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It's a given that most of what BL puts out is going to be from an Imperial/human perspective, but it would be nice to see more novels centered around the Eldar or Tau. To my knowledge, the only novels that heavily involve Eldar would be:
- Warrior Coven
- Eldar Prophecies(never read it)

There are several other ones that have Eldar in there to a much fainter degree(Fulgrim, for instance), but I have yet to find a good, solid book covering Eldar culture/society from their point of view. The same goes for the Tau. I know of the novel Fire Warrior, and personally haven't read that, but I've read some books that do involve Tau to a degree(one of the Cain books, one of the Last Chancers stories, and some others), yet never anything that are from a Tau perspective.

What I would love to see is some coverage on different Aspects and Paths of the Eldar, maybe some novice Alatoic Ranger as a main character.

Next year (August) an Eldar books coming out.

Path of the Warrior by Gav Thorpe

gav thorpe could not write his way out of a paperbag using a knife.


ALL of the books dealing with the aliens is completely horrible. Although a Starship trooperish novel to do with the Tau would be awesome.

The only book I've ever read that had Tau in it was the second Last Chancers novel, where Schaeffer and his team infiltrate the mercenary ranks of Farsight. Quite interesting, tells quite a bit about the Tau and the Kroot.

The reason i don't believe Eldar aren't in many books as a main race is because they're so predictable. They're basically just human but smarter but equally ignorant. And the weird names would be hard to follow for the average reader for Tau and Eldar IMO.

warpcrafter wrote:The only book I've ever read that had Tau in it was the second Last Chancers novel, where Schaeffer and his team infiltrate the mercenary ranks of Farsight. Quite interesting, tells quite a bit about the Tau and the Kroot.

The Last Chancer stories were decent, though its portrayal of the Tau was a bit dated(the book/collection came out in what, 2003?). I remember one scene where the Tau equivalent for stairs was described as having no hand-rails, due to its user grace/dexterity or some such(and to my knowledge, current Tau fluff doesn't suggest they're particularly dexterous).

There's barely any Tau fluff. The two codexes are very thin. There's only one novel.

Apart from that we have the computer game of Fire Warrior and Dawn Of War Dark Crusade, neither of which are considered canon. There are some mentions in a few Imperial sources though these could be just propaganda.

The Tau codex fluff gives a general impression of Tau culture being polite, well-ordered, artistic and elegant. Of course, compared to the Imperium nearly anything would look like that.

It's sometimes hard to reconcile fluff with reality. For example, the excuse given for Tau's low BS is their slow-focussing eyes. Not only is this unlikely considering they are a hunter species, but also eye focussing is only important at a close distance, due to the laws of physics, therefore not applicable to ranged combat. Obviously it's a bit of nonsense intended to justify giving Tau BS3 with all their high-tech equipment.

In other words, at lot of fluff is just fluff; general scene-setting material to give an overall flavour to the game setting.

IMO there are a couple of reasons why there is so little Tau perspective fluff.

Firstly because what readers want mostly is Moar Spase Mariens (Hurr!!!) and IG.

Secondly because an in-depth look at the Tau would either confirm or deny their role as the non-Grimdark faction, which is something GW seem ambivalent about. I should think a firmly non-Grimdark faction would be a useful contrast to the rest of 40K. However, it might be considered to cast too poor a light on the other factions if the Tau were established as genuinely progressive and altrustic, something like the UFP in Star Trek.

Tau aren't very non-grimdark, KK. They do have a habit of sterilising humans and there's rumoured mind control going on with the Vespids.

Kilkrazy wrote: eye focussing is only important at a close distance, due to the laws of physics.

Could you elaborate on this, it's very interesting and I'm not much of a physics buff.....sorry don't mean to hijack the thread or anything.

The best way to show this it is to look at a manual focus lens from an SLR or rangefinder camera.

Here's a set of photos I have just shot. They are of the focussing ring of a 50mm lens on a Canon AE1 camera.



Here I've set the lens to its closest focus which is 0.6 metres.



It takes about a quarter turn of the ring to get to the 1m mark, and you can now see the 2m mark is quite close. In fact, it's only about a 1/8th turn away. I get to that mark in the next image.



2 metre mark. You can see the 10m mark is now only about a 1/8th turn away.



The 10m mark. You can see it takes as much of a turn to get from 5m to 10m as it does to get to infinity.

This demonstrates that the farther away the subject is, the easier it is to focus on it.

The reason why is because to make an object half the size, you have to move it twice as far away. To make the object half the size again, you need to double the distance again in other words, steps of 1, 2, 4, 8 16, 32, 64, 128 metres. Your eyes (or the camera lens) put in the same effort to get from 64 to 128 metres as they had to put in to get from 1 to 2 metres.

That actually helps a lot, thanks for taking the time to answer that.

Dude, seriously, clean your camera. ;-)

I think it was the low WS and Initiative that were justified by slow focusing. Not BS.
I could be wrong though.

xenos are not so interesting to read as marines and IMP gaurd. People prefer reading books bout things they can relate to.

And yes we can relate to a superhuman more than a alien with 8 limbs

Plus marines are way cooler

Archonate wrote:I think it was the low WS and Initiative that were justified by slow focusing. Not BS.
I could be wrong though.

No, it's the BS.

The WA and I is justified by Tau considering H2H combat to be old fashioned and primitive so they don't practice.

Ronin-Sage wrote:It's a given that most of what BL puts out is going to be from an Imperial/human perspective, but it would be nice to see more novels centered around the Eldar or Tau. To my knowledge, the only novels that heavily involve Eldar would be:
- Warrior Coven
- Eldar Prophecies(never read it)

There are several other ones that have Eldar in there to a much fainter degree(Fulgrim, for instance), but I have yet to find a good, solid book covering Eldar culture/society from their point of view. The same goes for the Tau. I know of the novel Fire Warrior, and personally haven't read that, but I've read some books that do involve Tau to a degree(one of the Cain books, one of the Last Chancers stories, and some others), yet never anything that are from a Tau perspective.

What I would love to see is some coverage on different Aspects and Paths of the Eldar, maybe some novice Alatoic Ranger as a main character.

Shadowpoint had a nice Eldar perspective. The eldar was treated somewhat as alien, but they weren't stupid or heh heh heh alien like other bad BL books. And nothing says loving like an Archon vs. an Avatar going mono on mono. Plus eldar INNNN SPACEEEEEEEE!

Your complaining about Tau and Eldar?


When was the last time you saw a necron novel?????



NEVER (i think... )

It wrote:Your complaining about Tau and Eldar?


When was the last time you saw a necron novel?????



NEVER (i think... )

Actually, there's Hellforged(the 5th Soul Drinkers novel). Necrons are the main enemy in the book, and there's an appearance made by pretty much every unit, with relatively good canon-accuracy. There's also Caves of Ice(second Ciaphas Cain novel) and on a narrower scale, one of the Ultramarines books.

(@ one of the above posters): I would imagine the Tau are not that much into art, at all. Don't get me wrong, they would likely favor aesthetic pleasantness, but as far as them delving into the individualistic and almost metaphysical practice of art seems un-Tau, imo.

It why did you go off topic?

The Tau are only, "not so Grimdark," because everyone else is so deep into it. Seriously, the Tau are still a charcoal gray, everyone else is just pitch black, covered in blood and holding a skull. It's like being the happy carefree member of the Manson family.

The exterminate their enemies like everyone else, they just do it by sterilizing you and letting time take care of the killing instead of sending down a virus to turn you into organic goo then burning your world to a cinder, or eating you, or killing you just for fun.

They just put "Join us or," in front of the "DDDDDIIIIIEEEEE!!!!" of every other faction.

All that being said I don't think it'd be that hard to relate to the Tau in a Tau focusing book. The Imperium's mindset is utterly alien to most people anyways and yet we still get into it.

Kilkrazy wrote:
IMO there are a couple of reasons why there is so little Tau perspective fluff.

Firstly because what readers want mostly is Moar Spase Mariens (Hurr!!!) and IG.

and

beef wrote:xenos are not so interesting to read as marines and IMP gaurd. People prefer reading books bout things they can relate to.

And yes we can relate to a superhuman more than a alien with 8 limbs

Plus marines are way cooler

I think any novel from a non-human perspective will be VERY hard to write and/or remain interesting to, well, human readers.

We've been told time and time again that the Xenos out there are really (obviously) inhuman with inhuman aims, goals, method, desires, etc.

It would be hard to have a truly 'alien' novel that didn't, in some way, 'humanize' the subjects, wouldn't it?

And really, an entire novel from a Necron or Tyranid perspective?

Can't see it, really!

The Tau and Eldar are the most human of the aliens.

Bingo, those two would be the easiest to relate too. Tyranid, necrons, even orks are probably too alien to relate to. I'd think the Tau are probably the most identifiable alien in the WH40K universe.

Yeah, my personal theory on why GW included the Tau is because they needed some offset to the rest of the [more] grimdark aspects of the 40k universe, but also, because people could relate to the Tau more than they could other aliens(and arguably the Imperium).

Their ways of dealing with others are generally more "realistic"(methinks) than other factions. Plus, their combat style seems more conventional in the sense that if real-life military forces were "future-tized", that is how they would probably fight(ranged combat, rather than the arguably cool-but-unrealistic melee focus of other factions).

From Wikipedia:

History and development

The Warhammer 40,000 Design Team selected the Tau as one of three new race ideas from hundreds of possible concepts. The Kroot were one of the others, and these two were eventually combined into the one fictional organisation; the Kroot were later given their own army list in Chapter Approved.[citation needed]

According to Andy Chambers, the chief designer at the time, the Tau were intended "to be altruistic and idealistic, believing heartily in unification as the way forward." Graham McNeill was responsible for much of the background material produced for the Tau, developing what Andy Chambers described as "...their proud, quiet but determined character [developed] to the point where they actually became a rather likeable, if slightly naive addition to the cosmos."[1] The Tau were updated in early 2006 with the release of a new Codex.

The reason there arent any books, is because BL use to think no one could do them properly and refused to publish anything with alien protaginasts.

This attitude has with typical GW pendulum reversed and they gave cs goto an eldar book. They were to hard but now anyone can do it lol.

Ronin-Sage wrote:Yeah, my personal theory on why GW included the Tau is because they needed some offset to the rest of the [more] grimdark aspects of the 40k universe, but also, because people could relate to the Tau more than they could other aliens(and arguably the Imperium).

I think it is fairly commonly accepted that GW included the Tau in a rather sad attempt to pander to the Anime/Battletech crowd.

Maybe!

And, the Tau may be 'close' to human, but the Eldar?

They look human, but I'm pretty sure we've been told time and time again that they are utterly inhuman when it comes to motivations, etc.?

Again, maybe, maybe not...

As a battletech player I'll say the Tau aren't going to appeal to most CBT players. CBT's mechs tend more towards the Imperial Titan design aesthetic more than the Tau's.

The Eldar's motivations are perfectly human. "We're better than you."

Tyyr wrote:As a battletech player I'll say the Tau aren't going to appeal to most CBT players. CBT's mechs tend more towards the Imperial Titan design aesthetic more than the Tau's.

The Eldar's motivations are perfectly human. "We're better than you."

But, as a clearly non-human race with goals that are quite often aimed at using humans to the point of getting them massacred on a planetary scale, utterly alien too.

I still think it comes down to them thinking they're better than humans. There's plenty of instances in history of one side quite happily exterminating the other for even the slightest benefit. Every time I hear an Eldar's motivation it's almost always taking a path to keep what's left of their sorry space elf asses alive. Most of their plans require getting a few million Mon-Keigh's killed but still, its basic survival. They seem alien because they play the long game and are making their moves today to influence events years or even centuries in the future but its still just basic survival.