Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Okay please don't click spoiler if you haven't read the book. I am not responsible for ruining your enjoyment of it.

Welcome to the disappointment SW fans felt when we read the burning of Prospero.

He's overated and people who think he's a good writer need to expand their reading habits beyond 40k books.

^ Disagree - I'm a WOLF MAN 100% and prospero burns was a great book...
Only one flaw - there isn't much of the burning watched through SW eyes (fortunately, we will get graphic novel soon).....
IMHO Abnett is the best BL writer...Know no Fear was not his best work...but still...

We got a single chapter that addressed the title of the damn book, the thousand sons had a far better version of the fight frankly i felt cheated.

Turning the archaeologist into a enhanced human was crap, when they turned full grown men into proto-astartes it was highly dangerous requiring years of surgery and cybernetic enhancement, and the majority died from the attempt.

But oh no what does he do he has them remove his flesh and enhance it like it was nothing, if that Technic existed it'd be a wide spread way to improve adults.

Then you have an untrained human mind taking on a demon and not going mad from having everything you believed in destroyed.

The whole "there are no wolves on fenris" went no where fast and got a few throw away line at the end that dont make a whole lot of sense.

The few good bits were horribly over shadowed by his self insertion char that just destroyed the pace of the book.

 mwnciboo wrote:
this book could easily have a been a 600/700 page epic, or a two volumes. [/spoiler]

There is The Mark of Calth coming next year, sommer/early autumn I believe. It looks like it's going to be short stories again though, this might not finish all the parts you were on about but then again might be exactly what is needed to finish Know No fear.

KNF ranks up there with one of my favorites. I am however, an Ultramarines player and Dan Abnett fanboy.

 cvtuttle wrote:
KNF ranks up there with one of my favorites. I am however, an Ultramarines player and Dan Abnett fanboy.

Thing is, I am an Abnett Fan and also a it of a closet Guilliman fan too. I lack objectivity because I genuinely enjoy Dan Abnett's take on things, right down to the way he never say's Chaos in the Ghost books, it's always Arch-Enemy or BloodPact. I like the way he re-interprets fluff but keeps it broadly in line with the conventions of the 30k/40k universe. So for me the following is my take on his HH contributions.

Horus Rising (9/10) Set the standard for the rest of the series and captured almost everyone's rapt attention.
Legion (10/10 Outstanding extremely clever, well thought out and broke my pre-conceptions of the Alpha Legion completely to the point where I don't see them as loyalist or traitor)
Prospero Burns (9/10) Enjoyed the different take on it, with Wyrdmake and others being extremely well written, genuinely liked how it was handled, I now see Magnus as a mis-understood character.
Know no fear (6/10) Premise awesome, intro-awesome, middle section-okay, end-almost an after thought didn't sit well with me or with the story. It felt like a draft or a bit undeveloped.

If I'm honest with you, it didn't feel like Dan Abnett's work. He writes detail/or describes in such a concise and engaging manner, often with clever undertones that is the hallmark of many of his books, they are not simple 2-dimensional stories like many 40k / 30k Fiction. There is a general lack of sophistication in 40k writing, with the HH series being in the Vanguard of the more high-end more intellectually stimulating fluff , and to see Dan Abnett (in my opinion) miss the mark is bit disconcerting.

I see what you're talking about, and I had much of the same thoughts at the end of the book. I chalked it up to either one of two things:
A. Dan Abnett is doing what he does best and will have another few books released on the subject
or
B. Had some really epic material in the first rendition of the book, then the editors got their hands on it and cut out some stuff because it was waaaaaaay too long to put into one book. But really, who could blame Dan for putting too much into KNF? Its one of the most pivotal battles of the HH, in my opinion.

It nice to find at least one other, makes me feel a bit less like I'm being overly harsh or critical.

I have Dan Abnett on Twitter, and have had back and forth with him over twitter now and again. I don't really want to ask a question about this because it's not appropriate or an intelligent thing to do. Maybe it will come out in the future. One thing I would speculate on would be that Abnett will be doing the Terra Book of the Assault on the Warmasters Barge judging on the return of Ollanius Pious to the Fluff? (What's the equivalent of Retconning, a Retconn back to the original - Is it a"RE-CON"?)

@Brotheralexo's I think your B. scenario seems to be the most logical and most likely. It's a pity because to me, Calth is like Istvaan or Prospero, as one of the largest Legions seeks to take the Largest Legion out of the game in one fell swoop.

Having invested in and read some of the really long, series of Gaunts Ghost's, and others I would have no problem devouring 1000 pages on Calth. Bearing in mind I paid a ridiculous amount with FW for the 1st PRE-HERESY Book, I wouldn't think twice about buying a 1000 page Epic from DA.

This book felt like Diet HH, or Dan Abnett Lite......

 DarthMarko wrote:

IMHO Abnett is the best BL writer...Know no Fear was not his best work

I agree with these two points. I put Know No Fear as a middle of the pack book. There are certainly worse and better books, but it didn't suck.

I loved Know No Fear but I agree it was quite rushed at the end. My bigger concern, however, was the fact that Kor Pheadon was wailing on Guilliaman for a while. This is a freakin primarch we are talking about, he should of snapped Kor Phaedon (who wasn't even a full space marine keep in mind) like a twig in half a second.

Indeed, this is my beef Abnett in particular as he can never seem to scale the primarchs correctly. Some moments they are towering gods of war, while others they are just basically big marines.

Other examples include Legion where he has Alpharius stabbed by a guardsman and in Prospero burns where he has Magnus vape half the enemy with his mind then get curbstomped the next second by Russ. And of course my favorite is the whole daemon being present at Nikea despite the fact that the Emperor, Magnus, and several primarchs are there and seem to have no care.

Now some of it is a story problem where GW writes their BL authors into a hole. For example, Kor Phaedon must live, magnus' body must be broke, and in cases like fear to tread the red angel must magically be created. But what bugs me is the way the authors so haphazardly seem to do so. Does Guilliman have to magically appear in every BL short story, couldn't Kor Phaedon have been defeated in space, and the list goes on.

Bare in mind Kor Phaedon was using sorcery that was totally alien to anything Guilliaman had ever encountered before, he was never famed for his psychic powers so he'd not have great defense against it.

Russ beat Magnus because as was seen in the thousand sons Russ had the power to quiet the warp or something that made spell casting really difficult, so Magnus a man used to using his great powers in combat was suddenly without most of the options he'd grown used to commanding.

This was the first and only 40k book I've ever tried to read. I made it up to the second chapter and just said no more.

I would consider myself well read, but the 40k books aren't for me. I'll just stick to the game.

hobojebus wrote:
Welcome to the disappointment SW fans felt when we read the burning of Prospero.

He's overated and people who think he's a good writer need to expand their reading habits beyond 40k books.

I couldn't agree with you more. Talentless hack is the nicest think I could say about him, amazes me how he still gets work..


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kronk wrote:

 DarthMarko wrote:

IMHO Abnett is the best BL writer...Know no Fear was not his best work

I agree with these two points. I put Know No Fear as a middle of the pack book. There are certainly worse and better books, but it didn't suck.

Lol, I have to disagree. None of the BL authors are particularly talented, so being the best of that bunch isn't that hard.

No I couldn't do better, but I know my limits.

g0atsticks wrote:This was the first and only 40k book I've ever tried to read. I made it up to the second chapter and just said no more.
I would consider myself well read, but the 40k books aren't for me. I'll just stick to the game.

Some aren't that bad. It's just that, in my opinion, anything with Marines has a tendency to revolve around horribly exaggerated demi-gods bitchslapping the antagonist of the week around, aka "bolterporn", because that's a huge appeal for a large section of their fans (regardless of the Marines' original fluff offering potential for so much more, as some few stories do indeed show).

Get a "general" short story anthology (Dark Imperium, Tales from the Dark Millennium) and check out other options. These anthologies usually contain stories about several different factions from several different authors. At least that's what I would recommend, if you ever want to give BL a second chance.

Or get Deff Swkadron for the sheer hilarity.

 buddha wrote:
I loved Know No Fear but I agree it was quite rushed at the end. My bigger concern, however, was the fact that Kor Pheadon was wailing on Guilliaman for a while. This is a freakin primarch we are talking about, he should of snapped Kor Phaedon (who wasn't even a full space marine keep in mind) like a twig in half a second.

Indeed, this is my beef Abnett in particular as he can never seem to scale the primarchs correctly. Some moments they are towering gods of war, while others they are just basically big marines.

He 'scales' them differently because they're all different sizes with different temperaments and abilities. Alpharius and Omegon are said to look like simply large Space Marines, while Angron is a giant ball of muscle, Fulgrim is tall but lean, etc. Every Primarch is different, so describing them all as towering demigods of pure martial awesomeness would simply be wrong.

My memory of the Kor Phaeron fight is a bit hazy, but I do recall the odds being in Kor Phaerons favour. IIRC, Guilliman fought his way through a bunch of Word Bearers to get to him and Phaeron had the upper hand at the start of the fight because of that.

The Primarchs are powerful, but the whole 'demigod powerful' part is toned down a lot in the HH books. That's part of the mythology around the HH in the 41st millenium, not how it was.

 buddha wrote:
Other examples include Legion where he has Alpharius stabbed by a guardsman and in Prospero burns where he has Magnus vape half the enemy with his mind then get curbstomped the next second by Russ. And of course my favorite is the whole daemon being present at Nikea despite the fact that the Emperor, Magnus, and several primarchs are there and seem to have no care.

Magnus was off guard during that entire fight. He wanted to be punished. He certainly could have crushed the Space Wolf fleet in orbit, or swept them away when on the surface with a flick of his hand. He didn't want to - he knew he had personally failed the Emperor, and was accepting of his punishment. He had an 11th hour change of heart and saved what remained of his legion at the end.

 buddha wrote:
Now some of it is a story problem where GW writes their BL authors into a hole. For example, Kor Phaedon must live, magnus' body must be broke, and in cases like fear to tread the red angel must magically be created. But what bugs me is the way the authors so haphazardly seem to do so. Does Guilliman have to magically appear in every BL short story, couldn't Kor Phaedon have been defeated in space, and the list goes on.

That's not really GW writing them into a hole - it's them putting themselves in the hole in the first place. The Heresy has established set peices, and the fates of the Primarchs during the Heresy are known. So there's not much leeway the writers have in what happens to the major players.

There's completely new characters, who are surviving because they're the 'heart' of the series. Loken, Garro, Kor Phaeron, Erebus, etc. These are the characters weren't actually following through the story, not the Primarchs themselves, so killing them early just wasn't on the cards.

Regarding the OP, I completely agree with his criticisms of Know No Fear. Added to those, I couldn't stand the writing style of making it read like a tactical report. It put me off majorly, and it took me a few attempts to actually finish the book. Definitely the weakest of the series I've read so far.