Teaser

After the loss of Cadia, a group of war-weary elite soldiers stand guard over a remote outpost. But these Kasrkin have more than tiredness to fear, for the forces of Chaos are not through with them yet . . .

Review

A recent trend for Black Library has been to give new authors a chance to try their hand at short story writing. If and when those short stories prove popular, the author gets to write a full-length novel, often featuring the characters from the earlier story. Nowhere is this more evident than the Astra Militarum series of novels, which frequently have a short story to serve as a prequel to the main novel.

Veterans of the Fall has a slightly different origin, but a very interesting one. At least as a student of science fiction history. Yes, there was a short story. Tattershields introduced a bunch of characters serving in the Cadian kasrkin. However, there was then another piece of short fiction. Five of them actually, all first published in the pages of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine. These five stories were a novella told in serial form, a form as old as science fiction itself. Not, however, a form that Black Library does a lot of, at least not since the heady early days of Gotrek and Felix and Warhammer Fantasy.

Joining these two stories is another novella, Veterans of the Fall, from which this book takes its title. Honestly, at a little over two hundred pages, this final novella is long enough that Black Library could reasonably have published it as a novel on its own terms. Instead, they bundled all three stories together and sold them as a single ‘novel.’ For the literary scholars among you, I believe this makes Warhammer 40,000’s first true fix-up novel since the early days of Gaunt’s Ghosts. I will happily be corrected if I’m wrong on that front.

Diving into the story itself, I have to admit that I don’t think it’s one of the best the Astra Militarum range has provided. some of this is down to me not gelling with the writing style, which is nobody’s fault, but is one of those sad facts of reality that crops up if you read more books than is good for you. Like I do. that being said, I do feel as though the choppy nature of serialised fiction sitting in the middle of this book, with a slightly compressed novella following on from there, leads to a few pacing issues.

There’s also a sense that most of Veterans of the Fall is covering familiar ground. There have been a lot of Cadian stories over the past fewe years. Many of them (Justin D Hill’s Minka Lesk series and Edoardo Albert’s Kasrkin are two of the best) have been fantastic. Others have varies between good and serviceable. Unlike some Warhammer readers, I don’t think too many Cadians is a problem, but for me this is one of the lesser Cadian tales. It’s a solid story, but there’s not enough meet on the bones. Some of that is stylistic choices. Some of that is the result of its unique format. I also think that the villains of this particular story fall completely flat, landing somewhere in a land that is cliché even by the standards of franchise identity.

Veterans of the Fall is far from a bad book. As an artefact of publishing history, it’s downright fascinating. But for me, there was a certain something lacking. I just can’t pin down exactly what that something is.

• Contains one short story and two novellas
• First Published 2026
• 373 Pages