Best book for first timers?

[Boldthreat]

Angels of Darkness.

 

Angels of Darkness has it all. Space Marines, Chaos, Orks even. It touches on the Horus Heresy. It gives you a whole snapshot of the Current setting... it’s brutal and backward behavior... all of it.

 

It’s a simple story, but it pulls you into this dark world and at the end... you just want to know more!

 

And that ending... what a punch in the gut.

[DukeLeto69]

 

 

Bloodlines. It's generic enough sci-fi without any really weird 40kisms. You literally don't need any understanding of 40k to enjoy it.

I second this. A great way to ease in someone with no idea about the setting. Then some inquisitor books.

The only thing with inquisition books is imo you can get a confusing tone. Eisenhorn books/shorts feel more like law enforcement than the absolute authority you can get from other works; you gotta pick the right inquisitor book to get the proper 40k vibe so there's no whiplash.

Fair challenge - but damn fine books.

 

I think Wraight’s Vault books and French’s Horusian Wars books *feel* about the right power level for an Inquisitor. Perhaps the Ravenor books also capture better than Eisenhorn?

Edited September 6, 2020 by DukeLeto69

[DarkChaplain]

I mean, yes, Eisenhorn is basically a crime / law enforcement trilogy. But that's because Gregor Eisenhorn himself considers himself a moderate who doesn't fully utilize the full extent of his authority, instead playing the subterfuge angle. He does interact with Inquisitors that do use their rosette more forcefully, and there are radicals and co on top. And as Eisenhorn falls from grace, the Inquisition goes after him with more of the toolkit. There's conclaves, commandeered fleets and what not, so I don't think it represents the Inquisition badly at all - it just represents a "sane" Inquisitor who is trying not to abuse his power as much and work within the system, rather than outside of it - even though he knows he could.

 

From personal experience, every 40k-newcomer I had recommended Eisenhorn has loved the trilogy and wanted more 40k to read afterwards. It's an easy catch for the setting, and a necessary look under the hood of the Imperium. It benefits greatly from not making the Adeptus Astartes the stars - although it does feature them and makes the discrepancy in power levels clear.

 

After Eisenhorn, you can introduce a variety of other subjects and narrative angles, including the other side of the Inquisition, but Eisenhorn simply wins on an accessibility level, hands down. You don't need to know anything to enjoy it, whereas most books - including the previously suggested Spear of the Emperor - leave so much unexplained, expecting the reader to be aware of the setting's tropes and contrivances, that a new reader needs to stretch their suspension of disbelief much more, while also having to accept that there will be a lot of stuff they won't "get" until much later.

 

Eisenhorn shows how various important Imperial institutions work, as well as giving an insight into various types of Imperial societies, bureaucracy and the big enemy that is Chaos. It establishes ground-floor rules that everything else can build on more effectively afterwards - and the trilogy does so through a very human, highly relatable first person narrative featuring fantastic character interaction and evolving conflicts. They're not battle books, they're not super faction specific - reading one Space Marine book can be a drastically different experience from another, due to how Chapter cultures differ, even before you consider authors or styles - and they're all available in an omnibus format that isn't just convenient, but also cheap. All books are out, unlike something like Spear of the Emperor, and there's a follow-up trilogy in Ravenor, too, making it easy to expand upon with a bit of a different focus.

[SkimaskMohawk]

Yea I agree with those on the whole. Nothing made me feel like eisenhorn was too low on the authority than when he attends a country fair and there's a problem with the crystal ball. He feels like a lord who has some expertise in the supernatural.

[cheywood]

I have to go with Eisenhorn as well. While it’s tonally a little different from the majority of what’s out there, both in its age and in Abnett’s interpretation of the universe, it still more than holds its own. It’s accessible in terms of prose and knowledge required (almost none), features a relatively relatable protagonist for BL, introduces most of the essential aspects of the Imperium without getting bogged down in the details of the brutality and misery so many books emphasize, and has numerous sequels so you’ve got a story arc to follow as opposed to reading one book and going ‘Now what?’. 40k’s a trip, and like anything surreal most people do well when they ease into it. Eisenhorn’s the first BL novel potentially being adapted for television for a reason after all. Edited September 6, 2020 by cheywood

[Knockagh]

This question keeps coming up purely because there is no one go to novel for those wanting to start reading.

I think the best thing to read would be the fluff from the core rules. But if you aren’t a gamer your unlikely to buy those books. They do give you the core fluff and they are well written. But I wouldn’t recommend them as they are a rule book. BL not having a go to entry point is a weakness and something they should probably address. Not sure how. The setting is so big I’m not sure a novel can do it. It needs something more like a history book.

[DukeLeto69]

This question keeps coming up purely because there is no one go to novel for those wanting to start reading.

I think the best thing to read would be the fluff from the core rules. But if you aren’t a gamer your unlikely to buy those books. They do give you the core fluff and they are well written. But I wouldn’t recommend them as they are a rule book. BL not having a go to entry point is a weakness and something they should probably address. Not sure how. The setting is so big I’m not sure a novel can do it. It needs something more like a history book.

Which according to the description in the BL Coming Soon page is exactly what the anthology “Nexus and other stories” is for!

[Knockagh]

 

This question keeps coming up purely because there is no one go to novel for those wanting to start reading.

I think the best thing to read would be the fluff from the core rules. But if you aren’t a gamer your unlikely to buy those books. They do give you the core fluff and they are well written. But I wouldn’t recommend them as they are a rule book. BL not having a go to entry point is a weakness and something they should probably address. Not sure how. The setting is so big I’m not sure a novel can do it. It needs something more like a history book.

Which according to the description in the BL Coming Soon page is exactly what the anthology “Nexus and other stories” is for!

Reading the description of the nexus it looks a wrong fit for first stories I think. It reads like pure bolter porn. Sci fi has too much good quality fiction about these days to get away with that stuff.

[Scribe]

I mean really, its a question of best for...what? To introduce the setting? Its simply too vast to cover it all at once. To introduce major players? Many many ways to do so.

 

To capture the 'feel'? I would still put it at Spears, or (one of my personal favorites) Wrath of Iron.

[Marshal Rohr]

Spear of the Emperor

[bluntblade]

We probably should have started with "what about the setting appeals to your sister?"

[Knockagh]

We probably should have started with "what about the setting appeals to your sister?"

I gave my sisters 5 year old his first space marine last Sunday. She glared at me and said ‘you can pay for that crap when he ends up like you!’

[Brother Lunkhead]

I'd probably steer clear of Space Marines (Imperial and Chaos), Guard, and other more war oriented 40K fare, unless your sister is a military SF fan. As others have already said, Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are a great introduction to the 40Kverse. Another series to consider are the Shira Calpurnia novels by Matthew Farrer. These are all great immersive works. They all give the reader great stories while also providing the them with a fine introduction to many aspects of the 40kverse without being as focused as Space Marine novels.

[Ishagu]

Eisenhorn Xenos

Dawn of Fire - Avenging Son

The Great Work

Dark Imperium 1 & 2

[Perry]

Storm of Iron

 

Easy reading, classic 40k story, introduces major factions in the setting chaos, marines, guard, mechanicus, titanica.

[bluntblade]

I'd probably steer clear of Space Marines (Imperial and Chaos), Guard, and other more war oriented 40K fare, unless your sister is a military SF fan. As others have already said, Eisenhorn and Ravenor novels are a great introduction to the 40Kverse. Another series to consider are the Shira Calpurnia novels by Matthew Farrer. These are all great immersive works. They all give the reader great stories while also providing the them with a fine introduction to many aspects of the 40kverse without being as focused as Space Marine novels.

I would question that a little - the Space Marines are such a huge draw, and coming in knowing nothing about them, I found that Battle of the Fang was both informative and intriguing because it left so much else to explore even as it served me some fleshed-out characters instead of the caricatures I expected.

[Scribe]

Yeah I mean, avoiding Marines is avoiding what realistically is a massive part of the setting one will be exposed to.

 

I see no arguments against something like Spear.

[rookie40K]

I started with Ultramarines Omnibus and a book with a bunch of short stories involving different chapters of space marines. What I know now, I would think Helsreach would be a good start.

[DarkChaplain]

There's a difference between outright ignoring novels with Marines, and picking books that feature Marines but not in starring roles. Something like Eisenhorn includes Marines, but they're presented in such a way that the contrast between them and normal (or even exceptional) people is made clear. In that, I guess that the Spears fit the bill, at least.

 

I'll still argue that Spear of the Emperor is not the starting point new people should be looking at. It's too specific in many ways, both in terms of being culturally distinct as chrono-geographically in the setting. It's extremely isolated in its corner, with dilemmas that will be lost on folks who don't have a good grasp of the setting. It's pretty unrepresentative of most 40k fiction in a sense.

As a re-introduction to the post-8th franchise, it's pretty great, yes. But as a first time intro? I don't think it fits the bill.

[Xisor]

Battle of the Fang was my first, and while it drops you into a conflict which has been running for centuries, it's very comprehensible and a good book overall.

That's really quite encouraging. I've always thought fairly highly of Battle of the Fang, but I'd never thought of it for this situation: but you're right. It's a comprehensible novel, it's relatively limited in scope yet also gargantuan and has sweeping involvement with things that matter: factions, your place in the world, what you actually want out of the future, why you're doing any of what you do in the first place.

 

It's helped, I think, that the Wolves and Sons are all distinctive too. The notions of the momentousness and legacy work in many ways because they're easily grasped, they're age-old enough feeling stories that maybe for someone starting off it evokes the sweep and scale of the universe, without bogging you down in almost-but-not-quite-graspable details (is Sanguinius the bright red one or the pink one or the angry red one? Magnus is the viking one, right? Who's the creepy & sneaky one, Alpharius, Corax of Kurze?!)

 

Or at least that's the impression I'm left with. You didn't need to know the ins and outs of who everyone was, the characters were all fairly distinctive, but also a great standpoint for learning about and understanding the 40k universe. (In a way for which Eisenhorn is terrible, so too I'd say is Brothers of the Snake.)

 

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Conversely, something like Titanicus or Priests of Mars might be more palatable from the big hitters - both introduces the civic life of the Imperium (albeit from wildly different perspectives, even in the same book!), but both also give you windows onto the military life of the various games (near-civil for Necromunda, large-scale for Titanicus & Aeronautica, human-skirmishes and battles for 40k itself) and a deeper understanding of how it all sort-of fits together.

 

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For my take, I suppose you've got to wonder what the main "hook" is going to be for said friend, what are they into? Political thrillers? Horror? Adventures? Pulpy & bloody capers? Seeing the 40k universe brought to life? Characters and concepts that hook them? Poetic prose?

 

Each of those comes with a huge hurdle, alas. Going straight in for 'pacy plot with fun/relatable characters', then Abnett's you're man. You want poetic and stuff you suspect there could be PhD in studying? ADB, Farrer, Fehervari. You want a grounded, almost 'historical' novel that's a damn good story where all the pieces fit together damn neatly? CL Werner, Chris Wraight (and again: ADB) are the purveyor's you'd be after.

 

But then if you want a guide to 40k, someone who's basically invested but just wants to know where to start? Brothers of the Snake could be ideal, if they can stomach the style (it'd have killed 40k for me if I'd read it first - I really like Dark Eldar, and that novel makes them seem like a laughable joke - an old governor and her little dog can outwit them!), or it could be the end of their interest. 

 

Sisters of Battle have no shortage being a 'maybe Space Marines are the big hitters, but it's all a bit... lads lads lads. Dani Ware's shorts and novels have been ace. (To whit: jumping into anthologies, novellas and what not are ace ideas, less eggs in single baskets, more variety in topic and tone - not just book to book, but with the same author very often trying very different things in different offerings.)

 

If you've an idea for the factions they're interested in, then that's a good guide too. Genuine love for all things Imperial Guard? I don't think there's an Imperial Guard novel I wouldn't recommend. Imperial Glory is one of the finest, though so too's Fire Caste, Cult of the Spiral Dawn, Baneblade and even novels like Desert Raiders or Straken really pull a surprising amount of weight for how little they get mentioned. Even the 'worst' (or perhaps least ballyhooed) like Ice Guard and things were decent enough, enjoyable and interesting reads. (Thanks to the infectiousness of Death World, I still have big pile of Catachans only recently painted after roughly a decade...)

 

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Similarly, if your friend leans towards Xenos interests, now we're talking! With the Eldar, there's a variety of authorial styles - the drier, more mythic and ennui-ridden melodramatic quality of Gav's (IMHO excellent) Path of novels, or the wonderfully eccentric utter madness and weird-horror-y style of Andy Chambers' Dark Eldar stories.

 

If you want variation even therein, the first Ynnari book by Gav is ace, the related-but-not-identical book Valedor by Guy Haley is one of the very finest Eldar novels going - and it's stand-alone! That it happens to play up the Tyranids in a fascinating and engaging way is not to be sniffed at either. (And shocking to think Guy's hardly touched Eldar otherwise. If he was just cribbing off Gav/Andy, he did it amazingly. If it's his own style and it just landed so closely in alignment but distinctive in flavour with respect to them, even better!)

 

Similarly with Orks, The Beast Arises series got a bit meandering and repetitive in its penultimate books - but with that caveat in place, I think any reader can be inoculated against the editorial/authorial mega-daftness and so allowed to access the really bloody good bits of the books despite it. (And given that in length it's essentially a 6-normal-sized-novel book, it's basically wonderful without any qualification anyway!)

 

With other Ork-antagonist novels (Straken, Imperial Glory, Baneblade, Gunheads spring to mind) you're not short of "good stories, well told".

 

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And then there's Chaos. Ahriman (if you can take convoluted), Black Legion (if you can stomach unabashedly good things), Lords of Silence, Lucius, Daemon World, etc etc. Chaos-as-antagonists in recent years have had stellar work, even from the sidelines, with the likes of Cadia Stands, many of David Annandale's works (if you're big on horror and want 40k-sci-fi horror in grand and peculiar ways, I don't think I could recommend Ruinstorm enough - it's more plot-y than other novels, so David's horror stylings seem to themselves be the enemy of the protagonists, rather than the vehicle for which the book was made, and I thought it worked excellently!)

 

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And if you just want some hardy page-turners that happen to be set in 40k? Chris Wraight's your man, these days. I'm not sure anyone could gainsay his Terra books: The Carrion Throne -> The Emperor's Legion -> The Hollow Mountain -> The Regent's Shadow.

 

(Having not read that last one, you never know - it could be abysmal...)

 

They might not be 'introductory', but they're also fairly momentous in and off themselves, and self-contained enough in a way that getting into any series or big novel with wacky new ideas is gonna be a bit of a hurdle to begin with.

[Pacific81]

I mean, yes, Eisenhorn is basically a crime / law enforcement trilogy. But that's because Gregor Eisenhorn himself considers himself a moderate who doesn't fully utilize the full extent of his authority, instead playing the subterfuge angle. He does interact with Inquisitors that do use their rosette more forcefully, and there are radicals and co on top. And as Eisenhorn falls from grace, the Inquisition goes after him with more of the toolkit. There's conclaves, commandeered fleets and what not, so I don't think it represents the Inquisition badly at all - it just represents a "sane" Inquisitor who is trying not to abuse his power as much and work within the system, rather than outside of it - even though he knows he could.

 

From personal experience, every 40k-newcomer I had recommended Eisenhorn has loved the trilogy and wanted more 40k to read afterwards. It's an easy catch for the setting, and a necessary look under the hood of the Imperium. It benefits greatly from not making the Adeptus Astartes the stars - although it does feature them and makes the discrepancy in power levels clear.

 

After Eisenhorn, you can introduce a variety of other subjects and narrative angles, including the other side of the Inquisition, but Eisenhorn simply wins on an accessibility level, hands down. You don't need to know anything to enjoy it, whereas most books - including the previously suggested Spear of the Emperor - leave so much unexplained, expecting the reader to be aware of the setting's tropes and contrivances, that a new reader needs to stretch their suspension of disbelief much more, while also having to accept that there will be a lot of stuff they won't "get" until much later.

 

Eisenhorn shows how various important Imperial institutions work, as well as giving an insight into various types of Imperial societies, bureaucracy and the big enemy that is Chaos. It establishes ground-floor rules that everything else can build on more effectively afterwards - and the trilogy does so through a very human, highly relatable first person narrative featuring fantastic character interaction and evolving conflicts. They're not battle books, they're not super faction specific - reading one Space Marine book can be a drastically different experience from another, due to how Chapter cultures differ, even before you consider authors or styles - and they're all available in an omnibus format that isn't just convenient, but also cheap. All books are out, unlike something like Spear of the Emperor, and there's a follow-up trilogy in Ravenor, too, making it easy to expand upon with a bit of a different focus.

 

I think the content of your post is probably pretty much what was pitched to the TV production company, and exactly why it is Eisenhorn (amongst all of GW's IP) that is being made into a major television show.