War of Secrets by Phil Kelly- now available

[bluntblade]

That dialogue pains me.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Wait, who is the character calling the Dark Angels "armoured ogryns"?

[rendingon1+]

It's primaris sergeant Morricone.

[Axineton]

Just finished this. This takes the crown of worst book I’ve read from black library. I honestly wish they got some actual established sci fi writers to write books for them instead of the clowns that actually do

[b1soul]

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

[Moonreaper666]

How did the Primaris react to the Watchers in the Dark?

[Lord_Caerolion]

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

 

He said "book". C.S. Goto doesn't write books, he scrawls an approximation of language on bound paper.

[Axineton]

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

Nope.

 

To be honest I don’t really read an awful lot of black library books.

[Lord_Caerolion]

 

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

Nope.

 

To be honest I don’t really read an awful lot of black library books.

 

 

I'll give you a short summary. Terminators can backflip, rocks thrown by children can destroy Eldar tanks, everything ever uses multilasers, and even more everything ever brays. There is no other sound. Only braying. Lastly, all Eldar worship Slaanesh. Not just the Crone World Eldar, but also the Dark Eldar (with Lelith Hesperax living in the Eye of Terror, apparently, and also a psyker now, somehow), and also the Craftworlders, including Eldrad himself.

 

Suffice to say, his writing has not been well received, and tends to be ignored as much as possible.

[DukeLeto69]

Just finished this. This takes the crown of worst book I’ve read from black library. I honestly wish they got some actual established sci fi writers to write books for them instead of the clowns that actually do

I think with the return to a more "relaxed" policy at BL these days we are starting to see established writers coming to BL (ie. BL have more freedom instead of being so tightly tied into the studio and supporting the games).

 

There is certainly a lot of nepotism at GW/BL though as we have seen existing employees given the chance to write for BL with mixed results:

 

BL Editors = Nick Kyme, Laurie Goulding

Studio game designers / codex writers / background and RPG book writers = Gav Thorpe, Andy Hoare, John French, Phil Kelly, Andy Clark (I think as harder to know now that the studio have stopped including writing credits).

 

Personally not read any of Phil Kelly's books but one has to assume that they have sold well enough or BL wouldn't do any more? While there is nepotism BL are not a vanity/self publishing route.

 

The one person I would have really liked see take a crack at writing some short stories or novels was Alan Bligh. He possibly had no interest but his background writing in the Imperial Armour and HH black books was fabulous. Sad but we will never know!

[Orwell84]

 

Just finished this. This takes the crown of worst book I’ve read from black library. I honestly wish they got some actual established sci fi writers to write books for them instead of the clowns that actually do

I think with the return to a more "relaxed" policy at BL these days we are starting to see established writers coming to BL (ie. BL have more freedom instead of being so tightly tied into the studio and supporting the games).

 

There is certainly a lot of nepotism at GW/BL though as we have seen existing employees given the chance to write for BL with mixed results:

 

BL Editors = Nick Kyme, Laurie Goulding

Studio game designers / codex writers / background and RPG book writers = Gav Thorpe, Andy Hoare, John French, Phil Kelly, Andy Clark (I think as harder to know now that the studio have stopped including writing credits).

 

Personally not read any of Phil Kelly's books but one has to assume that they have sold well enough or BL wouldn't do any more? While there is nepotism BL are not a vanity/self publishing route.

 

The one person I would have really liked see take a crack at writing some short stories or novels was Alan Bligh. He possibly had no interest but his background writing in the Imperial Armour and HH black books was fabulous. Sad but we will never know!

 

 

Definitely mixed results from that lineup; only Thorpe, Goulding and French seem to have turned out anything acclaimed by the majority of readers. Phil Kelly seems to have just cemented the opposite kind of rep with BL readers.

 

As to Bligh, it is a shame he didn't get a chance to weigh in on the fiction side. On the other hand, excelling as a non-fiction writer doesn't mean one will automatically be great at writing fiction (or vice versa). So perhaps, with all respect to the late and great Alan Bligh, he may have dodged a bullet. That said, if he did publish any BL fiction I'll gladly take a crack at it.

[DukeLeto69]

@orwell84 agree that being a great non-fiction writer (or in this case should that be a fictional history text book writer) does not mean you can also be a great novelist. Regarding Sir Bligh we will never know. From things various authors have said, including ADB, Alan Bligh was one of the go to people to discuss points of lore and the setting. I bet he is sorely missed.

[mc warhammer]

 

 

 

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

Nope.

 

To be honest I don’t really read an awful lot of black library books.

I'll give you a short summary. Terminators can backflip, rocks thrown by children can destroy Eldar tanks, everything ever uses multilasers, and even more everything ever brays. There is no other sound. Only braying. Lastly, all Eldar worship Slaanesh. Not just the Crone World Eldar, but also the Dark Eldar (with Lelith Hesperax living in the Eye of Terror, apparently, and also a psyker now, somehow), and also the Craftworlders, including Eldrad himself.

 

Suffice to say, his writing has not been well received, and tends to be ignored as much as possible.

apart from the conflicts with established in universe concepts and laws...is his actual writing (imagine you’ve never read 40k before) bad?

[Orwell84]

 

 

 

I take it you've never read C.S. Goto

Nope.

 

To be honest I don’t really read an awful lot of black library books.

I'll give you a short summary. Terminators can backflip, rocks thrown by children can destroy Eldar tanks, everything ever uses multilasers, and even more everything ever brays. There is no other sound. Only braying. Lastly, all Eldar worship Slaanesh. Not just the Crone World Eldar, but also the Dark Eldar (with Lelith Hesperax living in the Eye of Terror, apparently, and also a psyker now, somehow), and also the Craftworlders, including Eldrad himself.

 

Suffice to say, his writing has not been well received, and tends to be ignored as much as possible.

apart from the conflicts with established in universe concepts and laws...is his actual writing (imagine you’ve never read 40k before) bad?

 

 

From what I can remember over a decade ago, his Dawn of War and Deathwatch novels weren't special. Nothing to rank with Angels of Darkness or Last Chancers. Eisenhorn and Gaunt's Ghosts, or Simon Spurier's Lord of the Night. Truth be told, I didn't even remember the Slaneeshi-worshipping Eldar or backflipping Terminators

[Lord_Caerolion]

 

apart from the conflicts with established in universe concepts and laws...is his actual writing (imagine you’ve never read 40k before) bad?

 

 

Having not read any of his actual writings, other than selected excerpts, I can't comment much, but what I have seen is not particularly good. He seems to love going into explicit details, at some length, about Eldar getting tortured. 

 

 

 

Grasping one talon in the formidable grip of his power fist, Neleus dragged the Lictor creature out of the sand and held it momentarily, dangling from its own fore-talon. Then, with a swift movement, he crushed the talon in his fist and launched the hapless creature into the air with a swing of his immense arm, riddling it with hellfire shells as it flew. By the time it landed back in the sea of its own kind, the creature was little more than a shredded husk.

[Phoebus]

That sounds like Phil Kelly alright. I mean, Primaris ARE basically youngsters who lack true experience. They're kitted out and got basic training but they lack the experience with command structures, true battles and the likes. They may be "Marines +1", but they're also "Marines -3" when it comes to basic competencies and overall maturity. They did not receive the years of training through Scout companies etc, and they don't even know who they just joined while knowing the other immature Primaris next to them.

To be clear, I haven’t read this novel. That qualifier aside, I think it’s worth remembering that all Space Marines undergo thorough training regimens based on hypno-therapy, psycho-indoctrination, and other fifty-dollar words that essentially equate to stuff being pumped into your brain. That’s an aspect that is unfortunately ignored all too often, even by veteran Black Library authors. With that in mind, I wouldn’t expect any outsider to be entirely familiar with even the overt structures of the Dark Angels (much less the covert ones), but a lack of maturity on the part of Space Marine characters strikes me as the writer just missing the mark.

[b1soul]

I think the Primaris' lack of experience should be fixed after over 100 years of the Indomitus Crusade

[Guest Triszin]

I view kelly's writings as.

 

The conclusion events occurred in reality.

 

however the journey to that conclusion is a fantasy told by a mad man.

 

so the journey is false, the destination is real.

[Phoebus]

I think the Primaris' lack of experience should be fixed after over 100 years of the Indomitus Crusade

I don’t think lack of experience should be much of a factor where the Adeptus Astartes are concerned. That is to say, experience should certainly play a role in how much more skilled a veteran Space Marine might be compared to a newly-promoted battle-brother, but not where their relative psychology would is concerned. There are Chapter-specific exceptions, to be sure: Blood Claws and Long Fangs behave differently, the demands of the Inner Circle take a toll on its warriors, etc. All in all, however, a great deal of work goes into shaping a Space Marine’s mentality, personality, and psyche. That’s a long-standing concept in Warhammer 40k.

[Viridia]

Just finished reading the book. Quite a good read in fairness, especially since this one seems to be along the lines of Of Honour and Iron in terms of how the Primaris behave, and it's a fair idea to say they've not even had the upbringing that a Scout would. Instead, the Primaris seem to be a lot more akin to clone troopers from Star Wars in terms of how they're treated; near-veneration/fear of their creators, the simulated training in virtual environments, the feeling of being seperate from their kin.

 

In terms of the ending;

I do feel that the book has set it up for a potential war between the Angels of Absolution and their parent chapter, and that the Primaris being inducted into the DA could end up turning against them at some point.

[Phoebus]

Having finally read War of Secrets, I don’t think it’s so much a bad read as it’s simply underwhelming.

 

Let me throw something obvious out there, so it’s clear where I’m coming from. War is a Space Marine Conquests entry set in a galaxy that has literally been torn in half by the psychic energies of thirsting gods. That there are cataclysmic events occurring in M42 is an understatement: a Primarch is brought back to life; Khornate daemons invade Terra, bringing the Adeptus Custodes out in force for the first time in ten millennia; a fleet of five million Ork vessels is launched against the Imperium; Perturabo attacks the mightiest worlds of Segmentum Obscurus with a million armies; the Rock is invaded by daemons and heretics, who manage to free Luther; Baal is devastated by Tyranids.

 

Do you see where I’m going with this?

 

Phil Kelly himself draws on some fairly heavy stuff to drive War of Secrets:

 

1. The survivors of the Fourth Sphere of Expansion embark on a desperate and ruthless campaign to wipe out their erstwhile human allies, because their belief in the Ta’u’va inadvertently led to the creation of its avatar in the Warp.

 

2. A Fallen Dark Angel begins spreading a Tzeentchian plague of mutation across a number of worlds as a prelude to his invasion of the adopted homeworld of the Angels of Absolution.

 

3. Primaris Marines must earn the trust of the most notoriously secretive and untrusting Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.

Thus, even though War of Secrets wasn’t dealing with the most defining stuff going on in the 42nd Millennium, it should have been a riveting story... but it’s not.

 

Kelly writes small-scale battles fairly well, but that’s sadly the only thing War really has going for it. By the time the action transitions to Allhallow, the charm of watching Lieutenant Xedro Farren and his Primaris Marines (of which we mostly only see one squad) dispatch their mostly forgettable opponents has worn thin. Kelly does introduce some heavy hitters late in the story, but it’s too late to make a difference.

 

The characters themselves leave much to be desired. The T’au are largely faceless, though Tutor Twiceblade and Kais (“The Living Weapon”) provide an interesting dynamic. The Dark Angels, on the other hand, generally range in extremes. The legacy Space Marines, all members of the Inner Circle, are telegraphed tropes — petty and antagonistic, seemingly for the sake of it. Most of the Primaris Marines are non-descript, with the only truly developed characters from their ranks acting against type and rebelling against authority to an often unbelievable extent. The motivations and actions of the protagonist, Farren, especially, made me wonder whether Phil Kelly gave much thought to the hypnotic conditioning and psycho-indoctrination that are so central to a Space Marine’s character.

 

(Ironically, those very concepts do play a pivotal part later in the novel — just not in terms of how the characters subjected to them act.)

 

The plot, for the most part, is rather mundane and requires the reader to just “go with it” even when things just don’t make sense. The way the various storylines advance feels forced, and a central premise becomes little more than an afterthought not even two thirds into the novel. Neither is the scale of the story impressive; this feels less like a Conquest and more like a Space Marine Skirmish. There is a twist, of course, advertised as “shocking” in the pitch for the novel. Unfortunately, the twist goes against what we know about the characters so much that it feels implausible rather than unexpected. And, as is usually the case with the Dark Angels, there is no real sense of closure by story’s end.

 

A brief synopsis follows:

 

The Dark Angels arrive on the planet of Saltire Vex, a backwater ocean world rich in prometheum. Though ostensibly there to defeat xenos that are killing the local workers, their true purpose is to hunt down a Fallen Dark Angel spreading a Tzeentchian mutation plague. The Dark Angels use the T’au — for it is they who have been killing the humans infected by the plague — to track down the Fallen to his next destination: Allhallow, the adopted homeworld of the Angels of Absolution. The Fallen unleashes his mind-plague on the human population of Allhallow, wreaking havoc until he is run down by the Dark Angels. In the aftermath of his capture, the Dark Angels and the T’au agree to a compact wherein the xenos will wipe out the garrison the Angels of Absolution have on their homeworld (as they have been potentially contaminated by the mind-plague) in exchange for the Unforgiven wiping out the surviving humans of Saltire Vex.

In the end, I also couldn’t help but feel that Kelly missed the opportunity to explore one of the key pieces of this Chapter’s original lore. A churlish conflict between the legacy Dark Angels and their Primaris reinforcements was perhaps the most expected route to go. A more interesting direction might have been to use that conflict as a modern-day parallel to the first step in Luther’s fall.

 

Luther, as you may recall, was not able to become a Space Marine because he was too old. He was augmented, but his lesser condition and the Lion’s decision to leave him behind on Caliban were what started his corruption in Codex: Angels of Death. Even after this story was retconned, though, we saw in Descent of Angels that older knights of the Order who were given partial augmentation felt insecure next to the squires and younger knights who were given the gene-seed. This would have been a perfect opportunity to provide insight on the Inner Circle’s apocryphal tales, their indoctrination, and their reflection on what the arrival of the Primaris meant compared to the arrival of Space Marines on Caliban 10,000 years ago. Here was a chance to have Dark Angels reflect on their nature and choices in a way that we haven’t seen before, to explore how the Primaris might be perceived as a threat.

[Apothecary Vaddon]

In the end, I also couldn’t help but feel that Kelly missed the opportunity to explore one of the key pieces of this Chapter’s original lore. 

Phil Kelly and missed writing opportunities in novels: name a more iconic duo.

[Sothalor]

 

 

In the end, I also couldn’t help but feel that Kelly missed the opportunity to explore one of the key pieces of this Chapter’s original lore.

Phil Kelly and missed writing opportunities in novels: name a more iconic duo.

C.S. Goto and Multi-lasers?

David Annandale and Chaos superweapon constructs?

ADB and mortal waifus?

Dan Abnett and abrupt endings?

[Lord_Caerolion]

 

 

In the end, I also couldn’t help but feel that Kelly missed the opportunity to explore one of the key pieces of this Chapter’s original lore.

Phil Kelly and missed writing opportunities in novels: name a more iconic duo.

C.S. Goto and Multi-lasers?

David Annandale and Chaos superweapon constructs?

ADB and mortal waifus?

Dan Abnett and abrupt endings?

 

 

Graham McNeil and "hey guys, remember this other book I wrote?"

[mc warhammer]

 

 

In the end, I also couldn’t help but feel that Kelly missed the opportunity to explore one of the key pieces of this Chapter’s original lore.

Phil Kelly and missed writing opportunities in novels: name a more iconic duo.

C.S. Goto and Multi-lasers?

David Annandale and Chaos superweapon constructs?

ADB and mortal waifus?

Dan Abnett and abrupt endings?

 

 

 

good old internet. 

 

i'm sure if ADB had just partnered his marines with male characters, nobody would accuse him of twinking his space marines. throw a gal in there though...