Flesh and Steel

[Gederas]

He was also notable for hating the fan base lol

Oof, I am assuming you mean he disliked more than that really iffy minority we give way too much attention to? 

 

I dont look much into the exact structure of the companies behind franchises I like but its always weird to me to hear that someone would willingly involve themselves with such an immersive job as an editor in something they seem to hate. Creative jobs sort of seem like the worst place to be if it doesnt work for you. Although it makes alot of their sloppy editing make a weird amount of sense in retrospect. 

No, hating the fanbase as in "hating the people who enjoy the game and lore".

 

Laurie Golding is known for being sarcastic, abrasive, and egotistical towards fans. He has a bit of a "these are my ideas and this is how it is" take with the canon. While other authors of Black Library and employees of Games Workshop allow some wiggle room for your own ideas and theories to unfold, Laurie Goulding tends to have an idea in mind and for that idea to be the only one. This is fine with fan works who are interpreting cryptic or completely untold lore, but for someone official to say that your idea for your beloved chapter is completely wrong (probably followed by "and you should feel bad for it" if it's coming from Goulding), then it's a bit disheartening.

 

Oh, and he's been quoted directly insulting fan forums like this (he said Warseer is a "pit of mewling tards" and "better to die than accidentally post there"), along with accusations of plagiarism in his works.

 

Essentially, he's the most hated person who's been in GW/Black Library's stable, because at least Matt Ward wasn't a total jerk, just bad at lore

 

 

 

.... So him now working for Riot Games for League of Legends is perfect, because he now works for Riot, and the playerbase of League is just as toxic as he is. ZING!*

 

 

 

 

*I say this as a player of League who ended up quitting because of the toxic playerbase.

Edited October 25, 2020 by Gederas

[StrangerOrders]

 

He was also notable for hating the fan base lol

Oof, I am assuming you mean he disliked more than that really iffy minority we give way too much attention to? 

 

I dont look much into the exact structure of the companies behind franchises I like but its always weird to me to hear that someone would willingly involve themselves with such an immersive job as an editor in something they seem to hate. Creative jobs sort of seem like the worst place to be if it doesnt work for you. Although it makes alot of their sloppy editing make a weird amount of sense in retrospect. 

No, hating the fanbase as in "hating the people who enjoy the game and lore".

 

Laurie Golding is known for being sarcastic, abrasive, and egotistical towards fans. He has a bit of a "these are my ideas and this is how it is" take with the canon. While other authors of Black Library and employees of Games Workshop allow some wiggle room for your own ideas and theories to unfold, Laurie Goulding tends to have an idea in mind and for that idea to be the only one. This is fine with fan works who are interpreting cryptic or completely untold lore, but for someone official to say that your idea for your beloved chapter is completely wrong (probably followed by "and you should feel bad for it" if it's coming from Goulding), then it's a bit disheartening.

 

Oh, and he's been quoted directly insulting fan forums like this (he said Warseer is a "pit of mewling tards" and "better to die than accidentally post there"), along with accusations of plagiarism in his works.

 

Essentially, he's the most hated person who's been in GW/Black Library's stable, because at least Matt Ward wasn't a total jerk, just bad at lore

 

 

 

.... So him now working for Riot Games for League of Legends is perfect, because he now works for Riot, and the playerbase of League is just as toxic as he is. ZING!*

 

 

 

 

*I say this as a player of League who ended up quitting because of the toxic playerbase.

 

Wow... I am glad I didnt know this guy exist until now, sounds like awful company.

 

I am not a fan of Ward (although I will defend his work on Iyanden unto death), but I never heard anything about him being a personally difficult person. Also, his less than... adequate writing never struck me as proportional to the amount of abuse the guy got.

 

I despise what he did with the UMs and some other stuff but I really struggle with the mindset some people have of 'sending death-threats over writing', roast the heck out of the guy for sure but by the blood of the gods it doesnt give you the right to threaten someone's wellbeing. 

 

Not to say I'm comfortable with people like this Golding fellow, you arent beholden to pleasing your fans but I am not a fan of people that are so comfortable biting the hand that is feeding you. Showing some humility is not a sin and insulting the people that facilitate your livelihood is just so bonkers to me.

 

Ty for the background!

[DarkChaplain]

Frankly, the accusations going Laurie's way are massively overblown. If anything, I consider him well justified for poking fun at certain parts of the community.

 

The amount of nerdrage that occured when he had that Malcador short audio drama for an advent calendar release.... Even the thread on B&C tackling that drama made it pretty damned apparent that, yes, there's an overzealous element in the fanbase that doesn't much care for nuance or anything that might break their headcanon. Heck, I remember getting insulted myself because I dared agreeing with one of Laurie's tweets at the time, regarding the "critical" reception of the drama online.

 

And frankly, just looking at the chan-leaning, or 40klore reddit communities... My god, I cannot even. Those are, incidentally, the places where Laurie gets flamed the most. I wonder why..

 

Fact of the matter is, Laurie was the lead editor for the Heresy for a long long time, and he was a driving force in actually getting the series into shape. If I remember correctly, he came around not long after Tales of Heresy or thereabouts, and left around the mid-40s. Sadly, he also had to shoulder the GW-interference part of the series. However, he was also basically a walking lexicon on the lore and had the unenviable job to keep tabs on the who, when and what across novels. As the series editor, he was basically as close to the "word of god" when talking about the series trajectory and specific character arcs as you were gonna get. People didn't like that, even though it was someone intimately familiar with the writing process, planning and author pitches.

[SkimaskMohawk]

The accusations aren't really overblown; his comments aren't justified.

 

No one should be insulted for doing their job, but at the same time they shouldn't start firing back at the people that essentially pay them. It's not professional and book readers are what necessitates editors in the first place. It's a concept everyone should have learned in their first retail job.

 

So you have this guy who starts making changes and stuff to the very broad strokes of the lore and gets flamed and insulted. But then he fires back and calls readers/customers/community members retards. And then, says things meant to trigger the people who took issue with the style of change (like everything in the black books could be completely wrong). And then writes the malcador story, which is maybe not true but also meant to grief the people once again. Also kind of...misses the point of the tragedy of the heresy. A lot of the "word of God" stuff felt spiteful; like the guys who made the contekar saying they make the lore so it is what they say it is, before it got scrubbed.

[DarkChaplain]

I'm not saying that it's a good thing to snark at fans, but I cannot help but feel that the aggregate sum of nerdrage, especially on the aforementioned boards, makes it a rather understandable reaction.

 

Funnily enough, Laurie Goulding is pretty much the bridge between Black Library and Forgeworld in so far that his character is credited as an author of the Black Books. FW hasn't been very subtle about those being written in-universe with incomplete information, partially as propaganda pieces either. The BBs were never supposed to be taken as gospel, yet more often than not, they are - which, I cannot help but think, is pretty stupid indeed.

 

It's that kind of weird "lore hunting" and outright rejection of other accounts that may contradict the things the fans decided to be "the truth" that I've seen Laurie poking fun at the most. And yes, headcanon and subjective feelings on the matter are important to the individual - but to think that just because I personally think that one of the Lost Primarchs is actually a mecha-godzilla-riding metalhead with tridents for fists who got expelled for sexually assaulting a unicorn one sullen sunday afternoon, that doesn't mean that my subjective headcanon interpretation of the lore is somehow an objective truth and anything and anybody who contradicts it is doing it solely to spite me - which is something I've seen a lot of even on B&C re: Malcador and the Emperor in particular.

 

The Malcador story specifically is a fantastic piece that is seriously misunderstood and misinterpreted by the anti-Laurie crowd. It's not intent on spiting fans, but on giving a new perspective through a very specific context, and offers the oft-desired room to speculate. When I listened to it the first few times, I was properly engaged by both Malcador as a character in a tough, personal situation, as well as the lore ramifications - and the challenge of discerning which parts of his statements were true and which were comforting lies to a dying confidant.

 

Instead of even looking at the context of the story, most people on B&C just got outraged at the cliffnotes from the people who listened to it - because they felt it wasted their time, spited them somehow, or retconned things. Rather than looking at the delivery, both narratively as well as the acting, it was dismissed as some sort of ploy of Laurie's to flip them off one last time. That he commented negatively on Twitter about folks here losing their minds over it without even "reading" or understanding the context is hardly a surprise.

 

After all, to stubbornly interpret "guy tells his dying friend that all the bad stuff was actually part of his plan to soothe her final moments" as "ZOMGOLOLOL INTENTIONAL HERESY CONFIRMED" is blatantly ridiculous, not to say the other r-word. It's one of those stories that clearly highlighted the overzealous nature of some fans when it comes to taking intentionally ambiguous statements and perspectives on the lore as gospel when everything around those statements and perspectives tells them not to.

[StrangerOrders]

Well, I certainly have a wholistic understanding of the arguments now and am grateful to folks for enlightening me!

 

That being said, it might be said that we are at risk of straying from the subject and it would be a shame to lockdown the thread for such a good book, so mayhaps we could all agree to disagree regarding this fellow and get back to discussing Haley's newest work? 

 

To get the ball rolling, I found it interesting that Zhao-Arkad is once-more in a strong enough position to be a major wide-reaching presence. I say wide-reaching because I seem to recall from Inferno that its sort of in the proverbial boonies of the Warp-Currents in the region, which is impressive given the toll Mars extracted post-Heresy and their innately isolationist tendencies. 

 

I wonder if they have one of their Iron Vigils (Steel Vigils?) on the world, since it seems they have quite alot invested there? Especially since their previous modus-operandi was to heavily invest in a few assets and to turtle the hell out of them.

Edited October 26, 2020 by StrangerOrders

[Petitioner's City]

Zhao Arkhad has been featured in quite a few Imperial Armour books before it featured in Inferno - most famously for having the STC for the praetor launcher, but it's very nice to get away from stcs, tanks and guns, and have a much more nuanced take on what a part of the mechanicus does within wider society.

[Beren]

As of the setting of the short story Whisper of Cogs,

a significant portion of Legio Xestiobiax was being secretly excavated from where they had been buried for centuries, heretek technology still intact inside.

Given that the character never recognised the heraldry or commented upon an Arkhadine Legio, its possible/likely that it was not common knowledge that Arkhad had ever had a Legio at that point. No idea what their post-rift situation is though.

 

Also, it has been enough time for both Ryza and Mars to rebuild themselves from some pretty significant damage, and its possible that many of the fractious elements causing trouble with each other took off and never came back during the Heresy.

 

Though, we do have secret heretek psy-engines on the one hand and Cawl hating puritans on the other.

[Knockagh]

All finished and a great addition to both the crime series and Haley’s ever growing list of BL greats.

Haley’s depictions of the cult mechanicus is just superb. No one has even come close. Cawls faction has been turned into something really cool under Haley from his Cawl book to the current crusade series and now at a low level in the crime series. I love how he is developing it. The tensions between the Terra and Mars, the gross social inequalities all mixed in with daily life makes a great read.

Perhaps Guy and Chris could have talked before hand. Two dudes with daughters wrecking their heads! As a father of two daughters I know only too well how protective you are over them!

[DarkChaplain]

I'm actually hard-pressed not to straight up call this Haley's best novel to date. There's too many books that I adore in his range (including outside of BL, actually), and I'd be doing them a disservice by just gushing like that.

 

But damn, it is so so so so so high up there among anything BL has published, period. Here's hoping that the next Noctis novel isn't too far out. Praying for it to be here next year.

[StrangerOrders]

As of the setting of the short story Whisper of Cogs,

a significant portion of Legio Xestiobiax was being secretly excavated from where they had been buried for centuries, heretek technology still intact inside.

Given that the character never recognised the heraldry or commented upon an Arkhadine Legio, its possible/likely that it was not common knowledge that Arkhad had ever had a Legio at that point. No idea what their post-rift situation is though.

 

Also, it has been enough time for both Ryza and Mars to rebuild themselves from some pretty significant damage, and its possible that many of the fractious elements causing trouble with each other took off and never came back during the Heresy.

 

Though, we do have secret heretek psy-engines on the one hand and Cawl hating puritans on the other.

It would be a good opportunity to give some credence to people going against Cawl. He has been 100% in the right so far so it would be interesting to see how it goes.

 

Because lets be real, its hard not to read Inferno and think that the Xestiobiax's tech was a really bad idea. 

[DukeLeto69]

I'm actually hard-pressed not to straight up call this Haley's best novel to date. There's too many books that I adore in his range (including outside of BL, actually), and I'd be doing them a disservice by just gushing like that.

 

But damn, it is so so so so so high up there among anything BL has published, period. Here's hoping that the next Noctis novel isn't too far out. Praying for it to be here next year.

I am halfway and loving this. One thing in particular elevated it even further in the last 20 or so pages (not going to do spoiler thing yet).

 

On Twitter Haley said he had just finished another novel. I said I hoped it was more WH Crime and be confirmed it wasn’t but that he had plans for more.

[Preliminary Bombardment]

I'm only a little bit into this, like 20% or so and it's a bit of a tangent but I like that Hayley actually addresses something that's always niggled about the Imperium.

 

Population.

 

There are some depictions of large families in this, between this and a small scene in The Great Work showing the Adeptus Mechanicus vat growing people it's like he's realised he needs a way to replace the millions of people who routinely die in his novels!

[DarkChaplain]

I think the family aspect and reproduction has been a bit of a feature in a lot of his books. Even Skarsnik, his WHFB debut for BL (I cannot tell whether it or Baneblade was written first), went into depth about the goblins' fungal reproduction. Baneblade had a lot of parallels with Flesh and Steel in so far that the protagonist left his wealthy, high status family to do something else - in this case, becoming a tanker in the guard - with some flashes here and there criticising the high society life, including when a bit of a party happens in the middle of a warzone situation.

Titandeath, too, took note of the reproduction of the Titan crew families, both via gene-crafting and a more natural accident. Then there's Dante, with its dips into showing the normal population of Baal doing their thing. Not to mention outside-BL entanglements.

 

So I don't really think that it's a sudden realisation, or a recent one, on his part. More that he didn't really have much in the way of opportunity to tackle subjects like that with much depth when the brief was about Space Marines or Primarchs doing their war games.

It's pretty much a big reason why I'm so excited for Horror and Crime - it lets the authors bugger off from the annoying combat focus and deal with subject matter that usually would only be sidenotes, by way of making them primary themes.

[Knockagh]

Family’s are where stories are made. Malcolm x said ‘ A man without any history is like a tree without roots’ or in a good fiction book, a character without roots is boring as heck.

[Preliminary Bombardment]

78% in, this is a very good book.

[DukeLeto69]

Just finished this. Wow! This was a seriously good book. Never thought I would say this but it is easily as good as Bloodlines by Chris Wraight, possibly even slightly better. Cannot put my finger on why other then the worldbuilding was more “oh cool some insight into the AdMech” and “ah so that is how the gilded live”.

 

Up until now I have not been a massive fan of Guy Haley. Thought he was a very solid second tier based on what I had read. Dark Imperium didn’t click for me, his HH books were good but not great, and Belasarius Cawl The Great Work was solid but not amazing.

 

However, for me, both Avenging Son and Flesh & Steel were absolutely excellent.

 

Based on the two novels and anthology (didn’t buy the audio) this WH Crime line has been so very good. Hope it is a success cos I am really very keen on a season 2!

[Plasmablasts]

This sounds like it should go onto my Christmas list!

 

I note that the basic premise, two detectives from different jurisdictions cooperating on a case, was compared to The Bridge. It reminds me of the same scenario in Isaac Asimov’s “The Caves of Steel”, which is one of the first books to combine the SciFi and Detective/Crime genres. I wonder if the title might in fact be a little homage on Haley’s part?