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The question I'm asking here is whether BL should check for contradictions to pre-existing 40k fluff before they publish their books.
This might help stop the always annoying conflicts people find after reading two books by different authors that cover the same subject.
It would also help clarify some details about the 40k universe.
What do you guys think?

Only if Codex writers do the same.

No, they shouldn't, because it stifles artistic creativity, and, at times, can prevent the telling of a good story. The 40K universe isn't designed to be consistent, or have every i dotted and t crossed. The various novels, fluff-bits of codices, gaming supplements, video games, and everything else are not meant to form an objective, cohesive whole. What you're reading is reports of things that happened half a galaxy away five thousand years ago, related to you by the fragmentary records kept by a guy who knew a guy who was dating this girl who had a cousin who worked for a guy who once met a guy who might have been there. Some of the things you read will be true, others will be outright lies, and most of it will be the interpretation of an event by an unreliable narrator who may have a biased viewpoint on the subject, and who are far from omniscient.

40K fluff contradicts other 40K fluff.

From what I understand from their own published thoughts and a couple of very brief conversations I have had, many of the BL writters do alot of research. I am in the main much happier with the Novels usually minor changes than those in the Codexes (Grey Knights, Necrons) or even the new rulebook -- allies matrix ignoring / rewriting fluff.

I voted "yes" because I am a big fan of consistency. That said, I will also add that it's a bit late to start now. Apart from having to come up with a speciel brand to denote "approved" novels, GW would first have to go through all the published stuff that already is there and sort out what they want to treat as a template.
In the end, this sort of control is just not something the owners of the franchise and many of the out-house writers want, and obviously some fans would feel the same. It's a shame for people like me, and I still think it has a negative effect on the community by robbing us of much of a "common ground" for discussions ... but in the end, it's just something we have to learn to live with.

Mr Morden wrote:I am in the main much happier with the Novels usually minor changes than those in the Codexes (Grey Knights, Necrons) or even the new rulebook -- allies matrix ignoring / rewriting fluff.

To me, the licensed material holds certain deviations that are much worse than anything I've seen in the GW material so far. Of course it depends on where you look, what your existing perception is like, and what army you're a fan of.

Nah, just give them creative license to do what they want. I would rather read a fluff raping book that is well written than one that sticks 100% to fluff (ha, like there is any consensus on what is fluffy) but is boring to read. Beyond that I just use this simple formula to decide what is canon, Rulebook>Codexes/IA Books>BL Books>Fanfic.

I vote "yes" here. Each of these writers is usually dealing with only a small portion of the setting. They could at least look into what came before.


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Lynata wrote:[the lack of consistency] has a negative effect on the community by robbing us of much of a "common ground" for discussions ...

I couldn't agree more, as you know.

It would be nice if everything flowed together... but part of playing the game is creativity. I mean, its up to us to imagine how tall a space marine really is, and what a bolt round is really capable of doing. To me the fluff leaves some things just vague enough to leave the rest to us to think up.

The poll doesn't allow a differentiated answer.

Editors should check for general consistency like blatant fluff errors or time line errors ("Lex Goto").
It is always okay and necessary for authors to have some freedom when writing stuff, even if it exagerates abilities and equipment found in 40k games. There are different point of views and narrators in the universe after all. Editors should only intervene when it goes too far and will start annoying readers familiar with the 40k background.

Kroothawk wrote:The poll doesn't allow a differentiated answer.

That's what posting is for.

Kroothawk wrote:There are different point of views and narrators in the universe after all. Editors should only intervene when it goes too far and will start annoying readers familiar with the 40k background.

Isn't this what is happening already, though? BL and FFG do have editors, it's just that even editors, just like the writers and the readers, have different points of view about when something goes too far. I think it's pretty much an "all or nothing" approach, lest it just depends on personal preferences yet again.

Not debating that a certain level of exaggeration is fine - that happens in just about every piece of fiction, especially when it's about heroic deeds. But I definitively think there should be limits. For example, it's easier to justify a wider range of abilities as people just are different. On the other hand, technology is always the same, so seeing a bolter or a piece of armour behave like this in one book and like that in another is somewhat irritating.

Technology may be the same, but perception of technology and description of technology are not always the same.

Ask 3 different people to describe how a coffee maker works and see if you get the same 3 answers.

If three coffee machine repairmen give you three different answers then you can be sure that at least two of them are wrong.

Manchu wrote:If three coffee machine repairmen give you three different answers then you can be sure that at least two of them are wrong.

Right. But they still gave you three different answers. Same thing about war books. Chances are if you read three books about Normandy, there are going to be discrepancies in the facts, whether it is what color the clouds were, how the machine guns worked or which side of the beach the counter attack came from (I know little about Normandy, so don't fault me here for that).

A certain amount of fact-checking is nice, but some things are just going to be different due to the vagaries of memory and the style of the author. And that's just real life!

pretre wrote:A certain amount of fact-checking is nice, but some things are just going to be different due to the vagaries of memory and the style of the author. And that's just real life!

Well, people seem to think - and prefer - that the novel they read is an accurate record of the story, not an interpretation. Yet, the latter is how the franchise is currently handled. Either people need to finally accept that it's all about the "lenses" as ADB pointed out, or the authors will have to start reducing discrepancies.

I don't have any illusions about either of the two happening, which is why we will continue to see the problems we have right now.

I think you're shifting between images: how a battle proceeded and how a machine gun works are quite different. The way a machine gun works is (for the purposes of this casual discussion) not a matter of perspective. Any given person who understands how that gun works will have the same understanding as any other given person who also understands how that gun works. Meanwhile, two military historians can legitimately disagree about the course of a battle based on reasonable treatment of the sources. These examples really aren't alike.

Right. How a machine gun works is not in dispute. But how someone remembers a machine gun working can be quite different from how it actually works. How someone describes how a machine gun works can also be quite different.

Of course if two people describe how a model of machine gun works differently, one of them is objectively incorrect and one is correct. Knowing which one without prior knowledge of the subject or a third source is difficult, however.

I think it is all about lenses, as Lynata/ADB said.

A description of the workings of a machine gun: One places the bullets into the muzzle of the barrel after pouring the powder down the same, using a ramrod to drive the charge into place. After removing the ramrod, one points the weapon in the desired direction and squeezes the trigger so that the flint held by the hammer falls onto a rough piece of metal, creating a spark which ignites the powder in the barrel, thereby discharging the bullet.

Or at least that's how I remember it -- ah well, it's through the lens of memory so it's just as valid as anything else.

This is the type of error we're talking about. Not one person using a metaphor of thunder to describe a boltgun firing and another person using a metaphor of an earthquake.

Right. These things happen. Some in-universe sources are more reliable than others.

Muahahahaha...

I'm sorry, that laugh wasn't directed at you, but that huge mushroom cloud of naïveté I saw rising from this thread.

You sir, or er, umm, ma'am, have struck upon the holy grail of all 40k fluff nerds.

That said, GW kind of leans toward confusing fluff to make things easier for themselves. Although I must say that I kind of side with them on some things as it would be hard to know what is historically correct after millenia of dogma, lies, half-truths and misinformation of all kinds has destroyed the truth.

It's probably a good time to point out that heavy-handed editors tend to alienate writers. Dan Abnett doesn't need to work for GW; tell him "You can't do X, it would contradict Y in another book." once too often, and he'll decide it's more hassle than it's worth. Back in the late '80s/early '90s, Bryan Ansell succeded in wrecking GW's first attempt at a fiction line by driving away his editors and writers (who included some relatively famous names, among them Kim Newman [writing under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil], Christopher Priest, David Langford, Tanith Lee, Ramsay Campbell and [almost unbelievably] the pre-fame Terry Pratchett - the latter three of whom all departed without completing any work) with bizarre management edicts (the most famous of which being that nothing should be written in the first person).

GW's fiction, though one would not exactly mistake it for serious literature, is generally of significantly better quality than most franchise fiction, indeed occasionally they publish books which might have been successful without a Warhammer connection (Drachenfels and the Eisenhorn trilogy, for instance). I'll accept a few inconsistencies between novels as the price of keeping decent writers, particularly since the most obvious alternative would be turgid, continuity-laden crap like the Star Wars novels.

Some of the Star Wars novels are actually pretty good, as are the Battletech ones. Conversely, there are 40k novels that suck in spite of all the leeway their authors have. Or even because.

I don't think that consistency has any affect on the quality of a single novel (only when it is compared to other products of the same franchise). It is arguably correct that greater artistic license can make a franchise more attractive for some authors, though. Me, I would say they should just learn to work within established confines of a world and limit their creativity to things that do not violate "da rules" - many other people manage to do that as well.

Lynata wrote:Some of the Star Wars novels are actually pretty good, as are the Battletech ones. Conversely, there are 40k novels that suck in spite of all the leeway their authors have. Or even because.

Well, I'm hardly an authority on Star Wars, but the handful of spin-off novels and comics I read back in the 1990s (Dark Empire, the Thrawn trilogy and some unutterably terrible ones by Kevin J. Anderson, who would later go on to ruin Dune with terrible sequels) were 100% unadulterated crap. Significantly, despite Star Wars policy of rigorous continuity-keeping, none of them successfully duplicated the tone of Star Wars (i.e. classic adventure serial stuff in a space opera setting), but rather read like exceedingly generic science fiction (or, in the case of Dark Empire, pretty much just rewrote the plot of the three films with different names). In fairness, I now recall that I did enjoy playing Knights of the Old Republic, and read some Jon Ostrander-penned comics set between the films which weren't actually that bad.

Lynata wrote:I don't think that consistency has any affect on the quality of a single novel (only when it is compared to other products of the same franchise). It is arguably correct that greater artistic license can make a franchise more attractive for some authors, though. Me, I would say they should just learn to work within established confines of a world and limit their creativity to things that do not violate "da rules" - many other people manage to do that as well.

Whilst I'm conscious of the fact that I read GW's fiction because I'm a fan, not because I expect literary brilliance - I have literary fiction for that, some of which contains neither fights, nor explosions nor genetically-engineered superhumans - I'm really not that bothered by continuity. Doctor Who - which I uncritically love - has about five different and inconsistent continuities, after all. I must admit that I find it more than slightly weird that a good number of people here on Dakka (I'm not pointing a finger at you here, it's just a general tendency I've observed) seem to judge a GW novel on its adherence to canon, not on whether it was an entertaining story in its own right. (I would, however, qualify that statement with the admission that I find writing which fails to maintain the expected tone [e.g. C.S. Goto], unless done very cleverly [e.g. Sandy Mitchell] both obtrusive and disappointing, but it's tone and style that are the important things to me, not trivia like whether boltgun shells have cases or precisely how tall a marine is.)

Wow, I thought Dark Empire was amazing.

TBF, most of what's wrong with BL's products has nothing to do with canon conflicts.

English Assassin wrote:Well, I'm hardly an authority on Star Wars, but the handful of spin-off novels and comics I read back in the 1990s (Dark Empire, the Thrawn trilogy and some unutterably terrible ones by Kevin J. Anderson, who would later go on to ruin Dune with terrible sequels) were 100% unadulterated crap. Significantly, despite Star Wars policy of rigorous continuity-keeping, none of them successfully duplicated the tone of Star Wars (i.e. classic adventure serial stuff in a space opera setting), but rather read like exceedingly generic science fiction (or, in the case of Dark Empire, pretty much just rewrote the plot of the three films with different names). In fairness, I now recall that I did enjoy playing Knights of the Old Republic, and read some Jon Ostrander-penned comics set between the films which weren't actually that bad.

Trust me, I know what you mean - my personal collection of Star Wars books isn't that big either, specifically because I didn't think that most of them held up to the original movies. There were a number of exceptions to this, though. Also, some of the books were good specifically because they didn't quite follow the space opera setting.

For example, a number of products delved more into the "military fiction", which I think was a pretty good idea. It's a different style, but one that has its merit, for the setting does provide a lot of potential for this in addition to the classical "adventurer's tale". Most notably there were the Rogue Squadron comics, but I also enjoyed "To the Last Man", telling the tale of an Imperial Lieutenant's career. Movie material right there - just not for a movie in the style of the original trilogy but rather something like the movies "Zulu" (which was indeed the inspiration for "To the Last Man"). Yes, Star Wars will forever be connected with lightsaber-clashing knights using the force, but the setting as a whole offers so much more. It's a living, breathing world. Exactly like 40k; people aren't just playing Space Marines and Chaos, are they?



But if you like the Space Opera aspect, I recommend you take a look at the Legacy comics. It's sort of both "new and old" - combining popular elements from all previous eras into a big adventure in the sense of the original trilogy: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Legacy

English Assassin wrote:I must admit that I find it more than slightly weird that a good number of people here on Dakka (I'm not pointing a finger at you here, it's just a general tendency I've observed) seem to judge a GW novel on its adherence to canon, not on whether it was an entertaining story in its own right.

For me, it's just got to be both. If the story isn't good, I won't enjoy reading it. If the story does not fit into my perception of the setting, the link between the book and the world it supposedly portrays is broken. As you said, you read 40k fiction because you're a fan, and so do I. Basically, I can do without books that "attack" my understanding of the world and just fail to "fit in". That they are robbing us of the "common ground" for the purpose of discussing fluff is just yet another negative effect.

Yes, a cohesive and canonical universe should be developed. Every other big fictional setting does it. An author having to research their background before writing on it isn't a big deal, and I don't feel bad for them having to do it. It's part of their job.

Just last night read a battle between the SoB and Red Corsairs that happened in 744.M41 when the Badab War didn't even happen until the 900's.M41. Annoys me to say the least that these kind of basic errors exist.

Harriticus wrote:An author having to research their background before writing on it isn't a big deal, and I don't feel bad for them having to do it. It's part of their job.

Well, granted, that depends on what the author wants to write about. 40k has become incredibly large - so much stuff was written over the decades that even "fluff nuts" can still make mistakes because they missed out on some obscure reference in an older book or some White Dwarf article.

That said, I have heard that GW is very supportive of its licensees and authors are welcome to ask them for stuff - it's just that, from what I have been told, a lot of writers apparently do not do so because they don't want to feel dependent or constrained, preferring to merrily type away as they feel.

As for other big factional settings ... there is Star Trek with its difference between "hard canon" and "soft canon", but at least the soft canon is supposed to tie-in with the hard canon, so you'll only have differences between soft canon sources. With 40k, everything is as valid as the next book, which means that consistency is entirely at the author's mercy.

Yes. To avoid horrible things like multilaser armed Astartes who do backflips in Terminator armour.

Lynata wrote:For me, it's just got to be both. If the story isn't good, I won't enjoy reading it. If the story does not fit into my perception of the setting, the link between the book and the world it supposedly portrays is broken. As you said, you read 40k fiction because you're a fan, and so do I. Basically, I can do without books that "attack" my understanding of the world and just fail to "fit in". That they are robbing us of the "common ground" for the purpose of discussing fluff is just yet another negative effect.

Fair enough, it really doesn't bother me as much, at least until we reach the level of nonsense contained in, say, Deliverance Lost, which just makes no bloody sense at all. Obviously it doesn't help that it's not a particularly competent novel either.

Lynata wrote:As for other big factional settings ... there is Star Trek with its difference between "hard canon" and "soft canon", but at least the soft canon is supposed to tie-in with the hard canon, so you'll only have differences between soft canon sources. With 40k, everything is as valid as the next book, which means that consistency is entirely at the author's mercy.

But then Star Trek also notably structures whole plotlines around reconciling contradictions in canon (like all that awfulness with the Klingons in Enterprise), just for the sake of pleasing a few nerdy die-hard fans. (Obviously Enterprise would have been rubbish anyway, but that didn't help it.) I will be most disappointed should GW lower themselves to such appalling fanwankery.

Sparks_Havelock wrote:Yes. To avoid horrible things like multilaser armed Astartes who do backflips in Terminator armour.

In fairness, He Who Shall Not Be Named is hardly a typical example, and the checking process should in his case simply have ensured that he was not contracted to write any novels at all.

Terminator being armed with a Multi-laser isn't that ridiculous a concept and I could easily buy it. Many Chapters have customized weapons.

Backflipping Terminators is stupid though, but I've heard worse.