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Had similar thoughts to Roomsky. What a dumpster fire that "review" is, it beggars belief. Looking at that user's post history doesn't inspire trust either.

 

At any rate, he doesn't seem to understand the structure of the series, nor the sheer scale of the Siege. His blatantly silly wishlisting just sets him up for failure right off the bat. No idea how skipping book 3 and just going for book 4 (because Abnett, duh, he'll save the series!) is supposed to make sense in a series where plotlines arch over the entire 8 book series (and beyond, looking at Sons of the Selenar), but okay.

The comments are the usual reddit circlejerk; it's the reason why I'm rather selective about subreddits I read and post on, while particularly avoiding fandoms. Lotsa people flaming content they have no clue about, to farm easy karma.

  On 12/1/2019 at 11:07 AM, Reclusiarch Krieg said:

I just read a scathing review. If its contents are true, just on merit on what is decribed, omitted and how much space devoted to the sub-plot of the mustered human soldier... Yikes.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/e4553r/siege_of_terra_first_wall_is_an_epic_letdown_is/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

 

First Wall has problems like any story, but it is nowhere near as bad this dude is saying. From reading his review he was expecting a FW Black Book where every detail of the campaign is listed out in extreme detail. The Siege of Terra series was never going to be that, they are focused on the key defining moments within the Siege and how they were allowed to come to pass through multiple perspectives.

 

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I didn't intend for this to be a massive response, I really liked this book for what it was and looking forward to the others.

"Star Wars: A New Hope is an absolute freakin' nightmare of a movie that should be avoided at all costs...I mean, you don't even know who Luke's father is and they only have one Death Star! Should be actively avoided to preserve your love of Star Wars."

 

-that same Reddit reviewer.

 

 

<eye roll>

 

Ok let's get back to actual discussion on this thing.

That sounds like Gav really nailed what lies at the core of Perturabo: His martyr complex telling him that it's others that force him to do bad things, to waste his sons in meat grinders, while hypocritical doing the same even unasked and uncaring for it. He's blind to his own hypocrisy, that so much of what he is railing against is near-exclusively self-inflicted, but he will use these self-inflicted wounds to justify his rage against others regardless. His psychology as a character is hugely interesting to me, and has been from way back when.

 

Perturabo is the kind of guy who will keep hitting himself while claiming somebody else is guiding his fist, when really, it is all he really knows to do at this point. But instead of stopping to hit himself, and realizing that he should reevaluate his own actions and motivations, he'll only hit harder in an attempt to prove himself right, that it's not really him that's at fault.

  On 12/1/2019 at 7:09 PM, DarkChaplain said:

That sounds like Gav really nailed what lies at the core of Perturabo: His martyr complex telling him that it's others that force him to do bad things, to waste his sons in meat grinders, while hypocritical doing the same even unasked and uncaring for it. He's blind to his own hypocrisy, that so much of what he is railing against is near-exclusively self-inflicted, but he will use these self-inflicted wounds to justify his rage against others regardless. His psychology as a character is hugely interesting to me, and has been from way back when.

 

Perturabo is the kind of guy who will keep hitting himself while claiming somebody else is guiding his fist, when really, it is all he really knows to do at this point. But instead of stopping to hit himself, and realizing that he should reevaluate his own actions and motivations, he'll only hit harder in an attempt to prove himself right, that it's not really him that's at fault.

Exactly this. Hayley exemplifies this in his Primarch book where his adoptive sister tell him it to his face. He will always complain about being the martyr and will do so bitterly and without end about how he is rescinded to his fate. But he still chooses to do it, even when he has a chance to do it differently.

 

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  Quote
I take it Satarael (Dark Mech character) doesn't do much of significance then?

 

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Edited by Mr.Havoc
  On 12/1/2019 at 11:07 AM, Reclusiarch Krieg said:

I just read a scathing review. If its contents are true, just on merit on what is decribed, omitted and how much space devoted to the sub-plot of the mustered human soldier... Yikes.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/e4553r/siege_of_terra_first_wall_is_an_epic_letdown_is/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

 

Very first thing i see when i click on it is an all-caps plea to upvote for the community to be aware of this abomination....yeah, the guy is obviously high on his own ego and being the great deliverer of imperial truth.  It's rarely hard to spot someone that is trying to construct an exaggerated narrative for their own benefit rather than an honest balanced review.

 

On the conscripts soldiers thing, i'd seen a lot of opinions over the years wanting more of that human element, especially for the siege but it's no surprise the "mah primarchs need to be having an epic beatdown " inclined will go berserk the minute we get it (regardless of it being done well or not).

Edited by Fedor

I just finished this book.

I would like to say that I'm absolutely amazed and made proud by my pricy, rare and beautiful Siege of Terra books, but I have to admit to myself that... well, to be polite, I'm not happy with the First Wall.

I'm not one of Gav's most ferocious detractors -I find him to be a little hit or miss, but he does have his qualities- but I really struggled to finish this book.

While I devoured the previous two in a couple of days, this one almost took me a full week.

 

I'm not good at writing reviews, so I'll keep it short.

I think this book has two major problems: the first is that it doesn't convey the sense of scale and awe for the events that are unfolding, something that Solar War and The Lost and the Damned did pretty well.

No zoom out to show you the magnitude of the battle, or even to give you a wider picture of what is actually happening from a strategical point of view. For this last reason, I -admittedly, not a native speaker- found the battle for the spaceport to be almost unintelligible; a series of unrelated events that just happen while characters do stuff. After that, it's "ok, we reached the word count - time do declare this battle lost and go away".

And speaking of word count, the distribution in this book is all over the place - here we come to problem number two.

The Addaba free corps. The basic idea was cool - but I think Gav felt too much authorial love for it, and it ended taking up way more space than necessary in the novel.

Many people had been asking for more human POV during the Horus Heresy series, and I was among them.

But what I wanted was to be shown the sheer, raw violence and horror of this conflict in a way that the sensibility of an Astartes cannot convey - not to follow the story of a 17 years old girl that falls in love with a tank commander only to break up with him a couple of chapters later, and doesn't interact with the Siege in any way, until maybe the very last chapter.

To think that we spent 100+ pages of the main, numbered series for this just makes me feel sad.

And Gav even says in the afterword that he had to cut a good chunk of it!

If he had this idea and he liked it so much, I think he should have pitched it for the Novella series -we're going to have it for this very purpose, after all.

 

Believe me, writing this does not give me satisfaction in any shape or form. 

My expectations were admittedly high, and this just didn't deliver.

Not in my eyes.

 

Very negative, I know.

I'm sorry.

Perhaps I need to sleep on it.

Edited by The_Bloody

Finished. I didn't really like it and so won't bother doing my traditional highlights reel. It's certainly not the raging dumpster fire that some people are apparently making it out to be but I still can't help but be disappointed. Thorpe just isn't a good enough author to capture the grandeur of what he's trying to describe. Books in this series need to form part of a cohesive whole, but they also should be able to stand on their own feet. The First Wall, in my opinion, does the former reasonably well, but not the latter. The Dorn vs. Perturabo subplot, as others have already noted, was one of the stronger parts of the book and is nothing at all like it is described by the screeching critics found on Reddit.

 

But at the end of the day this, like LATD, isn't a book I'd recommend to people. It's just a book that is fortunate enough to be part of an important and long-awaited series and any importance or meaningfulness it has is derived purely from that fact. I don't regret reading it but I also can't see myself picking it up again.

  On 12/2/2019 at 5:50 PM, The_Bloody said:

 

<snip>

 

Very negative, I know.

I'm sorry.

Perhaps I need to sleep on it.

 

How you feel is how you feel. You shouldn't be ashamed to admit you like or don't like something, especially if you give concrete reasons as to why you feel the way you do (which you did).

Just finished this book. Don't wanna review it cos if you are reading this you should go read the book, but loved it, easily one of the greatest in the last couple of years from Black Library, and does an excellent job of fleshing out a few characters (eg Amon) who have previously been fairly minor. 

Some big moments that are just epic in scale and long awaited meet-ups. So good. 

The Siege of Terra – The First Wall

Gav Thorpe

 

Wow, book 3 already. At least, for those whom BL manages to extort for pricey advanced Limited Editions. And the friends of those people. I’m glad for everyone enjoying their LE’s, they're quite nice, but it’s the Siege of Bloody Terra, they would have no trouble selling out with a parallel release.

 

Anyway.

 

I get that it’s the Siege and they’ve been working super hard on it, but it’s perhaps a bit unfair of we the community to view it as anything other than fancy Horus Heresy Novels. Gav was never going to ascend to a higher plane for those that dislike his work just because they authors had a few extra meetings. Let’s be fair, people.

 

Is this Thorpe’s best work? Hell, I don’t know, could be. I’ll need to read it again in 6 years when it comes out in MMPB to really make up my mind. But it’s not bad at all, and to my eyes, definitely not as bad as certain parties previously mentioned in this thread would have you believe. I certainly prefer it to The Lost and the Damned.

 

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Overall, I enjoyed it, but it’s nothing too special. Some good moments, some tedious, a net positive in my opinion. I’m very interested to see the reaction this gets when it gets a wide release.

 

To Taste

ANR: 6.5/10

 

At the moment: Solar War > The First Wall > Lost and the Damned

I agree with Roomsky, this book really could have used a bit more time in the editing room. There are a couple of minor POVs that don't really add anything to the book, and feel like they were just there for the sake of being there (Khârn is a notable example). 

 

Gav also struggles a lot with capturing the scale of the siege - it seems his solution is just to add a bunch of extra zeros to everything, but he doesn't seem to get that a fight between 40 guys is vastly different from having multiple brigades and divisions shooting at each other. Instead of trying to figure out how such a force can even function on any operational level, we just get repeated instances of Rann assuring the reader that his second-in-command knows all this already so that Rann can personally go lead some fight or another. 

 

On the flip side, the book is a lot better when it tackles the siege on a much smaller scale - i.e. the parts with Zenobi, Amon and Forrix.  

 

Overall I found it to be a rather uneven book. It's good when its good, but its very underwhelming when it isn't. 

  On 12/8/2019 at 5:40 AM, Gongsun Zan said:

I agree with Roomsky, this book really could have used a bit more time in the editing room. There are a couple of minor POVs that don't really add anything to the book, and feel like they were just there for the sake of being there (Khârn is a notable example). 

 

already so that Rann can personally go lead some fight or another. Gav also struggles a lot with capturing the scale of the siege - it seems his solution is just to add a bunch of extra zeros to everything, but he doesn't seem to get that a fight between 40 guys is vastly different from having multiple brigades and divisions shooting at each other. Instead of trying to figure out how such a force can even function on any operational level, we just get repeated instances of Rann assuring the reader that his second-in-command knows all this

 

On the flip side, the book is a lot better when it tackles the siege on a much smaller scale - i.e. the parts with Zenobi, Amon and Forrix.  

 

Overall I found it to be a rather uneven book. It's good when its good, but its very underwhelming when it isn't. 

This sort of thing was always going to be an issue for a sub-series that is basically a massive complex multi-front battle, at least if it's an aspect that bothers people generally in BL books. None of the BL writers have ever really demonstrated that they have much talent or more likely even an interest in a harder/more realistic military tactical focus on the battles in their books. That's generally fine by me as i don't look to 30k or 40k (or most of my sci-fi and fantasy in general) to excel or go too far in depth there, though it surprisingly bother me quite a bit on a reread of Solar War. French more or less handwaves away the Terran and Luna defences in that with one big ritual.

 

very much doubt when the series is done we are going to have the purely military engagement side of The Siege be too strategically intricate or skilfully done on a tactical level. It's not what the series has ever really been about. I imagine Forgeworld black books on it will be the place that goes a lot more in-depth there, if they ever get that far.

Edited by Fedor

I doubt I’m going to change anyone’s mind here, but one of the things that I like most about Zenobi’s arc is the way that it conveys the scale of the conflict.

 

 

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"None of the BL writers have ever really demonstrated that they have much talent or more likely even an interest in a harder/more realistic military tactical focus on the battles in their books."

 

Yes, the Siege of Terra is/will be reading more like Tolkien's Fall of Gondolin (the better written portions of the Siege) and less like a hard military sci-fi version of Stalingrad or Leningrad in space. 40K is that type of setting and more importantly, the BL stable doesn't have that type of authour.

 

EDIT: *is not

  On 12/8/2019 at 10:42 AM, DukeLeto69 said:

Not a dig at anyone but W40k is a sci-fantasy setting full of magic, daemons etc. It has never been, isn’t and never will be hard sci fi. Surely nobody expects that?

Not hard sci-fi expectation overall, but over the years i've seen a consistent minority of fans complain about the military side of the lore in general online discussion. I'd say there's definitely a subset that would wecome more time devoted to the strategic and tactical side of stories featuring Marines and the Guard. Basically more of the military sci-fi less of the space opera and fantasy. Some of the Imperial Guard books flirt with that kind of approach from what i remember, like Rebel Winter and Imperial Glory.

Time of yet another imprint to join Warhammer Horror and Warhammer Crime, to be announced next year at the Black Library Weekender:

 

Warhammer SciFi

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future,

Sometimes there even is Hard Science

  On 12/8/2019 at 12:05 PM, DarkChaplain said:

Time of yet another imprint to join Warhammer Horror and Warhammer Crime, to be announced next year at the Black Library Weekender:

 

 

 

Warhammer SciFi

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future,

Sometimes there even is Hard Science

Lol just being pedantic but that is soooo the wrong typeface for “hard sci fi”

 

Edit - weird it changes font in the quote

Edited by DukeLeto69

To be honest I’d love a book about a magos discovering something we take for granted like its this huge earth shattering discovery.

 

‘Sire, by using the collected ambient radiation from solar energy we can power our space stations without servitors running inside of giant wheel cranks’

Edited by Marshal Rohr
  On 12/8/2019 at 12:08 PM, DukeLeto69 said:

 

  On 12/8/2019 at 12:05 PM, DarkChaplain said:

Time of yet another imprint to join Warhammer Horror and Warhammer Crime, to be announced next year at the Black Library Weekender:

 

 

Warhammer SciFi

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future,

Sometimes there even is Hard Science

Lol just being pedantic but that is soooo the wrong typeface for “hard sci fi”

 

Edit - weird it changes font in the quote

 

 

I figured Comic Sans would nicely underline the hyperbolic, silly announcement. I'm German, I'm still trying to learn how this comedy/humor thing works, apologies.

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