Articles tagged with: Books

As the name implies, this book is a novelization of 2009's special edition of the Space Hulk Boardgame, depicting missions from Blood Angels space marine terminators against genestealers.

All the boardgame missions are narrated, capturing quite well the atmosphere and narrative of the old Space Hulk text excerpts present in rulebooks.

We read adventures of 5 man squads of terminators, cleansing a dangerous space hulk. And in this point is where the story breaks with old roots, because this novel says that "a hundred terminators, plus techmarines are sent to the hulk", which would mean that the full 1st company of the Blood Angels would be risked on a single space hulk at once. This feels quite unrealistic, plus in old stories (and in real games) only one or two squads are deployed at the same time.

Another thing I learned with this book is a nice trick: If you want to make a novel larger, put a letany each two character sentences. Like "purge the unclean!", of course followed by another as a reply from a fellow marine. This way you get almost twice the pages with the same real content.

Despite the abuse of letanies, the novel is an enjoyable tale, hooking correctly most of the lore, marines, weapons and monsters from the boardgame in the novel.

Posted on 2013-10-12

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Note: I misunderstood this was a full fourth book, but it is instead a short story, part of the Victories of the Space Marines novel.

This short tale on the surface appears to be telling about Alaric's squad of Grey Knights' assault of an imperial ship captured by a chaos fiend, but really what it talks about is how the process of becoming a grey knight happens. From how the storm bolter bullets become sacred, to how their armour gets the magic wards, or how a simple human becomes an inquisitorial interrogator.

All of them share one common denominator: huge sacrifices.

Recommended read, I enjoyed it a lot.

Posted on 2013-09-14

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Starting a new trilogy of books about the Dark Angels Space Marine chapter, Ravenwing tells the story of an astartes who just joined the Ravenwing company and is becoming initiated in the inner circles and secrets of the chapter.

The famous Sammael, company master, is present through the book, and the story, which I don't want to spoil, beings with the investigation of a distress signal in one of the planets that the Dark Angels use to recruit future marines. Things of course will go wrong, and secrets will be sometimes told sometimes kept hidden between battle brothers.

Having my SM marine composed of Dark Angels was a clear target for reading this summer. While the book pacing is sometimes a bit slow and you're left with the desire of more, how the chapter's secretive inner circles, rites and how the Ravenwing behaves is nicely depicted and will provide with "food" for those of us that like to know more about the sons of the Lion.

The way the author has made the Ravenwing bikes more present that you would initially imagine in a miriad of situations and scenarios is quite clever, not abused nor underused. Also how other normal chapters would feel of the Dark Angels sometimes strange actions in the battlefield (done to try to hunt the Fallen) gets interestingly depicted.

Although the book is chronologically set after another book I'll review soon, The Purging of Kadillus, can be read on its own.

Posted on 2013-08-02

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Closing the second trilogy of books, The Chapter's Due presents a quite weak and simple story of chaos space marines and daemons attacking the homeworlds of the Ultramarines.

The interesting points are a lot of battles and an abundance of known heroes: Uriel, Tiberius, Sicarius, even Maernus Calgar.

But even with all that, the book has a dumb plot, unexciting events, unrealistic battles * and in general feels more like a book just written to close the trilogy instead of because of having a nice story to tell.

* Sometimes a lot of space marines die against normal enemies, while other times a bunch of them kill all that gets in their path.

Posted on 2013-07-16

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Note: This is a short story, published initially in the Hammer & Bolter magazine and now part of The Primarchs Black Library book.

The Dark Angels are my space marine army since I collect Warhammer 40,000, so having more background about their primarch is quite appealing.

This story depicts Lion El'Jonson, through two Horus Heresy events: A chaos attack to the primarch's warship and mediating between Iron Hands and Death Guard chapters on a conflict in a Dark Angels planet.

You get a sharper image of the attitude, character and intelligence of the primarch, and at the end, a better picture of what Lion knew about Caliban before returning to the home planet. Even what or how was his idea of helping to finish the war.

A nice lore information burst added to the Dark Angels background. Too bad it feels too short.

Posted on 2013-06-01

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000