Warhammer 40,000

[Fist and Faith]

Warhammer books read so far...

Time of Legends
Heldenhammer
Empire
God King (Those are the three Sigmar books)
Warrior Priest


Horus Heresy
1) Horus Rising
2) False Gods
3) Galaxy in Flames
4) The Flight of the Eisenstein
6) Descent of Angels
7) Legion
11) Fallen Angels
13) Nemesis
14) The First Heretic
17) The Outcast Dead
19) Know No Fear


40,000
Eisenhorn Omnibus
Ravenor Omnibus
Pariah
Blood Angels Omnibus
Blood Angels Second Omnibus
Grey Knights Omnibus
Soul Drinkers Omnibus
Blood Ravens: Dawn of War Omnibus
Atlas Infernal
Faith & Fire
The Emperor's Gift

Space Marine Battles Novels
Battle of the Fang
Fall of Damnos
Hunt for Voldorius


As I said recently, I'm reading The Blood Angels - Omnibus, at the recommendation of Argothoth. It's a very fun book. The Blood Angels is one of the Chapters of the Space Marines; the outrageously enhanced soldiers, with their outrageous weapons and armor. It's not overly complex, or deep, but it does try to cover some ground in a few areas. Psy powers; various religious ideas; tech/cyborg stuff...

More important, for me, is the outrageous history touched on throughout the book. Going back nearly 50,000 years (10k before our time), it begins with the origin of God-Emperor/Emperor of Mankind. Here's a tiny bit, and you can read tons more at warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Emperor_of_Mankind if you're interested.

The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic humanity's various peoples, the first human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would become the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Earth during prehistoric times, somewhere in ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C. But even before the birth of the Emperor, as humanity grew and progressed, the Warp began to become increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were being consumed by the entities and daemons of the Warp. Eventually the shamans of humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the shamans and their psychic abilities to guide the race, humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Eldar. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had all been consumed by the Warp.

In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic power that overwhelmed those daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a flame imperishable that became one soul out of many. A year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of Anatolian herders and farmers. His psychic power was so great that its energies altered his genome and physiology in the womb and rendered him immortal so he would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon his death. As he grew older, his potent psychic powers began to manifest. Over the many millennia of his life, he travelled among the different peoples of Mankind, using his ancient wisdom to help where he could in the guise of many different benevolent persons from human myth, religion and history. But as his psychic powers further developed, he became ever more aware of the terrible dangers that awaited Mankind in the broader universe and he resolved to do all in his power to defend and guide humanity towards a future as the predominant species in the galaxy. As more and more humans were born with the mutant psyker genes that granted them the ability to wield the potent power of the Immaterium in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology, and humanity suffered from the deadly effects of uncontrolled psykers, the Emperor realised that he would have to take a more direct and open role in human affairs than ever before.

However, in the current Warhammer 40,000 background story, the Emperor's origin and history prior to unifying Terra is left largely mysterious and undetailed, though his immortality and extraordinary psychic abilities remain intact. The first mention of the Emperor in Imperial records is when he unified Terra at the end of the Age of Strife in the late 29th Millennium. Horus mentions that the Emperor lived "in Anatolia, in his own childhood" when talking of his first meeting with the Emperor. It is known that he had been immortal and ancient even before his ascension to the Golden Throne over 10,000 Terran years ago. The Emperor is the "New Man", the first and greatest of the new race of human psykers. He is also the collective reincarnation of the extinct shamans, sorcerers and wisemen who had guided primitive humanity during prehistoric times. As the Emperor grew older his powers began to manifest themselves and become more potent and he gradually remembered his thousands of past lives adding all of their knowledge and experience to his own.

For thousands of years before becoming the Emperor, he guided and watched humanity develop over the course of its history, assuming the guise of a large number of historical personages. He was aware that the darker extremes of human nature were feeding the growth of the Chaos Gods in the Warp, and so he sought to promote peace and harmony on Earth and thereby curb the growth of the Ruinous Powers' strength. The Chaos Gods themselves recognized the Emperor as their greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy. Only at the end of the Age of Strife did the Emperor emerge from obscurity to take a more direct hand in the future of humanity, conquering the warring factions of Mankind's homeworld and establishing his direct rule over the Earth. The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many innocents that resulted from his conquest with great remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying humanity and protecting it from the manifest predations of the Warp.

With the assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars, who joined with the Emperor and the people of Terra in the Treaty of Mars that formally founded the Imperium of Man in the 30th Millennium, the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar starships that would carry his armies across galactic space. The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonized by Man during the Dark Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man, and also subdue, destroy, or force into exile all intelligent alien races from the Milky Way Galaxy, what was to become the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Mankind. The Emperor also created the superhuman Primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was later developed to serve as his primary military commanders for the Great Crusade. The Chaos Gods, however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan. The Primarchs were sucked into the Warp even as they gestated in the gene-laboratories deep beneath the Imperial Palace, and were scattered across the inhabited worlds of the galaxy. During the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty Primarchs were found and united with the Space Marine Legions that had been created after their disappearances from the genetic material that they had left behind. As the Emperor traveled across the stars, some humans wanted to worship him as a god, however he forbade this, proclaiming "I am not a god; rather than enslaving humanity I want to free it from ignorance and superstition." However, Lorgar, the Primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, desperate to find some outlet for his belief that Man must have a God to worship to be truly whole, gave in to the constant whispers of the Chaos Gods and, after corrupting his Legion to their service, sent his First Chaplain Erebus to poison the minds of the other Primarchs as well as their Legions. Just as the Imperium had reached its apex in the early 31st Milennium, the Emperor's most trusted son, the Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to Chaos as a result of his own pride and ambition and betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully half the Space Marine Legions, initiated a massive civil war for control of the galaxy. This rebellion is known to history as the Horus Heresy. Though the Emperor ultimately defeated Horus during the Traitor Legions' assault on Terra, he was all but slain in the battle suffering from a crippling loss of limbs and mortal systemic damage; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained his living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive. Trapped within his prison of flesh, only the Emperor's mind is allowed to wander free within the Immaterium, still seeking to protect and guide humanity to an increasingly distant better future.

As far as I can tell, most of this is from the game manuals. Possibly some out-of-print books? Does anyone know for sure?

And what I'm wondering is if anyone has particular recommendations. I'm going to try the Horus Heresy series. I bought the second book for a song at the Borders closing, and have the first book on order at B&N. I also have the first books of the Nagash (I guess that's not 40K) and Sigmar (maybe also not 40K? But it may have a lot of his origin in it?) on order. Anybody else have favorites? There's, like, a thousand books, and I'm sure many are not necessarily great.

[Fist and Faith]

Fine! Ignore me! See what I care! I just bought the Ravenor: the Omnibus, Soul Hunter, and Atlas Infernal. We'll see how it goes.

[Vraith]

Heh...I didn't exactly ignore it so much as not have the answer. From my old and limited memories the quote seems lifted from the basics of the game manuals.
I've never read a single one of the fictional works based on the game, so had nothing to recommend.
The only other thing I know is there was at least one game [I think it was for PS2?] where you were a space marine fighting the bad guys in a damaged space ship.

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting anything from you in particular. You responded to my post in the What are you reading thread. Just hoping anybody who doesn't read every post there might see this thread.

[Infelice]

Speak to me when you read about the Space Wolves. ... and also about the Chaos Marines, in particular, The Night Lords.

[Fist and Faith]

Ah, Infelice, if only you'd spoken up sooner! Heh. I've already started the Ravenor Omnibus, but I'll read Soul Hunter after that. That's a (I think the first) Night Lords book.

I was looking at the Space Wolves Omnibus, too, but got the other things first. I'll get to it!

[Fist and Faith]

Done with the first two books of the Ravenor Omnibus. Lots of fun, for sure! Hugely powerful stuff. One group of bad guys is learning a system of magic that's pretty cool:

Spoiler

'Enuncia is the name ancient scholars gave to a lost, pre-human language. Its origins and use may have associations to the warp itself, or to antique super-races that may once have existed in our cosmos. Tiny scraps of it have occasionally been discovered. We don't know how it was created originally, or even used. It's possibly the source of the arts we now understand as "magic". Simply put, the language was a tool, an instrument. By the power of words alone, the fabric of reality could be changed, transformed, controlled, manipulated, reshaped. It was a fundamental device of creation.'

Here's an example of it being used:

Spoiler

Instinct told Revoke he was just two, maybe three, strokes from running out of luck. He couldn't sustain this pace of combat much more than a few seconds longer. He sidestepped the Thief and yelled an un-word in desperation.

The force of the un-word smashed the incunabula back fifty metres. It hit the processional's side wall, cratering it, and fell to the floor.

[Fist and Faith]

OK, done with the Ravenor omnibus. Very fun stuff. Now I'm about to start Soul Hunter, one of the Night Lords books. Maybe Infelice will post with me. Awfully lonely reading this stuff!

[Fist and Faith]

*clears throat and looks out onto the auditorium's empty seats*

I went for the Horus Heresy, instead. Figured I should get some pre 40,000 info (in this case, 30,000) first. The first book, Horus Rising, is 400 pages, and I read 100 pages per day for four days. Which tells us it's an easy read. I'm 160 into the second book, False Gods, which is by a different author. (Most of the books in the HH are by different authors.) It's good stuff. No psy stuff yet, so not as fun as the Ravenor or Blood Angels omnibuses. So far, it's a pretty thorough telling of these important events in the 40k's huge universe/mythos.

[I'm Murrin]

*clears throat and looks out onto the auditorium's empty seats*

I know the feeling.

[Fist and Faith]

But I know this is not the kind of stuff most people here will like. It's a lot of fun, and the whole mythos is very cool, but it's not the caliber of stuff Watchers usually look for. I'm just having a good time reading it and annoying everyone with my posts. Thanks for posting, though!

[I'm Murrin]

Think of it this way and it won't seem so bad: No one's commented on my blog since May 2009.

[Fist and Faith]

Hmm... Didn't know you had one. Or I forgot. I could check it out. But you and I disagree on most things, so...

Edit: There. Now quit yer gripin'!

[Fist and Faith]

Done with False Gods. Starting Galaxy in Flames tonight. Can't say there was much difference between the quality or styles of the first two books, which are by different authors. Good job of making it one story. And it's good that they're building this rather significant part of the mythos slowly, even if I'd like a little more to happen.

[Fist and Faith]

OK, simmer down, folks. I know you're anxious to hear more, but relax! Sheesh!

OK, done with Galaxy in Flames. Some serious stuff happens. The first three books have been slow moving, but momentous. Huge, gigantic acts of betrayal, terrible on the level of the galactic civil war it's leading to, and on personal levels. Also, one of the nastiest world-destructions I've ever read. Extreme amounts of an outrageously powerful virus that spreads VERY fast, and kills ALL living things. (Sloughs the flesh right off of the people.) This generates tremendous amount of gases, which are then ignited, burning the world entirely.

The Warsingers were cool, even though we didn't see them for all that long. Powerful music that they used to fight.

On to Book 4: The Flight of the Eisenstein!

[Fist and Faith]

OK, done with FotE. And I'm going to take a break from the Horus Heresy series now. The first 250 pages of this book were a retelling of most of GiF, but from a different character's pov. And yeah, it is all pretty cool stuff. Nice detail and personal impact on this huge story. And it's easy enough to read. The fact that I've read the first four books, about 1,600 pages, in eighteen days is proof of that. Av would have read them all in probably three days. But, for all that, it's slow moving. I want to read Book 12, because it's about some characters dabbling with forbidden sorcery (all sorcery is forbidden at this point in the mythos), and it's a prequel.

But for now, I'm jumping ahead 10,000 years, back to 40,000, and the inquisitors. The Eisenhorn Omnibus. Written by the same guy who wrote the Ravenor Omnibus. In the first twenty pages, a bad guy turned on the thawing process in a cryo-hibernation facility, waking a couple thousand people before it was time. So nobody was there to let them out of their caskets, and give them the warming fluids and other medical attention they needed. The pounding from the inside of the caskets and the screams of pain and terror were a fun way to start a book.

[Fist and Faith]

Eisenhorn is such a good book! Like Ravenor (Ravenor was Eisenhorn's protege, btw, so I should have read them in the reverse order), the stories are intrigue and detective work. Bad guys are killing thousands and tens of thousands, and the Inquisitors go planet to planet to track down all the enemies, and find the source of the evil.

And there's good fantasy stuff. Like Enuncia from Ravenor, there's a big, evil magic to deal with. In this case, a book of magic - the Necroteuch.

(I won't bother with spoilers any more.)

I knelt and picked up the little volume. Even through my armoured gloves, I could feel its heat. For a second, a long hypnotised second, it was all I knew. I understood why Dazzo had remained kneeling there for so long after her first grasped it. The content of the book, that ancient lore, was alive somehow, fidgeting, rustling, calling to me.

Calling me by name.

It knew me. It beckoned to me, telling me to open it and experience its wonders. I didn't even think to resist. What it was showing me was so wondrous, so sublime, so beautiful ... the stars themselves, and behind the stars, the mechanisms of reality, the intricate and oh-so perfect workings of a transcendent natural force we misguidedly and dismissively called Chaos.

OK, not exactly a new concept. I don't know how many aware and semi-aware books of magic are out there in the genre. But it's still cool. And, more important, the villains go through all kinds of stuff, even hideous torture, with a smile on their faces, because they know how extraordinary the reward will be when they get it.

And there's an alien race who got their hands on it long ago.

"The history is here, inscribed pictographically. Our eyes do not read it though. The saruthi have no optical or auditory functions. Smell and taste, the two combined in fact, are their primary senses. They can detect the flavours of reality, even those of dimensional space. The angles of time."

"How?"

He shrugged. "The Necroteuch. It warped them. Their empire was small, no more than forty worlds, and very old by the time the book came into their possession. Carried by humans, fleeing persecution on Terra in the very earliest days. Thanks to their taste-based sensory apparatus, they derived from the Necroteuch more than a simple human eye could read. From that first taste, the profound lore of the Necroteuch passed through their culture like wildfire, like a pathogen, transforming and twisting, investing them with great power. It led to war, civil war, which collapsed their empire, leaving worlds burned out or abandoned, contracting their territory to the far-flung fragment we know today."

"They are corrupted - as a species, I mean?" asked Voke.

Malahite nodded. "Oh, there's no saving them, inquisitor. They are precisely the sort of xenos filth you people teach us to fear and despise. I have encountered several alien races in my career, and found most to be utterly undeserving of the hatred that the Inquisition and the church reserves for anything that is not human. You are blinkered fools. You would kill everything because it is not like you. But in this case, you are right. The contagion of the Necroteuch has overwhelmed the saruthi. Never mind that they are xenos, they are a Chaos breed."

He shivered, as if a chill wind was picking up but the suns continued to beat relentlessly.

"What are their resources, their military capability?"

"I have no idea," he said, shivering again. "They abandoned their spaceship technology centuries ago. They had no further need of it. As I said, the Necroteuch had warped their sensory abilities. They became able to undo the angles of space and time, to move through dimensions. From world to world. They mastered the art of constructing spaces in four dimensions, environments that existed only at specific time-points."

As a result, everything of the saruthi, both what they make and they themselves, has two interesting qualities. First, nothing is symmetrical. Nothing "feels" right when you look at it, because there's no balance. Ends of things don't match; limbs are not in pairs, and aren't the same length; etc. Second, since they work with time - the fourth dimension - and we only see objects in three dimensions, everything looks wrong. This adds to the unbalanced feel that the asymmetry gives, but it goes further. They have octogonal tiles that all fit together perfectly, the way square tiles do. But octogons don't fit together that way. There's space between them. Saruthi octogons, however, fit perfectly. And human eyes can't figure out why. The sides all look the same length, but, at the same time, they don't. The angles look wrong, yet it looks like an octogon. Because they're in four dimensions, not three.

[Fist and Faith]

Eisenhorn simply rocks! The whole point of it is the title character kinda, sorta turning to the dark side. That is, using the enemy's weapons to fight the enemy. Which is forbidden. And he goes a little farther than that a few times, and even a lot farther once. Some of his turest friends and colleagues turn against him, calling him a heretic. Other inquisitors want him dead; some thinking it's for the best, others because they're not all that wonderful themselves.

[Mr Hat]

A recomendation from me: Check out the Grey Knights omnibus. If you don't know, the Grey Knights are the militant arm of the Inquisition tasked with fighting Chaos. The are completely awesome and make the already fearsome Space Marines look like a bunch of little girls

I loved WH40K when I was younger and still have an interest in it, even though I don't game or collect the models anymore. I just love the setting, the background and the huge amount of detail that has gone into fleshing out such an atmospheric universe. The artwork that goes with it is pretty stunning as well.

I've read a fair few of the Horus Heresy books as well - they're really enjoyable fluff, I find - the equivilent of a decent action film. Sure they're not that deep, challenging but who cares? Sometimes all you really want at the end of the day is is huge genetically engineered super humans beating the hell out of stuff

[Fist and Faith]

Thanks for stopping by, Mr Hat! I'll check out the Grey Knights next time I'm at B&N. But I've found I'm much more interested in the psykers and crazy Chaos powers than I am in the Space Marines. The Eiesenhorn and Ravenor omnibuses are far better than the other things I've read so far. Even the Blood Angels, although Mephiston freakin' rocks! I'm reading Atlas Infernal at the moment. Not as good as Abnett, but there's certainly some wacky stuff going on. I have the Inquisition War on order from amazon.

I just love the setting, the background and the huge amount of detail that has gone into fleshing out such an atmospheric universe. The artwork that goes with it is pretty stunning as well.

It really is amazing! So many have contributed that there's more depth than most things.