Picking a top 5 has been tricky but here goes:Ĥ0k meets the battle of Britain in an excellent fighter pilot action novel set in the Sabbat Worlds, with a few familiar faces from the Gaunt’s Ghost Novel The Guns of Tanith. He wrote their first novel all the way back in 1998 (happy to be corrected on that) and is still going strong, despite a short absence of his writing in the 40k and 30k universes. Other than that, the best way to approach the later Heresy books is to cherry-pick ones that focus on factions or characters you're already interested in and skip the rest.Dan Abnett is in my opinion the best of the authors that the Black Library is lucky enough to have on its books. A rare exception is Legion, a spy novel that uses yet another of 40K's grand pointless wars as a backdrop.
#BEST WARHAMMER 40K NOVELS 2018 FULL#
Unfortunately the Horus Heresy books were a victim of their own success, selling well enough that initially modest plans were expanded into a line that numbers over 50 books, full of padding and stories that bounce back in the timeline to fill gaps no one cares about. It's a look at the Imperium before religious dogma dominated it, imperfect but far from "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" it becomes. In these, the perspective is split between superhuman space marines and ordinary remembrancers-artists, photographers, poets, and journalists brought along to record their Great Crusade for posterity, who instead witness its fall into corruption and betrayal. The first three are the essential ones: Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames. Like most prequels they're better experienced after the stories they're set before, full of foreshadowing that pays off if you know what's coming. The Horus Heresy line jumps back 10,000 years to a formative point in the setting's history. While the enemies faced by the Ghosts are terrible, Gaunt struggles just as much against the orders he's given. Unfortunately for them, the war engine of the Imperium is full of glory hounds and bastards happy to throw away thousands of lives to move a trench forward half a mile. Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt is an unusually compassionate officer, dedicated to keeping alive a regiment who are the only survivors of a dead world.
#BEST WARHAMMER 40K NOVELS 2018 SERIES#
Suddenly it's more like the X-Men than The Big Sleep, a change that revitalizes the series and makes it worth sticking with.įor classic military sf, Gaunt's Ghosts is the series you want. Ravenor jumps genre and protagonist, following an inquisitor who works with a team of badass specialists. The third book in the Eisenhorn trilogy suffers from this, but waiting on the other side is a sequel trilogy called Ravenor. Eisenhorn's written by Dan Abnett, one of the better 40K writers but one with a weakness-endings that feel rushed.
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His investigations into Chaos frequently lead to conflict with the machinery of the Imperium he's supposed to protect, which plays well with the genre's cynical view of authority. The Eisenhorn books turn 40K into hardboiled fiction, with Inquisitor Eisenhorn as a Raymond Chandler detective narrating in first-person. There are so many it's hard for new readers to find a way in, and easy for regular readers to miss books they'd enjoy in the megaflood.
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The other thing 40K books push beyond reason is their quantity. In one turn of phrase that will stay with me till I die, someone's intestines flopped out like gray snakes. Some of the books are clever and twisty, but they always find room for something to be painted with arterial spray, or a head to pop like a specific over-ripe fruit or vegetable. They're pretty extra when it comes to gore and dismemberment as well, the writers competing to find new ways to describe violence. Not content with extrapolating the future to a reasonable distance, it imagines 38 or 39 millennia ahead (individual books hop around the timeline) to a galaxy that's full to bursting with evil empires who are all at war with each other and frequently themselves. It's the perfect word for 40K, a science-fantasy setting based on taking everything too far, then pushing it further.