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KingDeath wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:
Like many BL series I thought the GG books got better as they went along, I would love to get some new material as well.

Im another DA convert, I think he is far and away the best BL author.

Strangely i think they get worse. Certainly less bad than most other BL fluff but i found the older books, while still inconsistent in quality, to be better written and overal more enjoyable.

If I remember, the first books were put together from short stories originally published separately in magasines, so they packed a lot of punch. Each chapter could pull its own weight, because in the past, it had to.
It's very difficult to live up to that by then writing a book end to end.

Personally I've only read one and a half, so I can't rightly comment.

It was only Ghostmaker that was a short story anthology. First and Only was written as a novel, although sections of it did appear in White Dwarf.

Hi, guys! Just popping in to say Dan Abnett is the best. All hail!

 Verviedi wrote:
Wtf was up with the "Lasman" in Salvations Reach? The word was never used in the series before that, and suddenly in SR every character knew it!

I've noticed that as the books progressed, Dan read and was probably influenced by books, movies, and TV as he went a long. I found that every book brought with it some new terms or words or weird quirks that felt really influenced by something in the sci do genre. In this case he was trying to go kind of old school by giving titles (ie Bombadier, Fusilier, Gunner, etc..)

He also had a tendency to take things out too.

Like in one of the first two novels, one of the characters slides the las crystal out and spits on it because the gun was jamming. Never saw that again after.

I really enjoyed the books. The Guns of Tanith being one of my favorited as I felt the series was hitting its prime.

After reading Salvations Reach though, it feels like the Ghosts are starting to look tired out. Not to sound mean, but they need to eventually die.

Still love the books,but I think the series has had its run

He doesn't slide a crystal out, he opens up the cover over the focussing lenses because the gun wasn't damaging the things it hit.

Been a long time since I've read the book so the details were fuzzy.

I tend to agree that the series is getting tired - for me, the first two omnibuses (Omnibusii?) were quite a bit better than the third. I favour the second, partly because it's the first one I read, but also because the characters were all kinda established (I despise origin stories).

 Furyou Miko wrote:
It was only Ghostmaker that was a short story anthology. First and Only was written as a novel, although sections of it did appear in White Dwarf.

I knew the first was, but I had a feeling the second also was. it's been a while.

Wikipedia (which I appreicate is not exactly a bastion of reliability) has this to say: The first two books are collections of short stories originally printed in the short fiction magazine Inferno!, published by the Black Library.

Quite honestly whichever way it came around, of the two, Ghostmaker feels markedly less structured (not a criticism).

Ghostmaker is technically the second book in the series, too, which probably confuses the issue - the stories were published first, but because First and Only is about filling in Gaunt's background (and some of the Ghosts' as well), it was released as a novel before the Ghostmaker anthology was put together.

Yeah, I'm reading it second and it is a little perplexing in a "Previously on Gaunt's Ghosts: ..." manner in that it fills in a lot of information referenced in the "first" book.
Frankly it's not a deal breaker.

The thing to keep in mind is that just about any BL novel is written to include enough world-building that it can be someone's first introduction to 40K and they won't be *too* lost.

I mostly agree with this, too. Although I've only read as far as Only in Death. My favourite of the series is still Necropolis - probably one of my favourite 40K/sci-fi novels overall, come to think of it. I like the variety of theatres given in The Saint omnibus - an armoured convoy, an airborne assault, trench war, etc. The Lost felt a little weaker and unfocused, it seemed to me. Abnett suffers quite a bit from rushed endings to his novels, and this gets noticeably worse as they progress, I find. Also, I find that the roots of the Tanith's skills (stealth and expert navigation/never being lost) seem to have been forgotten, in place of repetitive pitched battles/outnumbered, impossible odds/stand-offs instead.

Anyway, although it seems to have meandered slightly in the middle, I'm hoping for a nice strong finish, and that Abnett can pull off a well paced, satisfactory climax and conclusion to the series. Personally? I think it should end with most - if not all - of the original Tanith dead. Gaunt at the very least needs to go out with a bang. That's just me. Either way I just want The Victory to come out already so I can carry on the series!

 Psienesis wrote:
The thing to keep in mind is that just about any BL novel is written to include enough world-building that it can be someone's first introduction to 40K and they won't be *too* lost.

Actually, the lack of that was one of the first things my literature-student partner commented on when I lent her Titanicus. It assumed too much prior setting knowledge.

Really? I dunno, having read it, while I recognized that there were a lot of fine details that a non-40K fan wouldn't get, I thought it did well enough in establishing who the major players were, the factions they worked for, etc.

Yes, but you've been in the hobby for long enough that you've internalised a lot of the background knowledge of the setting to the point where you probably don't realise that it's 40k-specific knowledge.

That's how she explained it to me after I expressed the same sentiment, at least.