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 blazinpsycho&typhooni wrote:

 Melissia wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
I suppose if you don't care much for space marine fiction the HH series WOULD be kinda dull

Some of it's okay. I liked the Prospero Burns and A Thousand Sons pairing for the way it demonstrated the same battle from different perspectives, for example.

Most of it's boring tripe though. Even compared to most 40k fiction.

I have to agree. I enjoy my 40k fiction, it's a guilty pleasure kind of like really bad junk food. But the 30k stuff... I feel there's a lot of wasted potential here.

I would like to hear your reasoning why it's boring? Just curious.

I haven't found any 40k books the quality of First Heretic, Thousand Sons, or Betrayer. The space marine battle series is far inferior, in every aspect they could be critiqued, but I've only read maybe a handful of them. Definitely junk food. Read of lot of 40k books and will say that 30k has the best non fantasy black library books.

The Night Lords books were okay. Maybe the best 40k I've read from ADB. Emperor's Gift was so bad I'm considering burning it. It was written for people under 12. I won't read anything by Guy, Gav, James, or Anthony anymore unless they are short stories. They are good at those, but their books are poor to me

I've been avidly buying W40K novels since before BL officially existed, so I always liked to think that I had pretty much got the entire collection (I have, up to a point), and I've had a deep fascination with the background and fluff since Rogue Trader was first introduced, way back when.

So to be presented with a series of novels that explained and detailed the mythical Horus Heresy was very exciting, almost as exciting as hearing that Terry Practchett had written another book (RIP), and , for the first few novels, that excitement seemed justified.

Yes, some weren't quite such a riveting read - Descent of Angels, how boring was that? - but you can take the rough with the smooth, the narrative seemed to be bowling along nicely.

Then it all started to go Pete Tong; suddenly novels were issued in hardback first, then we saw the introduction of these accursed 'trade' paperbacks, which seem a little bigger and more expensive just for the hell of it. But that was just the start; limited editions, 'novellas' (or what should be called sorry, I could only come up with half a book), e-books that take years to become paper versions, audio books that never exist as a novel on your book shelf, reprints of existing novels in anthologies which contain new and unpublished-in-this-format short stories which drive completists like me mad!

But the worst of it is, the narrative has stalled - the Heresy is going nowhere. The start was good, it was strong - helped by having some of BL's best writers producing them - then it seemed to settle down for a bit of a cruise, but the end was still in sight (we all know where it's heading to, that great showdown on Terra). Now? It's spluttered to a halt, it's ran out of petrol and pulled up on the hard shoulder, once proud New York Times best sellers sitting in the drizzle waiting for the emergency services to come along and give them a jump start.

Why? Greed, I suspect. Why else would you take a winning formula and suddenly do everything in your power to piss off all those loyal fans who for years bought your books in the only format available, as soon as they were published? Why wait for a well-written and coherent novel when you can bang out umpteen e-books a month? Why stick to a fairly well-plotted out story arc - Horus the beloved son is tempted, falls and seek to usurp on his father - when you can shoehorn in all sorts of unimportant and barely-linked arcs to the story so that you can go from what should have been 12 to 15 novels to...well, who knows, 40, 50?

It's a real shame, the Horus Heresy could have been an excellent series, but I fear that by the time we finally get the the Battle for Terra we will have passed the point of caring, and it will go the way major films seemed to have gone - it will span 2 or 3 books and be full of pointless padding, like th3 30 novels that came before it. Oh, and they'll probably get C S Goto to write it. Shudder.

I read the first maybe 8-10 HH books and was really having to force myself to read through half of them just because they are so dull. Can't really comment on whether they alter the established fluff or not though.

Much of the legitimate complaints have been said already.
I'll add that I think that the reason they're stalling the plot is to prolong it. It's a well selling series and as long as they keep writing them, they'll keep making money, plot be darned. As a result, the series itself suffers.