Tag Archives: Maria Haskins

Best of Black Library 2020 – 40k

It’s almost the end of 2020, so I thought it might be fun to take a look back at the Black Library stories that I’ve read this year and pick out a few personal highlights – in this article I’m looking specifically at Warhammer 40,000 stories, but I’ll do the same thing at some point for some of the other settings as well. These are just my own choices, based on what I’ve personally enjoyed reading the most, and I’ve based my selections on stories that were released in 2020 and that I read during this year (so for example I’ve had to miss off a few short stories that I read in anthologies in 2019 but which subsequently got standalone e-short releases in 2020).

Continue reading →

From Humble Beginnings: 40k Short Stories That Deserve Their Own Series

There’s a long history in Black Library fiction – and Warhammer 40,000 in particular – of characters who started off in short story form and went on to bigger things. From the early Inferno! days of Gaunt’s Ghosts and the Last Chancers, to Severina Raine and Sister Augusta more recently, characters who started off in a single short story have regularly gone on to feature in novels and novellas of their own, or simply long-running series of short stories. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some recent-ish 40k short stories and pick out a few which seem ripe for developing into longer stories, and whose characters (or settings) could go on to be the fan-favourites of the future.

Continue reading →

QUICK REVIEW: The Jagged Edge – Maria Haskins

For her debut Black Library story Maria Haskins tackles a tale of desperation, sacrifice and familial bonds within the Imperial Guard in The Jagged Edge. Sergeant Aurelia Shale and her squad of Keplerian Scrappers are sent on a dangerous mission to infiltrate and destroy an enemy-held manufactorum, approaching through tunnels in the mountains of Kepler-Gamma. Accompanying them is Commissar Theodora Shale, Aurelia’s sister – in the darkness beneath the Jagged Edge, Aurelia must contend with not just the heretic cultists of the enemy but her painful memories of a once-close sibling who abandoned her long ago and never really returned.

Keep reading…