Tag Archives: Robert Rath

[IN BRIEF] Assassinorum: Kingmaker – Robert Rath

Three Imperial Assassins have to work together to pull off an audacious, fiendishly dangerous mission in Robert Rath’s Warhammer 40,000 novel Assassinorum: Kingmaker. Their task: to infiltrate a Knight world, instigate a succession and avert a secession, bringing the Knights of Dominion back into line with the Imperium. Pulled out from their existing missions, Sycorax (Callidus) and Avaaris Koln (Vanus) are hand-picked by the veteran Vindicare assassin Absolom Raithe for their complementary skills (if not complementary personalities), and under Raithe’s fragile leadership the somewhat dysfunctional team plans and executes a daring mission with a bewildering array of moving parts. Inevitably things end up coming down to bullets, blades and the terrifying power of the Knights, but along the way there’s infiltration, impersonation, social engineering, data manipulation, document forgery and lots more.

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The Spy Novels That Inspired Assassinorum: Kingmaker – Robert Rath Guest Post

Welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m welcoming the brilliant Robert Rath to the site to discuss the inspiration for his upcoming Black Library novel Assassinorum: Kingmaker. I’ve been a big fan of Rob’s writing since reading his debut BL short story, The Garden of Mortal Delights, and like a lot of people I was blown away by his novel The Infinite and the Divine! All three of his Assassinorum short stories have been fantastic, so I can’t wait to read Kingmaker and see more of the assassins in action. In this article Rob talks first about his early introduction to Imperial Assassins and then the spy novels that have particularly influenced Kingmaker, so read on and let’s start the hype building for the novel when it’s released sometime in 2022!

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Top 20 Books of 2020

I’ve already published a few articles in which I look back at my favourite Black Library stories of 2020 for all the Warhammer fans out there, but as the year is very nearly finished it’s now time for a wider roundup of all the best SFF/horror books in general that I’ve read this year. I would normally do a top 10, but I couldn’t resist making this the ‘top 20 of 2020’ so I’ve doubled the usual number of books…which, to be fair, did make my life easier as I’ve read so many great books this year! Narrowing the list down to 10 would have been really tricky, and even getting it down to 20 required a few sacrifices.

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QUICK REVIEW: Live Wire – Robert Rath

With his third 40k Officio Assassinorum short story, Live Wire, Robert Rath returns to Callidus Assassin Sycorax (previously introduced in Divine Sanction) for a second instalment of stealthy, polymorphine-induced infiltration. At the frozen pole of Sanga Kappa, one of the twenty planets of the Meloc Worlds, the heretek Programmator Quavarian works to perfect a potentially deadly meme-virus. When engine-master Jezette Vaal is captured and brought to Quavarian’s base to be infected by the virus and ‘reformatted’ to serve the glory of Chaos, an unexpected chance to serve the Omnissiah one last time provides the cover that Sycorax needs to finally track down and deal with the heretek before he can do any more damage.

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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).

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From Humble Beginnings 2: Age of Sigmar Short Stories That Deserve Their Own Series

As I discussed in my article 40k Short Stories That Deserve To Be Series, it’s common in Black Library fiction for characters to be introduced in short stories before going on to have their own series. In the previous article I looked specifically at Warhammer 40,000 stories and characters, but this time I’m going to pick out some Age of Sigmar stories in the same vein. While AoS has much less of a back catalogue (so far) than 40k, by virtue of only being around for a few years, a few new names have already started to become well-known (and loved) – Hamilcar, Gardus, Maesa – alongside some familiar names from the World That Was…but it’s going to be interesting to see which ones go on to become the next batch of recurring characters.

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The Infinite and the Divine – Robert Rath

For his debut Black Library novel, Robert Rath goes big with The Infinite and the Divine, a grand tale spanning thousands of years of bitter rivalry between two virtually immortal Necrons. Trazyn the Infinite (archaeovist and Overlord of Solemnace) and Orikan the Diviner (Master Astromancer of the Sautekh Dynasty) have been rivals since their days of flesh and blood, opposites in both outlook and temperament. After Orikan steals the Astrarium Mysterios from Trazyn’s galleries on Solemnace, their enmity escalates into a deadly feud as, over the course of millennia, each attempts to outdo the other in pursuit of the ancient artifact and the power (or in Trazyn’s case, the collectible history) they hope it can unlock.

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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.

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RAPID FIRE: Robert Rath Talks The Infinite and the Divine

Welcome to this instalment of my Rapid Fire series of quick author interviews, in which I’m chatting to Robert Rath about his debut novel for Black Library, The Infinite and the Divine. This exciting new Warhammer 40,000 title is the first full novel to feature the ancient technological menace of the necrons as its protagonists, and promises to be something a little different to the usual Black Library fare. It’s available to pre-order as of Saturday the 3rd October.

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QUICK REVIEW: Iron Sight – Robert Rath

Robert Rath’s second Warhammer 40,000 short story featuring agents of the Officio Assassinorum, Iron Sight pits a Vindicare assassin against a slippery Genestealer Cult sniper. Having pursued his mark for almost a month, Absolom Raithe has finally tracked down the Jackal Alphus and is closing in, confident of the kill which will see his fifth mission complete and his full status secured. As Raithe chases down the fleeing Alphus, however, he finds the tables turned against him; a long-distance kill isn’t possible, so he’s forced to abandon his usual tactics and take on his enemy up close and personal.

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