Category Archives: Article

The ‘Start Here With Black Library’ Novellas

Over the summer of 2018 Black Library released a series of six paperback novellas, all previously available in different formats and editions, under the label of Start Here With Black Library. These went somewhat under the radar, as they weren’t (and still aren’t) available via the Black Library or Games Workshop websites, instead being available to pick up in book shops, and on Amazon. They’re absolutely amazing value, however, at a mere £3 each, so obviously I picked up a copy of each of them for myself (I found them at Forbidden Planet in London), and I wanted to talk a little bit about them here.

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Monthly Highlights – September 2018

Somehow we’ve reached the start of October, and the final quarter of the year – how did that happen? Before September completely fades from memory, I’m having a good look back at everything I read (or listened to) and reviewed last month in order to pick out a few highlights. Planning out what I wanted to write this month, I realised that these Monthly Highlights posts have got a little bloated of late, so I’ve trimmed things down for this one. Also, rather than picking one top highlight and two notable mentions, this month I’m going with three top picks as I simply couldn’t choose between them.

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The Return of Inferno! to Black Library

Way back in the mists of time (well, 1997 to be precise) the first publication for the newly-created Black Library was a bi-monthly magazine called Inferno!, which featured short stories, comic strips and artwork all bringing the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 to life. Inferno! ran to 46 issues over seven years, and introduced fans to a whole host of names who would go on to be regular Black Library authors. Dan Abnett, Gav Thorpe, William King, Ben Counter and a whole host of other authors published their first Black Library stories in the pages of Inferno! magazine.

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Getting Started With Black Library: Age of Sigmar

A few people have recently asked me about where they should start with reading Black Library’s Age of Sigmar fiction, so I thought it might be worth putting together an article with my recommendations on the subject. In a similar vein to my Getting Started With Black Library – Warhammer 40,000 article, I should point out that these are my personal recommendations, and everyone’s mileage may very well vary, but bearing that in mind these are a few suggestions for where (and how) to get stuck into Age of Sigmar. I’ll link out to reviews where appropriate, but you can also have a look at the overall Age of Sigmar reviews page on Track of Words for a full list of everything I’ve read/listened to and reviewed.

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Monthly Highlights – August 2018

September is upon us, and it’s officially – technically – Autumn, so it’s time for me to take a look back at the stories I’ve read and reviewed in August and pick out a few highlights. Whether Autumn is really upon us or not, last month brought with it Black Library’s annual Summer of Reading campaign, and I’ve picked out two of the short stories from that campaign as my honourable mentions for August. It wasn’t hard to pick an overall highlight, however, even if I did cheat a little bit and consolidate three stories into one for that choice.

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I Miss the Days When Special Editions Were Special

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how much money I’m spending on books, a line of thought which inevitably arrives at one of my biggest expenses over the last few years – special edition Black Library books (variously called Special Edition, Limited Edition, First Edition…). I’ve been planning to blog about special editions for a while now, but I’ve been finding it tricky to work out how to get my thoughts down into sensibly and thoroughly, so what I’m going to do in this post is take a look at just one issue that’s been bugging me for a while – the fact that special editions don’t really feel special any more. I might wright up some wider thoughts at some point, but for the time being I’m going to try and stick to this one point.

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Black Library Summer of Reading 2018 – Roundup

Black Library’s Summer of Reading campaign is a regular fixture on the calendar, a week full of brand new short stories released one a day. Now that this year’s campaign is over, and I’ve published my reviews for all seven short stories, I thought I would take a quick look back at the whole thing, and provide a single place to look for reviews and links for all of the stories. If this is the first you’ve seen about the Summer of Reading, don’t be put off by the distinctly not-very-Warhammer header image – it’s a bit bright and happy for Black Library, but that doesn’t reflect the tone of the stories!

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Monthly Highlights – July 2018

Another month, another roundup of the best stories I’ve read and reviewed over the last few weeks. Last month I had a hard time picking just one story, but while I’ve had a blast with some fantastic books, audios and short stories recently, and it’s once again been a really tough call, one in particular does stand out as a real highlight from last month. As usual, however, I’ve picked a couple more which deserve recognising as well, so I’ll talk in a bit of detail about my main highlight before quickly taking another look at the other two honourable mentions.

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Monthly Highlights – June 2018

It’s July already, which means we’re halfway through the year – and also means it’s time for another roundup of the best books and short stories that I read over the course of June. As with previous months it was a difficult decision narrowing things down to just a handful of stories to talk about out of the fourteen reviews I posted across the month. In fact, it was so tough that rather than picking one highlight with a couple of notable mentions, this month I’m going to pick out three equal highlights and talk a little about each of them.

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Event Roundup: Black Library Live 2018

On Saturday 16th June, Warhammer World in Nottingham played host to Black Library Live 2018 – the latest event dedicated exclusively to Black Library. With seminars, signings, masses of books to buy and loads of other Black Library fans to chat with, it was a great day – and as usual I wanted to write up some of my thoughts about the event. This isn’t a fully comprehensive write up of the whole event, as there were too many seminars for one person to attend, so instead it’s an overall roundup of what I saw and how I felt it all went, including a Coming Soon section at the end. Spoiler – it was great, and everyone involved should be very proud!

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