Monday 8th of November, 2010

A Thousand Sons Audio - Available Now

Today’s the day – A Thousand Sons Audio is now available for download. This is the first time we’ve ever released an unabridged audio book and what better title to have chosen than Graham McNeill’s New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons novel. Owing to author privileges, Graham received his copy of the audio book last Friday (you can listen to an extract of it here) and spent the weekend immersed in the Horus Heresy. Here’s what he thought to hearing his novel for the first time:

“It’s a funny thing writing a book, as it has many iterations along the way to becoming something I can see on a bookshelf. When the words are in front of me, they’re fluid, always changing, and I can chop and change them at will. They don’t feel like the words of a book, not yet. Then I print it out and read them, and it still feels like I’m back reading an essay at university or school (not that we had fancy things like printers when I was at school…). Then I read it at the manuscript stage, and it starts to feel real, like a proper book. It’s laid out in the proper font, with the chapter headings in place, page numbers and ISBNs. Even now, I can still make changes to it, and wield the Red Pen of Doom, so it’s still not quite there.

And up until now, it was only when I held the printed book in my hand that if was real, was a book that I had to send out into the world and hope people liked. Words read on a page have a special kind of magic, a magic that allows you to picture the scene, hear the dialogue and create your own imaginary vision space for it to come to life. That’s something special, that only books can do, but what about when you hear it read to you?

 I listened to A Thousand Sons on audio book over the weekend, and that’s a whole other way to experience a novel. Martyn Ellis does a fantastic job of plunging you straight into the Heresy mindset with his rumbling tones that immediately had me feeling the heat and dust of Aghoru, and gave me chills when I heard my dialogue being spoken aloud by Ahriman, Phosis T’kar and Hathor Maat. It’s a different way to get into a story, more passive, but in some ways more immersive, as you can let the actor’s voice take you places you might not otherwise have reached on your own.

 As I listened to the confrontation between Magnus and Leman Russ on Shrike, I kept picturing the scene as those two titans squared off. I could feel the tension like I was there watching two tough guys getting ready for a fight, and knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it. There’s a wonderful pressure when a professional actor reads a scene that I don’t get when I read a book myself. That’s something special, and even though I know how it all ends (obviously) I found myself thinking, just another chapter, just to see how that cool bit coming up sounds…

If you can be dragged along by a story, even when you know exactly how it’s going to play out, then you’ve got something pretty special. Even if you’ve read the book, you’ll learn something new, feel a different way about a scene and have your perceptions twisted by the new experience. And isn’t that exactly what should happen with a book about a Legion whose fate is woven by the Architect of Fate…?”

Download the A Thousand Sons Audio Book now.

Posted by The Black Library Team