The Horus Heresy

I got back into 40k when Rogue Trader came out¹ last year. I had some ultramarines and necrons back in the early 00s, but what I really liked was the Black Library: inquisitors and space wolves and regular-old guardsmen being ground up into nothing to keep the machinery of a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy running for one more day.

So in January, I made a New Year's resolution: read the entire Black Library -- at least, the 40k books -- in 2024.

To get started, I looked at T. L. Branson's blogpost about the "order" -- less for order and more to group the series together, since it's not always obvious what goes with what -- and realized that reading it all would require me to quit my job and focus full-time on reading stories about space marines.

That goal has to be revised from "the entire thing" to "merely a lot" 😅

I began with the Space Wolf books, following Ragnar Blackmane's rise from a vanilla human on Fenris to Wolf Lord. The first book was one I had read a couple times before. Fenrian culture is interesting, and I've always liked their "cutting threads" and "laying on red snow" stuff. These were really good. I appreciated the unexpected visit to Terra -- seeing the throneworld is always interesting.

By the time I finished those, the Horus Heresy series was just about to wrap up with The End and the Death Volume III due out in a week. I had read about twenty books into the Horus Heresy back when the series kicked off in 2006. The timing seemed fortuitous; I chose the Heresy as my next project.

Heresy

I opened Horus Rising on January 30th. I'm up to book 44 (of 64): The Crimson King.

And I gotta say: the series drags a little bit in the middle. The firsty thirty books are busy running around covering what's happening with the Legions in the lead-up and immediate aftermath of Isstvan. The Primarchs get fleshed-out as characters and major characters from the eighteen legions and supporting organizations all need to be introduced.

The last fifteen books or so have had some stand-outs, but I'm getting pretty tired of hearing about Ultramarines fighting insurgents in Ultramar, and extremely tired of hearing about bands of Iron Hands and Salamanders not getting along with Raven Guard and how sad they are about Ferrus Manus losing his head. I get it, it's a big fuckin' deal for these characters, but please let's move on to something else.

Master of Mankind (#41) had been built up bit for me by some passing comments Luetin09 said in a video. It was interesting, but I was expecting the Emperor to be in the spotlight, and that was not the case. The Emperor of Mankind (beloved by all) mostly just sat on the throne and gave custodes visions for them to interpret.

Two of the highlights for this chunk of the series: Magnus' story has been on pause for about 30 books and we're getting back to that. I know there are several dramatic events left for him & his legion, so after seemingly-endless short story compilations about how emo the Iron Hands are, I'm stoked to get back to the Thousand Sons for the rubrick and Magnus deciding what side he's on.

There have been some indications that Legions are going to begin moving to Terra, so I'm hoping to return to epic pitched battles and primach-slayin' real soon. Maybe more Mechanicus stories focusing on titans, knights, and forges -- Mechanicum (#9) was and remains one of my favorite 40k novels.

Logistics

Part of the reason I fell off the the Black Library's was the lack of eBooks. I used to own a ton of dead-tree books, but there came a day when I realized how much space they were taking up and resolved to switch 100% to eBooks. At this point, there were some 40k books available electronically, but it looked like the Black Library was not serious about digitizing. So I read other stuff instead.

They have corrected that situation in the intervening decade. It looks like I can buy anything² from their site as a DRM-free ePub. And that's what I've been doing: if I can avoid Amazon DRM on my purchases and give the publisher the biggest cut possible by buying direct, it's a win-win.

But I gotta say: I absolutley fucking hate the Black Library site. It's the most basic eCommerce platform imaginable: somebody set some high-level categories and slapped products in there.

There's no order, there's no bulk "add to cart", there are no Horus Heresy bundles, there's no metadata on a product page to tell me what other books would make sense to read with the one I'm looking at. Once I get the order in, I have to download the books one-by-one instead of having a convenient "give me everything in this order as a zip please & thank you" button.

I have been purchasing them 25 books at a time and the purchasing experience sucks.

The site doesn't seem to give me a good way to follow new releases, either? This is the one instance where I want to subscribe to a newsletter -- please, tell me what 40k stuff you've released this month! -- but there's nothing like that.

I signed up for The Bolter & Chainsword just to follow the Black Library new releases thread. The weekly digest hopefully has me covered.