BL Mysteries

[DukeLeto69]

The Butlerian Jihad series wasn't bad because it tackled a remote period of the Dune timeline. It was bad because of mediocre, unimaginitive authours.

I agree for the most part. The authors are/were awful and not a patch on Hebert Snr. However, I do think part of the problem was revealing too much of the back story. We didn't need it as it was a far more interesting concept kept mostly obscured. It means it could be anything to anyone. We simply didn't need to know.

 

The other problem with going into detail about the DAoT is that it will undoubtedly have to fall into some well-trodden Sci-Fi tropes and that will belittle what we already have. So I say leave it well alone!

[Knockagh]

I’d love to see a small story about the Iron Men before they turned on Humanity. Maybe how they interact with humans when everything was great. Add a few moments when an iron man “hesitated” at an order to show there’s a very tiny crack in the AI that will cause conflict but with a slow build up and then leave the actual war out of the novel.

Iron men stories would be brilliant!

[b1soul]

@ DukeLeto, BluntBlade

 

Yeah...I totally get the concern.

 

My dream would be a DAoT series written by a skilled writer of hard sci-fi. The writer would have a deep understanding of 40k lore...and use that to make intelligent connections between two tonally disparate settings.

 

In other words, nigh-impossible...

 

NOTE:

...also, another theory is that the Emp is a leftover Stone Man, but I realise that Oll recalls encountering the Emp at Nineveh during ancient times. So, I think that really puts a bullet in theories that the Emp is a creation of DAoT.

[Roomsky]

I'm sure the Heresy itself used to be the same contentious debate: is it worth showing? Will it ruin the mystique? Kind of yes and no on both counts, I don't think a best or worst case scenario is possible in any case. Who would have forseen that the Heresy series saved Lorgar? Who could have foreseen what it would do to Vulkan?

 

That said, I vote in favor only if we can lure Ian Watson back into the author stable, and give such a setting entirely to him. His utterly mad, borderline high concept 40k, opinions of quality notwithstanding, is to my mind the only manner it could be anything halfway decent. And hey, it would probably be odd and disparate enough from the rest of the setting that those who hated it could simply ignore it.

[Felix Antipodes]

In fact, if I was BL I would use that as the series unifier; Legends of the DAoT, Unreliable Tales from the Perpetuals, etc, or some such to allow Ian Watson levels of crazy ideas that can be disavowed as necessary.

[b1soul]

I think anything before the Great Crusade's expansion beyond Sol could be grouped under a "forgotten archives" banner. This could be a sandbox for almost limitless creativity.

 

I like the idea of havinv the narrative frame be unreliable. For example, how about an AI/Iron Man held by the Inquisiton whose account could be unreliable?

Y'know what...might as well call the line BL Mysteries.

[DukeLeto69]

Guys I can see some of you love the idea of stories set during DAoT and clearly I do not so won't labour the point as it is all just personal taste and opinion.

 

Regardless of the merit of doing a DAoT series, for me there is 10,000 years of the Imperium to explore loaded with all manner of mysteries which feels more than large enough in scale. Personally I would rather they did more TBA type series (but with better editorial control) to flesh out the period between HH and DI.

[Orwell84]

Guys I can see some of you love the idea of stories set during DAoT and clearly I do not so won't labour the point as it is all just personal taste and opinion.

 

Regardless of the merit of doing a DAoT series, for me there is 10,000 years of the Imperium to explore loaded with all manner of mysteries which feels more than large enough in scale. Personally I would rather they did more TBA type series (but with better editorial control) to flesh out the period between HH and DI.

 

Agreed. There is the Nova Terra Interregnum for the Imperium at large, the Astropath Wars for the telepathica, the Moirae Schism for the Mechanicus and X Legion successors, various Black Crusades for Chaos, the Biel-tan and Iyanden alliance that eventually broke for Eldar fans... just some of the ideas BL could explore with a more coherent TBA-style series.

[Xisor]

Yeah, I'm somewhat inclined to agree, Leto & Orwell.

 

It's not to say that it couldn't and shouldn't be done, but more a question of constraints and resources.

 

A well defined extremely grand and expansive setting is great.

 

But we already have it.

 

I'm not sure anything is *gained* by going Dark Age as opposed to somewhere/anywhere else.

 

Hell, Death of Integrity and Gav & Andy's Eldar books do a lot of that pre-fall already.

 

So, the question, really, is what would be different?

 

More Captain+Sergeant buddy yarns? Character driven stories that only skim along in front of the bigger, backgrounded metaplots? Stories treading water but showing us famous fan-favourite characters?

 

If you're after harder, atmospheric sci-fi, BL already do it. I'm partly through "Straken" which is excellent and low-key with none if the HH melodrama, and it hits the exact same sweet spot of human stories in amongst mind-boggling *practical, hars* space stuff that "Baneblade" and "Desert Raiders" also offered up. (Also, strangely: caves.)

 

This same sort of thing comes up again and again, and seems to be a hallmark of tremendous 'harder' SF from BL.

 

It was there in "Imperial Glory" and in "Cult of the Spiral Dawn" and in "Fire Caste" and in "Gunheads".

 

Not galaxy-shattering apocalypses that break civilisations, but a random bunch of lads and lasses struggling against the universe and people. (And quite often: Orks.)

 

More ambitious or extraordinary stories try it to: "Imperator" and "Eye of Medusa" and "Voice of Mars" and "Carrion Throne" manage it too.

 

Slightly drier, less melodramatic stories, but also claustrophobic and personal and DRIPPING with pure 40k.

 

----

 

For mysteries, I wonder if it's not the *feel* that's important, far more so than the putative topic of mysterious interest?

 

I'm not sure that a DAoT series, as hankered after here, would actually have anything to do with anything mysterious.

 

Much like, I suppose, how there isn't actually much mysterious afoot in the text of the HH series.

 

It's melodrama & action; space opera.

 

Sometimes there's mystery (Nemesis, Damnation of Pythos, Descent of Angels), but somehow those don't seem to be as well received as, say, Brother Punches Brother Vol. XXXXVII re: family shame.

 

Maybe, as a fandom, we're not as into mysteries as we think we are.

 

Rather, we are in overwhelming denial about how much we absolutely love Eastenders IN SPACE!

[DukeLeto69]

@xisor I think the OP was about mysteries per se rather than a specific imprint or story style. The question was what mysteries (being mysterious by virtue that we know little or nothing beyond a codex timeline entry or something) are people interested in.

 

The thread kinda started heading down the book series/imprint route and we all (inc me) got excited about DAoT and whether that should be a series (or not).

[SkimaskMohawk]

Just going to mention that any recollection of oll might be incredibly unreliable. The human memory is very fallible; try remembering something from 10 years ago, pretty hazy right?

 

Now imagine thousands of years.

 

It's something Steven Erikson talked about with his malazan series and the ascendants that had been around hundreds of thousands of years. Even someone who was there can completely get it wrong after so many years.

 

So maybe he did meet the emperor back in the day. Maybe he met the emperor far later and the psychic impression he received was of some powerful individual he met in the past. Maybe he just mixed up who he met.

[b1soul]

I'd be totally down for a DAoT short story anthology or two to test the waters...a long-running series would be hard to pull off, yeah...

[Mellow]

Totally agree. A series like TBA would be unsuitable for the DAoT due to the span of time. It would need so much fleshing out that it would become unwieldy where as a series of short stories about some events would just give a little insight into what the era was about.

 

I think there’s more appetite for a Scouring Series at the moment which will hopefully cover Guilliman and Cawls major interactions alongside the traitors retreat to the Eye.

 

I’m not too hot on other historical events but I’m sure the various Xeno species would also have reason to have novels covering major events in their history.

[DarkChaplain]

I honestly don't think the Dark Age of Technology would even recognizable as 40k in any real sense. For all intents, it is a completely different setting. It lies further in the past than the Great Crusade or Unification Wars were from the Dark Imperium present-day, and while that was a vast timespan of over 10,000 years, it was an age of stagnancy for humanity. The Dark Age of Technology was anything but. Heck, it took Old Night lasting millennia to really knock mankind down to where it needs to be for the Great Crusade.

 

That supposed Dark Age had huge repercussions, but it is closer to super duper science fiction where everything is possible, stuff that we see in countless versions from publishers left and right, than to Warhammer 40,000. Do we really need to see humanity settling the galaxy? Developing the means to travel the warp? The origins of psykers and why AI are ruled out in the Imperium? We know the cornerstones and why they are significant to the setting of 40k, but for anything in terms of fiction, stuff would need to be downsized so much that the Dark Age of Technology would rather turn into Unhappy Weeks of Technology, in a sense. This era spans about as long as the Imperium itself, with lots and lots of stuff going down over the course of centuries and thousands of years of technological advancement. What do you expect, that some genius snapped his fingers, created the first warp-capable starships, and made for the cosmos, meeting Eldar and creating AI warriors from thin air, all within the span of a trilogy?

 

What purpose would it hold to see short stories from that time, when the setting of the DAoT is only defined in the broadest of terms, and supposed to be more of a warning to later generations than anything involving adventure or narrative structure on its own? We got glimpses of things in Perpetual, of course, but that was only within the context of Oll time/space-hopping across the galaxy with the Athame. Unless you want to make time travel a completely dandy thing and common occurance (despite the harshly criticised instances that we did have over the decades), why does any of that stuff need to get told under the 40k banner, by Games Workshop / Black Library?

 

Just to put it plainly: There are no Space Marines. There are no Primarchs. There is no Slaanesh. The other Chaos Gods are still relatively negligible threats, if they were even recognized as existing in the first place. There is no Imperial Guard, and whatever space army humanity got will not even be using the lasguns we know, let alone Bolters. The Eldar haven't fallen yet. Necrons are firmly asleep. Tyranids haven't arrived in the galaxy yet. Orks are unlikely to have amounted to much yet, otherwise they'd have already kicked off a massive Waaagh that'd even crush the Beast(s). Psykers were barely proven to exist.

Instead we'd have AI, pure science stories, humanity going full cyberpunk, and at some point humanity and AI going head to head. Those stories may as well have been published by Solaris or Tor or Gollancz, for all they've got to do with 40k. If you adamantly want to connect them anyway, throw in the Emperor as a scientist protagonist or boss guy and a few Perpetuals - not like that is already being slammed as lazy and needlessly convoluted.

 

There are enough stories about those sorts of themes already out there without Black Library starting to produce "generic" science fiction. If there's an element that makes sense to introduce to 40k while needing some sort of in-universe origin justification, BL is already doing that with the bunch of pieces of specific technology they featured in Space Marine Battles, the Horus Heresy or elsewhere. We don't need to demystify STCs just for the sake of it.

 

We've got so many eras that *are* recognizably 40k, whether for featuring Space Marines, key characters from the background or because they develop themes along the way, during those 10 millennia we get to play with, that going back to the Dark Age of Technology or Age of Strife is about as sensible as telling 40k stories set in the 20th century. There were stories that flashed back to the cradle of humanity, like Master of Mankind, but those snippets were subservient to the story unfolding, not individual present-day narratives on their own. And that's a damn better use of those blinks of lost ages than anything being produced on its own.

[DukeLeto69]

@DC sooooo you don't really like the idea of stories set during DAoT is that right ;-)

[DarkChaplain]

Exactly. If I want to read about that kind of subject matter, I might as well reach to something already out there. Heck, Guy Haley's got a few original novels out that deal with AI subject matter, settling strange new planets and so on. I wouldn't even need to look for new authors outside of BL's stable to get that kind of thing. I finished Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy just last year, which spanned a long long time in mankind's history. Graham McNeill just recommend Gareth L. Powell's Embers of War on his reddit AMA.

 

There's so much stuff in all manner of formats that touches on similar ground, I think BL focusing any capacity on that era is a waste of resources. It would do nothing to strengthen the brand as a whole and not actually connect to the franchise in any meaningful way. And if it doesn't do that, then why bother? What's there to pull me in outside of the authors' names, by which point you can easily look for their original content elsewhere anyway.

[bluntblade]

It's like wanting a brewery I like to start making rum.

[Red_Shift]

The war of the false primarch or the war that resulted in a load of space marine chapters getting destroyed invading the eye of terror would both be good choices for a beast arises type series.

 

The mystery I'm interested in is what the primarchs have been up to since the heresy. I have a vision of another plane of being where the primarchs interact in the warp/contest with chaos. A little like what happened with bullveye who was revealed to be in the thousand sons webway. Would they be aware of the passage of time? It's the kind of concept that could be awesome if realised well or utterly awful if poorly done!

[b1soul]

Again, I'd agree that a long-running series (like the HH or TBA) probably wouldn't suit the DAoT...but I don't see why we can't have short stories touching upon...

 

1. There are no wolves on Fenris

2. Catachan origins

3. An STC or two

4. The origins of knights and titans

5. A scientist who has suspicions about the Warp

6. DAoT humanity and pre-Fall Eldar diplomacy

7. Genetic enhancement...precursor to primarch project (perhaps show how the DAoT gene tech was for very different purposes)

8. Vignettes from the human vs. machine war

9. The stone men and their legacy

 

I don't think we need a series detailing how mankind colonised the stars

[mc warhammer]

I honestly don't think the Dark Age of Technology would even recognizable as 40k in any real sense. For all intents, it is a completely different setting. It lies further in the past than the Great Crusade or Unification Wars were from the Dark Imperium present-day, and while that was a vast timespan of over 10,000 years, it was an age of stagnancy for humanity. The Dark Age of Technology was anything but. Heck, it took Old Night lasting millennia to really knock mankind down to where it needs to be for the Great Crusade.

 

That supposed Dark Age had huge repercussions, but it is closer to super duper science fiction where everything is possible, stuff that we see in countless versions from publishers left and right, than to Warhammer 40,000. Do we really need to see humanity settling the galaxy? Developing the means to travel the warp? The origins of psykers and why AI are ruled out in the Imperium? We know the cornerstones and why they are significant to the setting of 40k, but for anything in terms of fiction, stuff would need to be downsized so much that the Dark Age of Technology would rather turn into Unhappy Weeks of Technology, in a sense. This era spans about as long as the Imperium itself, with lots and lots of stuff going down over the course of centuries and thousands of years of technological advancement. What do you expect, that some genius snapped his fingers, created the first warp-capable starships, and made for the cosmos, meeting Eldar and creating AI warriors from thin air, all within the span of a trilogy?

 

What purpose would it hold to see short stories from that time, when the setting of the DAoT is only defined in the broadest of terms, and supposed to be more of a warning to later generations than anything involving adventure or narrative structure on its own? We got glimpses of things in Perpetual, of course, but that was only within the context of Oll time/space-hopping across the galaxy with the Athame. Unless you want to make time travel a completely dandy thing and common occurance (despite the harshly criticised instances that we did have over the decades), why does any of that stuff need to get told under the 40k banner, by Games Workshop / Black Library?

 

Just to put it plainly: There are no Space Marines. There are no Primarchs. There is no Slaanesh. The other Chaos Gods are still relatively negligible threats, if they were even recognized as existing in the first place. There is no Imperial Guard, and whatever space army humanity got will not even be using the lasguns we know, let alone Bolters. The Eldar haven't fallen yet. Necrons are firmly asleep. Tyranids haven't arrived in the galaxy yet. Orks are unlikely to have amounted to much yet, otherwise they'd have already kicked off a massive Waaagh that'd even crush the Beast(s). Psykers were barely proven to exist.

Instead we'd have AI, pure science stories, humanity going full cyberpunk, and at some point humanity and AI going head to head. Those stories may as well have been published by Solaris or Tor or Gollancz, for all they've got to do with 40k. If you adamantly want to connect them anyway, throw in the Emperor as a scientist protagonist or boss guy and a few Perpetuals - not like that is already being slammed as lazy and needlessly convoluted.

 

There are enough stories about those sorts of themes already out there without Black Library starting to produce "generic" science fiction. If there's an element that makes sense to introduce to 40k while needing some sort of in-universe origin justification, BL is already doing that with the bunch of pieces of specific technology they featured in Space Marine Battles, the Horus Heresy or elsewhere. We don't need to demystify STCs just for the sake of it.

 

We've got so many eras that *are* recognizably 40k, whether for featuring Space Marines, key characters from the background or because they develop themes along the way, during those 10 millennia we get to play with, that going back to the Dark Age of Technology or Age of Strife is about as sensible as telling 40k stories set in the 20th century. There were stories that flashed back to the cradle of humanity, like Master of Mankind, but those snippets were subservient to the story unfolding, not individual present-day narratives on their own. And that's a damn better use of those blinks of lost ages than anything being produced on its own.

 

 

so...would a story about how it all went to  be a bit more 40kish?

 

also, has there ever been any indication that any of the stone or iron or whatever men have survived into the GC or Dark Imperium eras?

[b1soul]

One of the Gaunt's Ghosts has an Iron Man IIRC

[mc warhammer]

cheers. i'll have to get around to GG one of these days. is the iron man operational? what sort of impact does it have on the story?

[b1soul]

I havem't actually read the GG series...but I've read some of the discussions about it. Based on that, I did some research:

 

A Standard Template Constructor that produced Men of Iron was discovered on the planet Menazoid Epsilon during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade by Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt of the Tanith First and Only. Lord General Militant Hechtor Dravere and the Radical Inquisitor Golesh Heldane were intent on seizing control of the device, believing they could create an army of conquest allowing them to usurp control of the Crusade, and ultimately the Imperium. Gaunt, however, vehemently resisted the use of artificial intelligence, especially one that had been on a Chaos-tainted planet for thousands of years. He therefore destroyed the device before Dravere or Heldane could acquire it[Needs Citation].

 

It might have just been an STC, not an actual Iron Man

[mc warhammer]

ah right, cheers for that. still interesting.

 

i would imagine that any galaxy wide cull couldn't be 100% successful, and depending on the lifespan of an AI in 40k...there might be one or two still functioning 

[b1soul]

Yeah...that's what the wikia says, seems reliable though based on what I've heard posters mention

 

Perhaps some of the surviving Iron Men got really good at impersonating humans...perhaps an Iron Man with more benevolent programming, who was designed for more academic pursuits. Who knows...maybe a radical Inquisitor has one in his retine without anyone outside knowing its true nature. Or maybe he disguises it as an advanced servitor/cogitator