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Yeah, I used it as a simplifying shorthand, on purpose.

Finished the First Wall.
The good, I think Gav Thorpe's prose and dialogue was much improved in this book. He also manages the themes he was going for pretty well. I enjoyed the battle for the spaceport, and would have enjoyed more of that to be honest. It also had a satisfying conclusion and a reasonably good plot. It was fun to see some more stuff from the game like Poxwalkers and Plaguebearers and a Great Unclean One.

Stuff I didn't enjoy quite as much... I would have enjoyed the trooper side story as a short story, but I found it jarring to constantly be jumping through timelines inside a chapter, and it made me put the book down a few times. It has a satisfying payoff, but I think the build up wasn't really worth it to me.

And I'm not a fan of the way the Imperial Cult is presented here, I know it's how it is now but I prefer that stuff a little more ambiguous and a little less super powered. So that took some of the steam out of those scenes.

Overall though a decent book, and I enjoyed reading it. So far, and against popular opinion it seems, the Solar War remains my favourite. Starting book 4 right now, but I'd say the people who said it was more consistent than the Heresy were right, and the quality is good if not great so far.

I think because there is a writers room that consists of a core of BL veterans and the setting is a lot less sandboxy, there's going to be a lot more focus in the Siege. Lots of thread tying and story ending for a lot of characters and plots, while also setting up some of what we will eventually see later in the timeline.

They seem to be giving them more time too maybe? Certainly sounds like some of the HH books were rushed out.

A lot of the HH books are also novellas and short stories rather than full-length novels. The Siege books can get a lot more said/done and can go into events with more detail than a lot of Heresy books. Crimson King and Praetorian of Dorn are the outliers on my bookshelf for size, whereas all of the Siege novels (i.e. not Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus) are all roughly the same size.

Just finished Saturnine- I was pretty impressed by it, with the massive scope and enormous cast. Really managed to keep the prose fresh despite hundreds of pages of battle.

Abnett is really good at this sort of thing and he was having a lot of fun in this book. Predictably, it's the best one so far in my view.

However! I am not without criticisms. I think Abnett enjoys tweaking our noses with silly stuff sometimes. So some of the stuff like the brackets, or the faux military jargon like "non vi" kinda didn't work for me. Or everyone saying the s word this site censors, particularly the Khan. But I can't help but feel that Abnett is winking at us with these moments to an extent, reminding us to enjoy ourselves and not be too po faced about it all. After all, here we're talking about a sci fi siege with hyper advanced genetically modified troops in power armour, using literal trebuchet!

A few months ago there was a thread complaining about Krole. I dunno, I'm in two minds about it. One, she got to be a POV character, and an interesting one. She got to do a lot of cool stuff. Two, the point of the scene was that everyone we'd gotten to know was getting chewed up. But yeah, it was a bit of a "wah waaah" moment how it was handled, so I can understanding feeling disgruntled about it.

But overall I can remember thinking several times while reading it "Yeah, this is what I imagined for the Siege of Terra", so well done to Abnett for delivering. It's not an easy task!

I really like the fact that characters who have received development are actually being killed off.

For me, it emphasizes that during the Heresy, the Imperium lost its best and brightest.

So I took a detour for a bit and read Titanicus, just felt like a pause after Saturnine.

Mortis is a bit of an odd book. On the one hand, it's well written with decent prose and well drawn characters. That's always important, and a lot of Black Library books fall down because of that. There were a lot of sequences I really really enjoyed, like the mass titan battle, the trek through the wasteland, or the troopers holding the ravaged line.

But the Perpetual plotline practically killed the book for me. It was also well written, and Paradise was well conceived as a location and as something for the Emperor's Children to be doing. But I end up glazing over as I read it, because I found all of Oll's fading in and out of visions and memory to be really tedious, I don't care about him at all, the references to Greek myths were painful stuff. Sorry to John French, he's a good writer, but I detest this perpetual plotline and it's a big crack through this entire book.

Oh, and the Dark Angels plot has some good bits but also kinda seems to go nowhere. Seemed like an odd addition really.

So weirdly despite being well written, it's probably my least favourite so far. On to Warhawk!

You should definitely read Fury of Magnus.

I'll give it a look. Any particular reason I should check it out?

It has many good bits and that is all I will say. It's the final piece of the puzzle of why Magnus went full Chaos Traitor instead of just misunderstood sad man.

The Fury Of Magnus is damned good, probably because the author can't really feth about with the timelines all that much this time around. But it dropped a great bombshell and contributed to the overall series.

Wrapped up Warhawk myself not that long ago, it is amazing, was worried that it would be akin to filler, but it manages to give the whole White Scars arc proper closure and delves into some bits of that old fluff, even going so far as referring to that classic Games Day diorama of the Siege of Terra as inspiration for what's happening. Also gives us the Sigismund we want, Keeler does something meaningful and explores the Death Guard a bit more as they come to terms with being walking whoopee cushions now.

Now we wait the long wait for the seventh novel, by AD-B.

ADB is up next? Nice.

Yeah, Dan's going to be doing the final novel, that's what they said ages ago, he started the series, so he'd be the one to end it.

So AD-B will be writing about Eternity Gate I think it's called? Basically Sanguinius taking on greater daemons of khorne.

Cool, really looking forward to Eternity Gate. That's the last big plot point before the final book. Be a helluva job to pull it off I reckon, but they've done a solid job so far.

To me, some parts have felt like filler or could've done without, but as is, everything works into the bigger picture or is the authors tying up loose ends from the many-many-many novels before, like killing off certain traitorous arseholes in satisfying ways. As is, Warhawk and Saturnine are my favourites, there is some good pay-off in there, as well as some amazingly satisfying moments for either side of the conflict.

And for those who haven't yet, the official site has maps to go with each main novel: https://siegeofterra.com/

These have been of great help to further visualize where everything is taking place and where they are at what point.

I think it's pretty challenging to tie up such a massive series and address all the various characters. I'll agree, not everything has worked 100% and there were parts of some books I was less enthusiastic about, but overall the quality has been good enough for me to enjoy every book so far. I can't say the same about the Heresy, where I straight up bounced off of several books due to poor quality.

Those maps are pretty fun. I think the books could do with some maps at the front, to help. I'm reading on Kindle and they don't have maps, but the geography is sometimes a bit tricky to hold in your head.
I'm just starting Warhawk, but so far Solar war and Saturnine are my favourites. Cut everything involving the Perpetuals and I'd be happier too, as is I'm going to skim those bits because I think they're by and large terrible.

For me, the Perpetuals were a cool concept that then instead of being sideshows to the main event who could comment on the futility of it all, little glimpses into the Unification when they served the Emperor and other cool stuff, then they became some super important MacGuffin that needed to be everywhere. Very blegh.

I really dislike making everything that happened in history have something to do with a perpetual, and also increasing the number of them. Also, I liked the version of the story where Ollianus was just a normal guardsman.

It also really damages the setting for me to have human characters alive and talking who remember everything that happened in the past of 40K. This is not so bad for the Heresy, but having characters still around from that time that remember everything really undermines the setting fundamentally in my view.