Track of Words

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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Foxglove Summer – Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch, author of the Peter Grant series that started with Rivers of London and is now up to its fifth book, is a cruel man. First he ends his last book, Broken Homes, with an earth-shattering twist that nobody can have seen coming, then he makes us wait extra long for the next book to be released. Now it’s finally here, in the shape of Foxglove Summer, he’s teasing us, withholding the information we really want in favour of having Peter dragged off to the middle of nowhere to help look for missing children, 150 miles away from London, Nightingale and the Met. All the while he’s feeding us little titbits regarding the events at the end of Broken Homes; clearly he has big plans for the next instalments in the series.

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Broken Homes – Ben Aaronovitch

The fourth in Ben Aaronovitch’s popular Peter Grant series, Broken Homes continues the story that started in 2011 with Rivers of London, followed by Moon Over Soho (also 2011) and Whispers Under Ground (2012). Part police procedural, part supernatural detective thriller, each book follows Grant around different parts of London as he tackles the kind of crimes that most coppers just don’t like having to deal with. Along the way he’s encountered argumentative river deities, jazz vampires, various ghosts and plenty of unhappy senior officers, seen his best friend possessed by the violent spirit of Mr Punch, and been buried underneath one of the platforms at Oxford Circus.

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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 Long Night – Aaron Dembski-Bowden (audio drama)

Before Aaron Dembski-Bowden got his hands on them, the Night Lords were essentially the most basic of character archetypes; they were baddies by virtue of being evil, as simple as that. Nowadays though they tend to be painted in a different light; far from being just plain old evil and monstrous, in their current incarnation they are portrayed as selfish, nihilistic and massively flawed but in their own way still sort of principled, and bizarrely likeable. From a Heresy perspective, even more than their primarch Konrad Curze, the character who best embodies this conflicted nature is without a doubt Sevatar, First Captain of the Night Lords, mass murderer, liar, cheat and a very dangerous man to be around. Picking up from where we last saw him at the end of the Prince of Crows novella, The Long Night, a 40-minute audio drama from Aaron Dembski-Bowden, sees Sevatar imprisoned by the Dark Angels, talking to the ghosts in his head.

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Master of the First – Gav Thorpe (audio drama)

While the Horus Heresy series has been rolling on quite contentedly, reaching 31 books and countless other stories, it’s been a while since we’ve heard much from Caliban and those members of the Dark Angels sent home by their primarch, Lion El’Johnson. What has been happening back on the home world while the rest of the galaxy falls apart, and the Lion has been out chasing Konrad Kurze? Fear not, Gav Thorpe is on hand with a new audio drama, Master of the First, to shed a little light on the situation. This is a 35-minute audio drama available as a standalone MP3 download prior to a future release in a combined package with The Long Night by Aaron Dembski-Bowden.

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Brotherhood of the Storm – Chris Wraight

Chris Wraight’s Brotherhood of the Storm is a Horus Heresy novella which gave us our first proper look at the Heresy-era White Scars. It was originally released as a standalone novella, first a posh limited edition version but now available on the Black Library website in print, ebook and audio formats, but it also comprises the first story within Legacies of Betrayal, the 31^st full book in the Horus Heresy series. That does mean that completists may well end up owning it twice, but it also means that fans who don’t want to fork out for the hardback novellas can now get their hands on it in a more palatable format.

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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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Daemonology – Chris Wraight

Of all the Traitor Legions the Death Guard have had by far the least coverage in Black Library’s Horus Heresy series so far, barring the loyalist Nathaniel Garro. With only the odd exception they have largely been observers or at best incidental players, Mortarion’s duel with The Khan in Scars being perhaps their most exciting scene yet. Whether as an intentional part of the wider Heresy plan or simply by happenstance, we simply haven’t had much of an insight as yet into Mortarion and his legion, either during or prior to the Heresy, though long-term fans of Warhammer 40k will know his eventual fate. On the basis of Daemonology, a new short story from the pen of Chris Wraight, that could be changing pretty soon.

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