtag bunch of soldiers he commanded. Look how it’s grown! With anticipation as high as ever for Warmaster, the long-awaited next novel in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, Black Library are whetting our appetite with Sabbat Crusade, the second anthology of stories set within the wider crusade. Edited once again by Abnett and including stories from eight authors (Abnett included) along with previously out of print background on the crusade, it covers both sides of the story, not only the Ghosts and their Imperial allies but also the forces of the Archenemy at play in the region.

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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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Echoes of War – a Space Marine audio drama collection

As the Echoes of War fade (see what I did there?!), the Space Marines hang up their armour and the dreadnoughts are shuffled back into their long slumbers, it feels worth recapping on a week of excellent audio dramas from Black Library. For me, this collection came at a perfect time; the week before I had been digging around on my PC and found Hunter’s Moon and Thief of Revelations, neither of which I had previously listened to. Having devoured those in short order, it was with a sense of delightful serendipity that I saw Echoes of War listed on the Black Library website, and I didn’t need much persuading to get involved.

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Ahriman: The First Prince – John French (audio drama)

Originally released as part of Black Library’s Echoes of War collection, John French’s The First Prince is part of the wider Ahriman series and has since been released in prose as well. Running to 45 minutes, it’s set some time after the events of the novel Ahriman: Exile, and like most of the other shorter stories within that arc it’s not told from the perspective of Ahriman himself. Instead it focuses on Ctesias, another Thousand Sons sorcerer, who’s balanced precariously on death’s threshold. An unwise choice in the past has led him to a dangerous place, but Ahriman is determined not to see him fall.

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Renegades of the Dark Millennium – Black Library Anthology

We all love a baddie, right? Fans of Black Library probably do more than most, given the proliferation of great bad guys (and girls) in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. If that’s you, if you’re a fan of the dark(er) side, then Renegades of the Dark Millennium is for you. Unsurprisingly given the title, this is a celebration of all things dark, twisted and evil in the 40k universe, and is very much a Space Marines release.

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