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The Official Horus Heresy Reading Order

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With the epic scope of the Horus Heresy fiction, it’s sometimes daunting to new readers who want to come into the saga and enjoy the various novels, novellas, short stories and audio dramas.

So in direct response to audience requests, the gang over at Black Library have compiled an official Reading Order to act as a useful guide.

You can check it out Here, complete with links to each publication, and the list will continue to be updated as the saga progresses toward the final climax at the Siege of Terra.

And if you look carefully, you may also notice this teaser…

 


More on that in the new year…

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I Speak Games

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In what has now become something of an annual pre-Christmas tradition, Siobhán Thomas of the London South Bank University – she’s Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the BA (Hons) Game Cultures course there – has wrangled together myself and a group of games writers to talk about what it is we do.

Under the banner of the LSBU and in association with the International Games Developers Association London and The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain, I’ll be joining a bunch of industry veterans to talk about this year’s theme of combining narrative with gameplay; here’s the event blurb…

Playing the Story – how to marry gameplay with narrative without divorcing the player.

With narrative-driven and narrative-heavy games getting 9/10 and 10/10 reviews, has the era of story in games arrived, or is plot still ‘gameplay’s bitch’?

Join Rhianna (Tomb Raider) Pratchett, James (Deus Ex) Swallow, Andrew (Fable: Legends) Walsh, Ed (Brink) Stern and Tom (Subnautica) Jubert for a panel on the tricks, traps and travails of making stories work in games. After the event we’ll be heading over to The Albert Arms pub for further chat and networking.

The panel will take place at the Keyworth Centre, London South Bank University on Wednesday, December 9th from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM. Tickets are free but limited in number; to register for one, click Here.

DEUS EX gets AUGed

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is due out next year, and the anticipation has been high since we first busted out our reveal trailer; but one thing a decade and a half of working in the games industry had taught me is that everything takes longer than you expect it to. Modern videogames are massive projects with a myriad of moving parts, and getting them right is as much art as it is science.

 

We were due to see DXMD arriving on PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4 in a couple of months time, but a recent announcement from Eidos Montreal has pushed that release date back to August 23rd 2016 – the month of “aug” seems very fitting indeed.  Why the delay? Simply put, it’s to make sure that Mankind Divided is the best it can possibly be, and as my boss at EM David Anfossi said “This game is a huge part of our lives and we don’t want to compromise on its quality.”

Of course, delaying the game also has a knock-on effect of delaying the release of Deus Ex: Black Light, the original tie-in novel I’ve written for Titan Books which covers the gap between the end of the previous game Human Revolution and the start of Mankind Divided. The plan is for Black Light to hit bookstores for a day-and-date with the game on the 23rd; we’re also planning more original fiction content in the form of an exclusive ebook novella (just like Deus Ex: Fallen Angel, which was released with the Human Revolution Director’s Cut), as well as a series of comics.

Black Light is available for pre-order now, and while you wait for it and Mankind Divided, my previous Deus Ex novel Icarus Effect is still in print, and Fallen Angel is available as a free PDF download Here.

 

The Blood Angels Collection

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Another week and another re-release from out of the blue (or maybe red, in this case); Black Library have compiled all four of my Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels novels – Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius, Red Fury and Black Tide – into a single ebook edition called The Blood Angels Collection, which is available now from their website.

Now out of print, these books were previously only available individually in digital format, or on dead trees as The Blood Angels Omnibus and Blood Angels: The Second Omnibus, and this collection at a penny shy of £20 saves you just under £8.

Also, if you want to pick up the short stories that were included in the Omnibus editions – Blood Debt, Redeemed, Bloodline and the prose version of the audio drama Heart of Rage – you can find ebook editions of them on the BL site too for £2.49 each.

Click on any of the titles to visit the Black Library website.

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SCI FI Bromley on Saturday

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Ah, Bromley; you might not think it, but this leafy London suburb has always a dash of science fiction running through its streets. HG Wells spent a troubled childhood there before going on to write The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie, lived there in the 50’s. And if you want to stretch the definition, even children’s author and local lass Enid Blyton flirted with SF concepts in some of her novels.

So it’s kinda cool that this Saturday, a couple of time machines (specifically a TARDIS and the one from the 1960’s movie of the same name) will be materializing there, along with me and a bunch of other folks for the inaugural SCI FI Bromley show; there’s also a concert planned for the evening, where the Lewisham Concert Band will play a set of famous SF themes.

The event runs from 11:00am to 6:00pm at the Great Hall in the Bromley Civic Centre.

As well as a display of props, sales stands and cosplay stuff going on, I’ll be there signing books and taking part in Q&A panels with fellow authors Graham Guy and Graham Austin-King at 12:15pm and 3:15pm.

Also appearing at the show are Jami Reid-Quarrell from Doctor Who and Star Wars alumni Nick Joseph, Ted Western, Alan Flyng, Barrie Holland, Laurie Goode, Brian Muir and Stephanie English.

Entry to the show is free and tickets for the concert are £18, with proceeds going to charities Connect and the The National Brain Appeal.

For more information about the event, check out the website Here.

 
 

Hear THE VOICE

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Like John Farnham once said, we can write what we wanna write, and a few years back I wrote “The Voice“, a short story for the Horus Heresy anthology Tales of Heresy. 
 
Featuring characters from my novel The Flight of the Eisenstein, the story centres around the Sisters of Silence, the pariah witch-hunters who track down and neutralize deadly renegade pskyers in the age of the Heresy. 
 
At the time, I thought it was a pretty cool idea to write a piece of fiction about characters who have taken a vow of silence, and I was able to open out the lore of the Silent Sisterhood in some interesting ways.

And now today, as part of Black Library’s Horus Heresy Audio Week, an spoken word reading of “The Voice” by Emma Gregory is available for digital download – you can click Here for more information or to listen to a excerpt.

The Black Ships are a mysterious and fearful sight – unmarked vessels that scour the distant reaches of the galaxy, ever watchful for latent psykers and witchbreeds for the monolithic Astra Telepathica.

When one such ship, the Validus, is found drifting unpowered in the nightmare realm of the warp, it falls to the Sisters of Silence to uncover the reason behind it.

As pariahs capable of blocking even the most potent psychic energy, Amendera Kendel and young Leilani Mollitas ready themselves for the worst…

Filed Under: 40k