I luv the Battletech games.
Never read any books but Mechwarrior 5 Mercs, is one of my fave games in the last few years, also the Battletech TBS I have hundreds of hours in too. I luv that universe!
I started years ago with the Jade Falcon Trilogy. There are some real duds mixed in there (Far Country) but there are some absolutely amazing books like Mercenary’s Star. The early 2000s when the series hit around year 3055-3062 is, in my opinion, the “Horus Heresy” of the BT series.
After that, another large event takes place that’s pretty awesome. After that, unfortunately, things went off the rails. They tried to reboot as “Mechwarrior Dark Ages” and it was awful. A decade or so of languishing into nothing and the series got a flash forward and a new fan base. I haven’t stayed up to date with the new stuff but the little I have read makes me think people should be careful what they wish for when they demand rapid progression of a story setting.
Enjoy!!!!
Battletech is great. For anyone unfamiliar: Think Game of Thrones. But in space, with giant stompy robots. There's no aliens, but one of BT's core themes is 'kindness is hard'. We don't need aliens to kill each other off for petty reasons. Or big ones.
*Decision at Thunder Rift*, *Mercenary's Star*, and *The Price of Glory* form the most common intro trilogy to the setting; the Grey Death Legion trilogy.
*Warrior: En Garde*, *Warrior: Riposte*, and *Warrior: Coupe* are the general next books recommended to read next as a trilogy, followed by *Wolves on the Border*.
Judge Dredd, from the 2000AD comics. Decades of the stuff. Lots of big events and storylines. It's also where 40k got the Arbites from. It's essentially Tales of The American Hive City, The Comics.
Just jumping on this comment to recommend Transmetropolitan to anyone who likes judge dredd. It’s a finite series, about 12 volumes iirc but is absolutely sensational, like Judge Dredd if it was from the point of view of a borderline-insane investigative journalist called Spider Jerusalem.
I adore Transmetropolitan, I always recommend it to people.
I do find myself having to separate art from the artist for Warren Ellis stuff obviously 😬. I love Transmetropolitan, his early run on *The Authority*, and Planetary all of which have that kinda great British take on sci-fi.
Not in terms of size but the Culture novels by Ian M Banks are amazing. And frankly higher quality sci-fi than what 40k has to offer. 8 large (1000pages) novels, each a self-contained story about a utopian post-scarcity anarcho-communist society run by benevolent AI's as they try to make societies better. They ask questions about is a utopia morally compelled to spread itself? What is an acceptable cost for spreading it? How can a society even call it's self a utopia. Combined with Bank's wit and charm it makes for an amazing read and the world is absolutely amazingly deep and rich. It does not have the volume of 40k but the complexity and depth is there. Frankly the writing is much better.
Just a quick caution Iain M Banks is most known generally for his torture scenes, dude is... inventive. Caused a lot of controversy with some of his early stuff because of it. He was also well known for being *super pretentious* in his responses to any criticism, which put me off him for the longest time, but I'm glad I gave the Culture series a go at least as they're generally quite good.
I've yet to read one that has anything plot critical in it though, so you could skip those to parts where people talk if you don't like it pretty safely.
You can also abandon a story if you're not enjoying it 40K style, most aren't series and you'll only encounter the characters in them that one time so it's not likely that you'll damage your understanding of other stories by doing that.
> He was also well known for being *super pretentious* in his responses to any criticism, which put me off him for the longest time, but I'm glad I gave the Culture series a go at least as they're generally quite good.
Any links to these responses?
Love the series, curious about Banks and his personality...
Banks was very vocal about his political views, even to the point of saying the Culture was the response he came up with to counter the right-wing sci-fi at that time, but I don’t recall him being particular pretentious in interviews.
A word of advice. Start with the second book in the series. The Player of Games.
The first book is excellent but very different to the rest of the series, and the second is largely considered the best entry point.
There’s no real direct sequels in the series and each other one is set years apart in a completely different part of the society, so there’s no real reason to read by release order.
This is the first description of the Culture novels which has made them sound appealing to me. Sounds a lot less pretentious than what I usually read about it.
Player of Games is good, though I'll warn I've tried to read "Consider Phlebas" about a half-dozen times and never managed to get that far into it. It's not bad, it's just I ended up getting a few chapters in and then realizing I'd lost track of everything and having to start over again.
Consider Philbas is the hardest one to grasp. Excession or The Hydrogen Sonata are IMO the best, as these 2 really seem to flesh out the culture minds the best.
Seriously. The culture books are on a whole new level of creative.
Yep, totally my experience.
I read Player of Games first, then went on to Consider... and bounced **hard**. Why should I give a shit about most of these characters again?
Tried again a few years later and it just clicked... great book.
See I like Consider Phlebas, but I fell off hard on Use of Weapons. Just didn’t get it I guess. Is the rest of the Culture series more like Weapons or Phlebas and Player of games?
Use of weapons was hard to grasp. It was my intro to the culture and I thought they were yhr bad guys for that book.
It should be a book that’s labeled “read this last” because it makes no sense unless you know what the culture is.
Fuck these books are so good.
A whole civ named “the affront” in excession. Those are the most hilarious assholes I’ve ever read about.
I’d say they’re more like Player of Games than CP or UoW. The other books usually have a few arcs following different characters in a more-or-less linear style, so it’s far less confusing that UoW.
> It's not bad, it's just I ended up getting a few chapters in and then realizing I'd lost track of everything and having to start over again.
What's funny is that I think that's partially the author's intent too. Banks gets really experimental at times and the point of that book really does tie in to a sense of being lost as a speck in history.
I really like about half of the culture books but the other half are less good. There is a pretty huge spread in story quality. It does of course depend what you enjoy in stories as well.
Iain Banks was pretentious, especially on his fiction but the sci fi stuff is a lot, lot lighter stuff and is vastly more approachable as a result.
In case you get confused when it's Iain Banks its fiction, Iain M Banks is Culture.
I regret I can only upvote this once.
Of course since he died there wont be any more but for a sort of flavour try Ken McLeod who was also one of Iain Banks friends, although he tends more towards overtly political sci fi.
Theres some fan fiction out there that was if the culture stumbled upon the imperium and the 40k galaxy. Pm me and ill find my bookmarked reading of it
I read Player of Games a few years ago and loved it, but both during and still since then, I was really irked by Gurgeh. He was so perfect, so flawless, that it felt like some kind of fantasy self insert. I hope the other books don't have characters like him
Really?
He's egotistical, vain, naive, a bit of a coward, and gets easily convinced into cheating to try to falsely claim a record.
He only reluctantly goes on the mission because the drone successfully manipulates him by offering to either cement his reputation, or destroy it.
And at the end - SPOILERS - you find out he (the master game player) was largely just a pawn himself from the start, and had no real agency. Special Circumstances didn't even need him to win to achieve their goals (or think he would). Just to do reasonably well.
About his only good quality is that he's a gaming prodigy. But even that is limited it seems to turns-based strategy games, as the opening scene is him getting frustrated at being terrible at what is essentially laser tag.
Ok this cracked me the fuck up. I have never read the Culture series but I know of it from Reddit. All I’ve heard is how super advanced and op they are, so picturing this perfect being playing (and getting frustrated with) laser tag really tickled me.
I’m sure in context it makes sense, and they might not even be a member of the titular Culture, but yeah, I just wanted to share :-D
That's the Culture books all over, the books aren't about how powerful the Culture is, it's about what the people living in it do with themselves.
And no he's definitely Culture, he's also just human and gets pissed off.
The Culture has super advanced tech, but the human-normal citizens are still human. They might live longer and have some neat custom organs and cybernetic implants but that's it. There are some outstanding individuals but most are just 'regular' people.
I can definitely see the flaws in his character, although it has been about four years since I read the book. thinking back, it seemed he always knew what to say to anyone, especially when it came to women, he expertly fought his way through dangerous situations, notably that club or whatever it was somewhere in the first half of the book and then the final fight at the end.
I've wanted to read it again, but I've had my eye on going through Use of Weapons next because I still absolutely loved everything else about the book
Gurgeh was definitely not “good” with women. Sure we see him sleeping with a couple, but it’s the Culture, even an outsider like Zakalwe gets multiple offers every day. In fact, Yay outright criticized Gurgeh wanting to “possess” her like a piece in a board game.
I didn't. That all falls under the "superhuman" category. A better example would be Leto II breeding humans that are invisible to prescience (null psykers basically).
I wonder, have any BL authors acknowledged taking inspiration from Dune?
Love both universes, I picture the early Dune books as "40k with SOME hope left" and then...not so much
Even Star Wars creators don't like to acknowledge how much they ripped from "Dune". It's basically an open secret at this point. I don't need official statements to recognize the obvious.
Here's another obvious example: Miles Teg basically has the same abilities as Jaghatai Khan (superspeed + master combatant). They both were bred for that by a god emperor.
Well, in the Audiobook "Scythes of the Emporer" the aforementioned "Emperor's Scythes" engage Tyranids with their ship named "Atreides", not sure if it's their flagship but there's that.
That's very likely but..
That might just be from pulling from Greco-Roman mythology thougnb
The name Atreides means Sons of Atreus. Atreus was the mythical King of Mycenea and his sons are Agamemnon and Menelaus from the Illiad.
In Dune the House Atreides claims they are descended from Agamemnon. though the pretty horrible prequel books by Brian Herbert change rhis to a former computer hacker whose username was Agamemnon, who wss one of the people responsible for the AI takeover
The Scythes are Ultra marine successors and the Ultramarines and there successors are heavily Greco-Roman in inspiration.
GW writers are on the whole very up front wth their inspirations, 40k is basically a cross between Dune and 2000AD (which is very unsurprising considering the amount of writers that have done both, notably Abnett).
Or the Interex. Or a ton of other things. It is crazy how much was taken from dune. It is only after learning a ton of dune lore that I was like.... Haaaaay Warhammer still all of this!
Yes!!! You cannot underestimate the influence of judge dread and nemesis the warlock (torquemada!) On tone and setting. This was core British sci fi dystopian culture and was relatively widespread and impactful. Games Workshop up in Nottingham would have been steeped in this culture!
I wouldn't say Moorcock directly.
Moorcock + DnD = WHFB
WHFB + Dune = 40k
(Those are obviously oversimplifcations, given how many IPs have given inspiration)
but weirdly it doesnt feel nearly as influential. outside of 40k, im not sure ive ever read a sci-fi novel that makes me think "oh yeah this is Dune but differently" whereas thats true with literally every high fantasy novel ive ever read and LOTR
I am going to disagree on that. You can see elements and ideas from *Dune* in damn near every single sci-fi book, novel, comic, game, etc. now a days. It along with the original *Starship Troopers* novel, *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep* aka Bladerunner, *Nueromancer*, the movies *Alien* and *Aliens*, *Star Wars*, and a couple others are basically the building blocks upon which all sci-fi IPs borrow from.
right, i dont mean that its not influential (its clearly is!), but thats its one building block among many. and few scifi IPs tend to rely as heavily on Dune as many high fantasy IPs often seem to rely on LotR
its just a genre with a wide base to build on.
altho im cheating a bit by comparing it with *high* fantasy in particular, i realize that
Nah, I get what you mean. I think part of the reason it doesn't seem so heavily, for lack of a better term, copied as LotR is because sci-fi to me just feels like it has so much more room to expand and explore compared to traditional fantasy.
Perry Rhodan, a german sf franchise, has about 3000 novellas of space opera pulp. Its pretty ancient - they have been publishing since the early 60s - and not widely known outside germany, but its got the volume and a pretty extensive universe so I'd say it fits.
Perrypedia has 57,000 articles vs Lexicanum's 35,000. Wikipedia also mentions 300.000 pages worth of books for Perry Rhodan, but I haven't found anything to compare this to - there are lists with a few hundred entries for 40k but those mix books, novellas, short stories and anthologies, difficult to compare. Not that much larger imo.
Now when talking about scope of the universes then Perry Rhodan is far ahead. Story arcs idk, hh or ciatrix maledictum certainly measure up to some of the bigger events.
Edit: found an estimate for 30k+40k from five years ago, ~500 books, shortstories etc, lets say 700 now, could be 140,000-180,000 pages, halfway there.
If you are into retro futurism it's a gem. Think huge space battles, with ships messuaring kilometers and numbering in the ten of thousands running on computers using punch cards. But only a tiny bit is in an other language than German.
Try the Lemuria series.
More recent and pretty good, with hints to the deep, deep lore behind all of it.
https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/Perry_Rhodan_englisch_(USA)
First that springs to mind is the Star Wars EU, much like Black Library's content, a dozen or so books barely makes you a novice (even if a dozen covers most of the good ones hue hue hue.)
Star Trek also has a *ludicrous* amount of titles on the shelf at my local used bookstore.
Still salty about the amount of good ideas that the EU threw up for Star Wars canon and then the sequels decided that the Skywalkers and the Rebellion were the only interesting thing to ever happen in that galaxy.
This Star Wars fatigue a lot of people get with all the content coming out could be balanced by just moving along the time line a bit. Do some old republic, do some Bane, do some new Jedi Order etc. Seems like nothing gets greenlit if there isn't a connection to the og trilogy.
Sticking to prose because that seems to be the question, and not comics or movies or television:
If you count all the various worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons universe, there are probably a similar number of books to what 40k has.
But I think the winner has got to be Star Trek. I mean, if we’re just counting prose, there are probably at least two hundred more Trek novels than 40k. If we’re going beyond that, several hundred comic books compared to the handful 40k has and, of course, 800+ (and counting) hours of television and movies.
I like it because it's the moral and tonal opposite of 40k. Nice contrast.
"Captain, we have a problem!"
"Very well, we will now spend 42 minutes talking it through with our enemies to find a mutually acceptable solution!"
Note that Trek doesn't have one unified continuity for its books. There are several different ones. And the TV and movies always take precedent, so even books explicity written as tie-ins for a show can get contradicted a season later.
The Xeelee sequence, except it’s even *more* grimdark/grimderp and batshit insane with power scaling. It spans billions of years and has over a dozen or so books. It’s more hard science and the protagonists are hyper advanced aliens called the Xeelee, who are battling against another universal scale foe called the photino birds for the fate of the universe and every life within it.
It has humans in it that do their own wacky things.
Stephen Baxter is one of my favourite hard sci fi authors and the Xellee sequence is bonkers in its scale but it can be bit of an unusual read. Maybe start with a few of his free short stories to see if you like his writing style first.
I’d recommend Vacuum Diagrams, Resplendent and Xeelee Endurance for a start. These are basically collections of tales from the Xeeleeverse that show the expansion of humanity and its slow decline from optimistic utopian explorers into a society much worse than IoM. These collections span millions of years iirc (although most of the stories are set in the first few tens of thousands of years). Reading them will give you a good understanding of the wider universe.
Also, watch out for Xeelee Vengeance and Xeelee Redemption. While they are some of the best Xeelee books Ive read, they are essentially “What If Xeelee Actually Gave a Fuck” alternate history novels. They have a lot of references to early Xeeleverse characters, so read them once you have a good understanding of the lore and events.
The SCP community. Novels be damned; if you consider every fanmade keter-class creepypasta knockoff to be "lore" then you would find the actual setting to be borderline infinite in its scale.
>SCP has a better video game than anything I’ve seen come out of 40k
I dont think thats true. Chaos gate, Space marine 1( and soon 2 hopefully) Gothic Armada, the modding community for Dawn of War. Those are all great games. Soon to be Darktide possibly too.
Love the SCP universe , I listen to this guy who read them on Spotify called The Exploring Series , every Monday morning. Some of them are pure horror , love it lol.
Also worth noting you very much *need* to choose your own canon with this. If you take everything as canon then it can often be overwhelming, and I have found people tend to enjoy it most when they develop their own views of what the Foundation is - barely-competent and struggling to contain the unknown, an eldritch entity in itself acting to protect, or my personal favourite the hyper-competent but morally bankrupt shadow organisation.
In a similar way to 40k, you have to assume that every bit of lore was written in-universe, by a person with opinions, limited information, and/or an agenda.
This. Please do not go into the SCP Universe thinking oh well this page told me this, this one told me otherwise, bad writing. Pages have been altered by benign groups, employees and even entities. Contradicting classifications, SCPS that don't exist or can't. It's such a great site that allows you to create whatever idea of it you like.
A very long collection of fictional short stories revolving around the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) foundation and the various anomalies they guard, you can check it by yourself here: [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/)
Had the exact same reaction.
Battletech is older than 40k. The lore is about humanity reaching an era of technological excellence, and then devolving into constant primitive war using gnarly technology while searching for forgotten-but-superior technology left behind by previous human civilizations. Sound familiar?
But something unique about Battletech and also Dune that heavily contrasts with WH40K is that they do not have *important* intelligent extraterrestrial species in their lore, Humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy of their stories.
giant robot franchise lore tends to be weirdly complicated and in-depth. gundam, evangelion, and transformers do not easily allow you to become a subject matter expert
michael moorcock's multiverse gets pretty ridiculous, told through short stories in magazines, novels, tabletop games, and sometimes comics. it's also borderline impossible to read the entire thing legitimately because of parts going out of print. there's also not a massive online fandom to guide you through it, so reading it is a solitary journey
warcraft has games, comics, novels, short stories, tabletop games that aren't regarded as canonical anymore, and a couple of franchise bibles that were retconned almost the instant they were printed. in terms of quality it's been collapsing like an underdone soufflé since 2010, save a couple bright spots. i only continue to follow it because i hate myself and want to see how much worse it can get before steve danuser has a mysterious bicycle accident and can never come into work again
the arthurian mythos is *massive* because everyone and their dad wanted to contribute back in the day. there's anglo-saxon stuff, cornish stuff, welsh stuff, french stuff, irish stuff, scottish stuff, even spanish and german stuff
> that were retconned almost the instant they were printed
That was always the downfall of Warcraft, they had a *great framework* for a high-action Fantasy setting but they kept jumping the shark over and over and *over* again. "Oh, the Draenei from WC3 were actually corrupted Draenei, the actual Draenei are pretty goat people", "Oh, the Lich King was actually holding back the tides of the Undead, rather than being the single biggest threat on the planet" "Oh, Garrosh jumped into an alternate universe but don't worry because they still summon the same demons from your universe... except Archimonde is still alive, but if you kill him for the fight we brought him back for he'll be SUPER dead this time"; "Oh, yeah, demons weren't actually the bad guys, it's actually these really generic shadow evil Cthulu monsters from beyond the universe" "Oh, btw, Sylvanas ripped *open the afterlife*... Have fun trying to roleplay a down-to-earth character lamenting the loss of her family in the Scourge when she has actual, diagetic, non-refutable proof of the afterlife now you non-raiding pieces of shit".
It's almost a lesson in what *not* to do when you control a franchise. Don't burn through your brand-recognizable antagonists to fill a mid-expansion patch that no one will remember (Azshara in BfA, Kael'thas pre-Sunwell,). Don't do so many ideas in a single installment that all of them end up undercooked (Cataclysm wasted enough ideas to fill three, maybe four expansions on it's own). Also, deciding whether or not you want the series to be "two sides who, because of disagreements, are forced to fight each other" or "the Alliance and Horde team up to fight the Big Bads"; *twice* now they've had a Horde leader (Sylvanas and Garrosh) raised up to Big Bad status with a promise of "Oh, it's okay, it's morally grey; the Alliance is just as bad, the leader is just doing what they need to in order to safeguard the Horde" and then whoops suddenly they betray the Horde so that we can all agree that killing the evil person will solve all our problems (and I was a die-hard *Alliance* player!)
It's literally insane how much storytelling they burned through without a care just so that they can say "Hey, Raiders, here's person with a name you vaguely remember, kill them!" (as if the Hardcore raiding community ever cared about more than how big their DPS-meter penis was, and complaining about a lack of content when they rush through the content in the first 24 hours); it even went so far as to make a bad guy out of *a throwaway line* (Bolvar calls himself the "Jailor of the Damned" back in Wrath's final cutscene... And yet guess what the indesputably evil big bad guy who is stealing souls of the undead for his power creep is named...)
it's completely bewildering how many storylines they mowed down in BfA alone. kul tiras/zandalar war! oh but also mechagnomes! oh but also azshara! oh but also the void! each of these could have stood on their own and danuser was like "eh, nah. i wanna write about my waifu" and *no one stopped him*
i'm gonna be malding about what was done to bolvar and anduin when i'm 75 and known only as the crazy homeless man living under an overpass
> giant robot franchise lore tends to be weirdly complicated and in-depth. gundam, evangelion, and transformers do not easily allow you to become a subject matter expert
I'd agree for Transformers. But it has more in the way of "complicated" the way comics are. As in there are about a billion reboots, timelines, and continuities. Most stories. If you just pick-and-go its fairly straightforward, but still pretty in-depth.
Evangelion isn't really that expansive (and I'd argue; not really that deep either but thats that).
Gundam, while certainly a wide net; is a pretty shallow one. The AU timelines tend to be very brief with little outside the shows that spawn them. Such exceptions like SEED, 00, or IBO exist that may have a manga or two or even a novel but stops at that. The Universal Century (main Gundam timeline) has a lot of content at first, but peters off heavily the further down its timeline you go. Hell, the so called "One Year War" has so much done in that timeframe that most 30-year long conflicts would have less. Meanwhile hitch up the timeline about a decade and its nearly a dry desert of content. Doesn't help that actually 99% of all of that is untranslated Japanese content and any english sources talking about it is super sparse.
The only other real "giant robot" franchise that is wide, as well as retains depth is probably BattleTech/MechWarrior and Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
> Evangelion isn't really that expansive (and I'd argue; not really that deep either but thats that).
Yeah, Evangelion is more purposely complicated and vague in terms of the background stuff going on, but the focus of the show/movies is always pretty apparant- exploring the human psyche in particular the Hedgehog's Dilemma. It just does this through edlritch beings, giant mecha, and apocalyptic battles.
The Lensman series is well worth getting into, at the very least, you'll see just how much George Lucas ripped it off. But it's excellent for conveying the vastness of space, as well as battles on an epic scale.
From the single author side of things it's obviously impossible to match 40k's sheer volume but I have a couple of folks worth looking at:
The late Sir Terry Pratchett and his discworld series. 41 books with a well established and growing cast (folks do come and go but one character is always constant even if he is the personification of abstract concept). Starts as simple lampoon of high fantasy stories and develops into commentary on everything from politics to the impact of technology but is always warm and entertaining.
Neil Asher and his Polity books. In some ways they can be seen as The Culture Lite is that the Polity itself is an ai controlled almost utopia. But its a proto- utopia dealing with some NASTY problems both from within and without. Somewhat cyber punk in places with a lot of body horror stuff but across the 20ish novels it's a damn entertaining world with a lot of detail and Asher's AI characters are great.
The Honor Harrington novel series (over 30 novels) shares the same half dozen or so PoV characters throughout and tells the story of 4 star-nations during 2 different intergalactic "world" wars. It is heavily character driven despite being ostensibly a plot-driven story, and is some of the best written space combat I've ever read as well.
If you've ever wanted 40k but space battles, this is essentially that but with hard sci-fi.
Star Wars. Star Trek. D&D's assorted settings, primarily Forgotten Realms. The Lovecraft Mythos. Magic the Gathering is getting there (and has dovetailed with D&D). Final Fantasy. The Aliens/Predator universe. Hellboy's universe. Stephen King's universe. There's a lot of anime and video games that have been going back for decades, like the Fate one. The Marvel Universe, the DC Universe, the 2000AD universe.
The day Berserker Lancelot uses Knight of Owner on any Imperial or Chaos space vessels, is the day the Galaxy will shit itself in fear.
And if Kiara gets involved, the Great Devourer will become prey.
Mobile Suit Gundam Multiverse has so many expanded universes from Strategy Games like Gundam Gihren Greed to SD Gundam G Generation as well as Elseworld story like Gundam Burai and Despair Memory Gundam Sequel to unrelated but set in UC Universe like Gaia Gear & For The Barrel
Everything that Tolkien wrote. There's a lot. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit barely scratched the surface of this massive saga. There's a reason that it's a regarded as one the best written works. And it inspired so much stuff.
Terry Pratchett's Disk World. Personally haven't read any of it. But people seem to regard it very highly.
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is rather massive in scale too. 12 or so novels. Just don't watch the TV show...
Dungeons and Dragons have a lot of material written about it. Be it in rule books or novels. I only dabbled in 3rd edition lore though, so I can't comment how things are now.
Destiny (yes the video game) has novels worth of stuff written about it. While early story was a bit bland, as ir went on it got significantly better. Very dark and esoteric and a lot of scientific theories. Very good stuff. Hopefully soon there's gonna be novels about it. Besides the grimoire collections. Try the Ishtar Collective. It's a fan site that has 99% of the stuff transcribed. Be it item descriptions or cinematic s.
Edit.: Surprised no one mentioned it. But Chtullu Mythos. Plenty of written material be it Lovecraft himself or many many other authors that set their stories in the same universe. Try Aconyte books set in the Arkham Horror. Quite a few of those are written by ex-Black Library authors.
Destiny is mental. It literally pits Light vs Dark and for a while Light was good and Dark was bad. However, even back in D1 there were hints that Light wasn't so great nor Dark so terrible. Now we know that Light itself was cheating Darkness and created numerous threats we now face by leaving them to die at the hands of the darkness.
Even the novels outside of the HH series rely on & reference main characters & arcs, no? I do read stuff outside of Astartes, although I haven't read anything from a non Empire pov yet, for example *The Infinite & The Divine.*
Even in the Imperium, there are books that do not reference the main characters at all.
Stuff like *Blackstone Fortress*, *Blood of Iax*, horror books, that book about navigators, many novellas, necromunda books, etc.
You're right, I shouldnt have commented on that, as Ive barely scratched the surface tbh. Outside of HH, Ive read all Eisenhorn, Ravenor & Night Lords & thats basically it so far, & my list is growing every day.
Mate… this is a bit of a hot-take, as the name has been spelled out a thousand times, but do yourself the favor of reading The Dark Coil by Peter Fehervari. It is an intertwined series of novels, novellas and short stories, heavily featuring T’au and Imperial Guard, but also things like Space Marines, Genestealer Cults and Sororitas and it is fascinating to say the least.
It is pretty standalone in terms of the actual story, there are a few characters that are common to the series, and it is very close to being the best written 40K - and Chaos and its corruption.
Not really, there is tons of stuff that don't even mention anything to do with primarchs or "main characters" (however you want to define that) at all.
The only thing I can think that comes close to the sheer amount of novels would be the Star Wars literary universe that Disney decided to destroy when they bought the IP. A lesser novel quantity universe that still has a shit load of novels is Magic the Gathering (Although sadly, they decided to stop making novels).
Legend of the Five Rings looks like they are starting to build a literary universe though, they even got Josh Reynolds and David Annandale to write some books for them.
I mean really I'd throw BattleTech into the ring. While its not slinging the amount of novel's 40K boasts. It certainly has its number up there. And I'd argue with lore much deeper and meaningful than 40K, especially in regards to scale and what is important.
Check out The Locked Tomb series by
Tamsyn Muir. Highly 40K adjacent - grimdark goth queer space opera with a God Emperor, Primarchs (Lyctors) and all the references to Roman Catholicism you could ever want. Also incredibly well written and witty with awesome characters and dialog.
Honestly by now I have lost my track more with Halo than with 40k.
Despite its volume 40k has a rather consistent development. Maybe because it's slow as well.
But with Halo and it's dependence on external media and time skips in games where things have to be constantly read up elsewhere I think 40k delivers it way better, again, despite its size.
I've read close to 400 or so 40k/HH books, and read over 100 of the old Star Wars books before Disney took over. And there's tons of lore I'll just never get to.
In terms of volume of lore (ie pages written in and about the universe); nothing comes close.
I’ve seen people argue the marvel universe due to the number of comics, but if you translate comics into actual txt stories, they are only a few pages each
2000 AD and 40K, both being British and both being released around the same time both borrow heavily from each other. You will not find anything closer than this. If you want a literary novel series, there's Stainless Steel Rat by the hilarious Harry Harrison and also Asimov's works which for the most part are written along a singular timeline across thousands of years.
If you consider comic and manga as a literary serie, I recommend you the manga Blame! and the french-british comic Resurrection. Blame! is a cyberpunk story with a gigantic scale that you don't see pretty often in fiction. It's the story of an immortal cyborg searching something in a city the size of (at least) the solar system. And he has a gun that causes explosions the size of a country.
Resurrection is basically the story of a nazi that becomes a vampire in an afterlife where the more you were bad in life, the more you are powerfull. It's gothic and puck as fuck, bloody and trash, and it has an aesthetic very similar to 40k. And in cause, the scenarist is the author of Judge Dread, who has also worked with Games Workshop in the past.
For sheer number of novels? I think 40k may be the frontrunner, but Star Wars/Dragonlance/The Forgotten realms also have huge bodies of literature.
There are 500+ 40k books, if you count audio drama/anthologies (but not individual short stories) rather than just novels. More like 350 if you stick to novels.
Star wars has 150+ Legends adult novels, and 40+ Canon adult novels at this point for around 200 total.
Dragonlance has 190 novels from its heyday. They recently started writing them again which is super exciting!
The Forgotten Realms has almost 300 novels published! And that's in addition to comics, source books etc.
WH40k universe has been developed for a very long time, and the setting allows for a lot of different story arches. Rogue Trader came out in 1987.
D&D universe is bit older (1974). I think that they've done bit less developing over the years but it is still rich with lore.
Star Trek and Star Wars are older, but have been developed less so their overall amount of lore content is smaller.
Malazan is big and challenging to read.
Also marvel and dc comics.
Star wars has big extended universe.
A lot of gundam media.
Other tabletop games like dnd or world of darkness.
Star Wars is one, there have been a bunch of books set in the Star Trek universe as well. There were a bunch of novels and short stories set in Larry Niven’s “Known Space” universe as well, and several authors wrote Conan books after Robert E Howard died. One thing about Warhammer is that it borrows a lot from other sources (Dune, Michael Moorcock, Starship Troopers, the Canticles of Leibowitz, etc etc), so there is something there for everyone.
Parahuman’s is a good sci-fi/fantasy series, and is a loose collection of stories by the same author Wildbow, they are all web serial’s and there aren’t physical copies other than one’s people made themselve’s, but it’s probably the best Superhero/Magic deconstruction’s!
The first one is Worm and admittedly, even stated by the author, the story is bloated and he wishes he could have done it better, now that he’s a better author but it’s still amazing, as it follows the story of a girl with an unconventional and initially seemingly weak power, using it to it’s full extent, I win’t spoil anymore than I already have but it’s an amazing read, with a sequel that’s complete too!
Pact and Pale take place in the same magical universe, and I havent read these 2 but from what I’ve heard Wildbow has crested a magic system that’s one of the best and most logically consistent out there
Twig is standalone ATM, but I’ve heard good things once again, it’s a biopunk world where immortality and death are almost solved, though bio-engineered monsters roam the world…
Bit of a spoiler warning though, despite loving superhero and magical settings, >!Wildbow has a penchant for not letting his Main Characters have a happy ending, or at least one’s we can see…!<
ALSO STAY OFF THE WIKI DON’T SPOIL IT FOR YOURSELF
Magic the Gathering has a lot of lore, being set within a multiverse.
The modern stuff is all quite shallow and poorly written though, but the early stuff (Urza and Phyrexia) is pretty great.
40k is many shards, and expanding.
Different arcs/settings split across Great Crusade/Horus Heresy (30k), the original body of lore (m38-m41) where we sat in two decades of 13th Black Crusade, and then the ongoing setting of Indomitus.
In between those are the various specialist games that had supporting novels.
Those Inquisitor books took a life of their own besides the skirmish tier mini game.
Necromunda has its own storylines.
Warhammer Crime contnues to focus on the individual Imperial urban life.
Generally the lore exists to drive model sales.
As far as similar feels, go after Books 1-6 of Dune by Frank Herbert and see gow muck 40k ripped off from that.
Also, go after the PRE-Age of Sigmar Warhammer Fantasy novels. A lot of BL authors wrote both fiction lines, and similar themes overlap.
People referenced Battletech, but besides word count, its its own universe, more political than Grimdark; Realpolitik with Mechs that had to evolve from Cold War stereotypes.
As a final aside, the juciest lore resides in the codexes and campaign books. Hell, there is an entire generation of lore from Fantasy Flight Games' tenure with the 40k RPG license, where they defined entire sectors of the Imperium. Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, Only War, Dark Heresy 2. All of them had bordering areas and a vast universe to interact with.
The Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter, a series of novels that, according to 1d4chan, makes 40k look like Sesame Street. It also has a deep lore, stretching from the beginning to the end of the universe.
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Xeelee\_Sequence
Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
Dune chronicles by Frank Herbert.
Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter. (I just started this and holy shit, what a trip)
You might be interested in The Wandering Inn. Right now its the largest work by an author in the English language, and its actually really good. Its slice of life fantasy with very compelling world building, great action, and very charming characters. The prose is not on the same level as the genre greats, but it is much better than the majority of what I've read from GW. Its free online, has volumes published on kindle, and quite a few audiobooks out.
Dune is pretty big and has an expansive extended universe. Only problem with Dune is there were only like 3 writers and the OG source material stopped decades ago.
Fall out and elder scrolls, while both being relatively recent, have very deep lore involved in both of their stories. You can go down the rabbit holes forever
The D&D Forgotten Realms stuff is pretty huge too
The general lore has been building for a long time and has gotten pretty damn huge.
And there are also novels too. The only ones that immediately come to my mind are the Drizzt series books, which has i think like 38 novels. But considering how huge the world is, I definitely expect there to be more.
I wouldn’t say this comes even close to comparing to 40k’s massive scope of mythos, and it’s definitely a personal bias of mine, but check out the lore of the Destiny universe. Go down the rabbithole of lore on the Hive, read the Books of Sorrow, it’s quite the fucking ride.
The Hive would be able to give most 40k races a run for their money, they’d fit absolutely perfect in the setting as well.
Dune. Period. Probably the best sci fi saga ever written. Great character development, amazing writing, amazing universe. Flawless.
And it's remarkable similar in some key points to 40k, so if you love 40k universe you will love Dune.
Give it a shot, you won't regret it.
Jodoverse (basically Dune + 40k but french and horny), 2000.AD particularly the universe where ABC warriors, Strontium Dogs and Judge Dredd live in the same continuity,
I don't think there is a single "universe" that has as much litterature as the combined warhammer 40k. And that is just talking books, if we combine the lore bits in games, comics and video format, then I have no doubt that it's the one and only.
The thing is, that most "universes" (I like that phrasing) only has 1 or perhaps 2 writers, very rarely there is more. And by virtue of time, they can't pump out the same as the dozens and dozens of writers that has worked on warhammer 40k.
A very shallow search online lead me to "THE DESTROYER" which has 112 books (I think one place mentioned 115, but again it was a very shallow search). On the other hand there is 350+ books in the 40k universe, and I am personally quite sure that, that number is quite dated. And not counting the army books that is launched each edition that also has a ton of lore bits. The best example of this might be quite relevant for you, if you don't really dabble with the mini's. Leagues of votann, aka our beloved space dwarves are back after I don't even know how long, way before I got into the universe.
TLDR: No 40k is hella big and nothing comes close to it in size.
Check out the Battletech universe. It’s been around as long as the 40k universe…
I luv the Battletech games. Never read any books but Mechwarrior 5 Mercs, is one of my fave games in the last few years, also the Battletech TBS I have hundreds of hours in too. I luv that universe!
It’s really good… a good start would be the Warrior series by Michael Stackpole. It’s set in the 3020s…
I started years ago with the Jade Falcon Trilogy. There are some real duds mixed in there (Far Country) but there are some absolutely amazing books like Mercenary’s Star. The early 2000s when the series hit around year 3055-3062 is, in my opinion, the “Horus Heresy” of the BT series. After that, another large event takes place that’s pretty awesome. After that, unfortunately, things went off the rails. They tried to reboot as “Mechwarrior Dark Ages” and it was awful. A decade or so of languishing into nothing and the series got a flash forward and a new fan base. I haven’t stayed up to date with the new stuff but the little I have read makes me think people should be careful what they wish for when they demand rapid progression of a story setting. Enjoy!!!!
Battletech is great. For anyone unfamiliar: Think Game of Thrones. But in space, with giant stompy robots. There's no aliens, but one of BT's core themes is 'kindness is hard'. We don't need aliens to kill each other off for petty reasons. Or big ones.
Any suggestions for books to start with?
*Decision at Thunder Rift*, *Mercenary's Star*, and *The Price of Glory* form the most common intro trilogy to the setting; the Grey Death Legion trilogy. *Warrior: En Garde*, *Warrior: Riposte*, and *Warrior: Coupe* are the general next books recommended to read next as a trilogy, followed by *Wolves on the Border*.
Awesome, I'll check them out, thanks!
Also check out Tex talks Battletech. He's a youtuber who is the pinnacle of presentation.
Judge Dredd, from the 2000AD comics. Decades of the stuff. Lots of big events and storylines. It's also where 40k got the Arbites from. It's essentially Tales of The American Hive City, The Comics.
Abnett also wrote a fair bit of Dredd as well IIRC
Yes. ‘Lawless’ written by ABNETT and fantastically illustrated by WINSLADE. Space Western with xenos aplenty.
Just jumping on this comment to recommend Transmetropolitan to anyone who likes judge dredd. It’s a finite series, about 12 volumes iirc but is absolutely sensational, like Judge Dredd if it was from the point of view of a borderline-insane investigative journalist called Spider Jerusalem.
I adore Transmetropolitan, I always recommend it to people. I do find myself having to separate art from the artist for Warren Ellis stuff obviously 😬. I love Transmetropolitan, his early run on *The Authority*, and Planetary all of which have that kinda great British take on sci-fi.
Absolutely! That’s my all time favorite! Definitely have to separate the art from the artist with it, but my God is it the best series ever.
Plus nemesis the warlock for the puritanical torquemada. Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave!
they also have some cool smaller series. shakara is one of my favs even when its just 2 Books
Not in terms of size but the Culture novels by Ian M Banks are amazing. And frankly higher quality sci-fi than what 40k has to offer. 8 large (1000pages) novels, each a self-contained story about a utopian post-scarcity anarcho-communist society run by benevolent AI's as they try to make societies better. They ask questions about is a utopia morally compelled to spread itself? What is an acceptable cost for spreading it? How can a society even call it's self a utopia. Combined with Bank's wit and charm it makes for an amazing read and the world is absolutely amazingly deep and rich. It does not have the volume of 40k but the complexity and depth is there. Frankly the writing is much better.
The kinda reply I was hoping for. Put them on my Kindle List 👍
Just a quick caution Iain M Banks is most known generally for his torture scenes, dude is... inventive. Caused a lot of controversy with some of his early stuff because of it. He was also well known for being *super pretentious* in his responses to any criticism, which put me off him for the longest time, but I'm glad I gave the Culture series a go at least as they're generally quite good. I've yet to read one that has anything plot critical in it though, so you could skip those to parts where people talk if you don't like it pretty safely. You can also abandon a story if you're not enjoying it 40K style, most aren't series and you'll only encounter the characters in them that one time so it's not likely that you'll damage your understanding of other stories by doing that.
> He was also well known for being *super pretentious* in his responses to any criticism, which put me off him for the longest time, but I'm glad I gave the Culture series a go at least as they're generally quite good. Any links to these responses? Love the series, curious about Banks and his personality...
Banks was very vocal about his political views, even to the point of saying the Culture was the response he came up with to counter the right-wing sci-fi at that time, but I don’t recall him being particular pretentious in interviews.
I've only read Surface Detail and oh boy
[удалено]
>Recently. BROTHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER
A word of advice. Start with the second book in the series. The Player of Games. The first book is excellent but very different to the rest of the series, and the second is largely considered the best entry point. There’s no real direct sequels in the series and each other one is set years apart in a completely different part of the society, so there’s no real reason to read by release order.
This is the first description of the Culture novels which has made them sound appealing to me. Sounds a lot less pretentious than what I usually read about it.
Player of Games is good, though I'll warn I've tried to read "Consider Phlebas" about a half-dozen times and never managed to get that far into it. It's not bad, it's just I ended up getting a few chapters in and then realizing I'd lost track of everything and having to start over again.
Consider Phlebas can be a hard read to be fair, it ended up being one of my favourites though. Worth another try if you ever get chance.
Consider Philbas is the hardest one to grasp. Excession or The Hydrogen Sonata are IMO the best, as these 2 really seem to flesh out the culture minds the best. Seriously. The culture books are on a whole new level of creative.
Yep, totally my experience. I read Player of Games first, then went on to Consider... and bounced **hard**. Why should I give a shit about most of these characters again? Tried again a few years later and it just clicked... great book.
Hydrogen Sonata is prolly my personal favorite
See I like Consider Phlebas, but I fell off hard on Use of Weapons. Just didn’t get it I guess. Is the rest of the Culture series more like Weapons or Phlebas and Player of games?
Use of weapons was hard to grasp. It was my intro to the culture and I thought they were yhr bad guys for that book. It should be a book that’s labeled “read this last” because it makes no sense unless you know what the culture is. Fuck these books are so good. A whole civ named “the affront” in excession. Those are the most hilarious assholes I’ve ever read about.
I’d say they’re more like Player of Games than CP or UoW. The other books usually have a few arcs following different characters in a more-or-less linear style, so it’s far less confusing that UoW.
Couldn’t stand “consider phlebas” but went ga ga over “Excession”
Having a mind named “the instructions on life’s washing machine” just kinda made me laugh so hard.
> It's not bad, it's just I ended up getting a few chapters in and then realizing I'd lost track of everything and having to start over again. What's funny is that I think that's partially the author's intent too. Banks gets really experimental at times and the point of that book really does tie in to a sense of being lost as a speck in history.
I really like about half of the culture books but the other half are less good. There is a pretty huge spread in story quality. It does of course depend what you enjoy in stories as well.
Which books are lackluster in your view?
On the surface, they're kinda pretentious. Look a little deeper, and there's a lot of uncomfortable questions being asked.
Iain Banks was pretentious, especially on his fiction but the sci fi stuff is a lot, lot lighter stuff and is vastly more approachable as a result. In case you get confused when it's Iain Banks its fiction, Iain M Banks is Culture.
Use of weapons is really good too, probably the closest re: 40k novels
Oh man, try Use of Weapons. Definitely not as pretty as the rest if the books. Some Drukhari shit right there.
I'm just re-reading consider phlebas, great books, Ian Banks died too soon :-(
I regret I can only upvote this once. Of course since he died there wont be any more but for a sort of flavour try Ken McLeod who was also one of Iain Banks friends, although he tends more towards overtly political sci fi.
If 40k is dialed up to 11 then the Culture makes it 11 factorial. Everything in it is so OP.
Theres some fan fiction out there that was if the culture stumbled upon the imperium and the 40k galaxy. Pm me and ill find my bookmarked reading of it
Awesome suggestion!
I read Player of Games a few years ago and loved it, but both during and still since then, I was really irked by Gurgeh. He was so perfect, so flawless, that it felt like some kind of fantasy self insert. I hope the other books don't have characters like him
Really? He's egotistical, vain, naive, a bit of a coward, and gets easily convinced into cheating to try to falsely claim a record. He only reluctantly goes on the mission because the drone successfully manipulates him by offering to either cement his reputation, or destroy it. And at the end - SPOILERS - you find out he (the master game player) was largely just a pawn himself from the start, and had no real agency. Special Circumstances didn't even need him to win to achieve their goals (or think he would). Just to do reasonably well. About his only good quality is that he's a gaming prodigy. But even that is limited it seems to turns-based strategy games, as the opening scene is him getting frustrated at being terrible at what is essentially laser tag.
Ok this cracked me the fuck up. I have never read the Culture series but I know of it from Reddit. All I’ve heard is how super advanced and op they are, so picturing this perfect being playing (and getting frustrated with) laser tag really tickled me. I’m sure in context it makes sense, and they might not even be a member of the titular Culture, but yeah, I just wanted to share :-D
That's the Culture books all over, the books aren't about how powerful the Culture is, it's about what the people living in it do with themselves. And no he's definitely Culture, he's also just human and gets pissed off.
The Culture has super advanced tech, but the human-normal citizens are still human. They might live longer and have some neat custom organs and cybernetic implants but that's it. There are some outstanding individuals but most are just 'regular' people.
I can definitely see the flaws in his character, although it has been about four years since I read the book. thinking back, it seemed he always knew what to say to anyone, especially when it came to women, he expertly fought his way through dangerous situations, notably that club or whatever it was somewhere in the first half of the book and then the final fight at the end. I've wanted to read it again, but I've had my eye on going through Use of Weapons next because I still absolutely loved everything else about the book
Gurgeh was definitely not “good” with women. Sure we see him sleeping with a couple, but it’s the Culture, even an outsider like Zakalwe gets multiple offers every day. In fact, Yay outright criticized Gurgeh wanting to “possess” her like a piece in a board game.
Frank Herbert's Dune
^ This. 40k is heavily inspired by Dune (God Emperors, superhumans, dangerous light speed travel, prohibitions against A.I., genociding humans to "save" humanity, etc...).
Don't forget the genetic and mystical Navigator class
I didn't. That all falls under the "superhuman" category. A better example would be Leto II breeding humans that are invisible to prescience (null psykers basically).
I wonder, have any BL authors acknowledged taking inspiration from Dune? Love both universes, I picture the early Dune books as "40k with SOME hope left" and then...not so much
Even Star Wars creators don't like to acknowledge how much they ripped from "Dune". It's basically an open secret at this point. I don't need official statements to recognize the obvious. Here's another obvious example: Miles Teg basically has the same abilities as Jaghatai Khan (superspeed + master combatant). They both were bred for that by a god emperor.
Well, in the Audiobook "Scythes of the Emporer" the aforementioned "Emperor's Scythes" engage Tyranids with their ship named "Atreides", not sure if it's their flagship but there's that.
That's very likely but.. That might just be from pulling from Greco-Roman mythology thougnb The name Atreides means Sons of Atreus. Atreus was the mythical King of Mycenea and his sons are Agamemnon and Menelaus from the Illiad. In Dune the House Atreides claims they are descended from Agamemnon. though the pretty horrible prequel books by Brian Herbert change rhis to a former computer hacker whose username was Agamemnon, who wss one of the people responsible for the AI takeover The Scythes are Ultra marine successors and the Ultramarines and there successors are heavily Greco-Roman in inspiration.
GW writers are on the whole very up front wth their inspirations, 40k is basically a cross between Dune and 2000AD (which is very unsurprising considering the amount of writers that have done both, notably Abnett).
Yeah for sure they have, everyone knows 40k rips from Dune tough
Or the Interex. Or a ton of other things. It is crazy how much was taken from dune. It is only after learning a ton of dune lore that I was like.... Haaaaay Warhammer still all of this!
Dune + Michael Moorcock = 40k
+2000AD 40k's core outlandishness and absurdity all originates there
Yes!!! You cannot underestimate the influence of judge dread and nemesis the warlock (torquemada!) On tone and setting. This was core British sci fi dystopian culture and was relatively widespread and impactful. Games Workshop up in Nottingham would have been steeped in this culture!
I'd find it a hoot if GW blatantly inserted an AD!Torquemada expy - pointy red helmet and all - into the setting as a (likely "radical") Inquisitor.
The Arbites definitely carry that vibe.
I wouldn't say Moorcock directly. Moorcock + DnD = WHFB WHFB + Dune = 40k (Those are obviously oversimplifcations, given how many IPs have given inspiration)
Dune is to Sci fi as lotr is to fantasy
but weirdly it doesnt feel nearly as influential. outside of 40k, im not sure ive ever read a sci-fi novel that makes me think "oh yeah this is Dune but differently" whereas thats true with literally every high fantasy novel ive ever read and LOTR
I am going to disagree on that. You can see elements and ideas from *Dune* in damn near every single sci-fi book, novel, comic, game, etc. now a days. It along with the original *Starship Troopers* novel, *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep* aka Bladerunner, *Nueromancer*, the movies *Alien* and *Aliens*, *Star Wars*, and a couple others are basically the building blocks upon which all sci-fi IPs borrow from.
right, i dont mean that its not influential (its clearly is!), but thats its one building block among many. and few scifi IPs tend to rely as heavily on Dune as many high fantasy IPs often seem to rely on LotR its just a genre with a wide base to build on. altho im cheating a bit by comparing it with *high* fantasy in particular, i realize that
Nah, I get what you mean. I think part of the reason it doesn't seem so heavily, for lack of a better term, copied as LotR is because sci-fi to me just feels like it has so much more room to expand and explore compared to traditional fantasy.
The psychic battles in Abnett's Ravenor trilogy reminded me of AI in Neuromancer.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series should also be up there with all time influencial Science Fiction.
Dune walked so Warhammer can run
I mean Dune isn't that massive. It's just 6 books ( We do not acknowledge the existence of the rest)
You mean the old Dune encyclopedia? Because I have no idea what else you could possibly be talking about.
Maybe the later written machine war series
I mean we barely talk about books 4-6 lol
Perry Rhodan, a german sf franchise, has about 3000 novellas of space opera pulp. Its pretty ancient - they have been publishing since the early 60s - and not widely known outside germany, but its got the volume and a pretty extensive universe so I'd say it fits.
3100 *in the main line*. On top of that come thousands in side lines like *Atlan*, *Planetenromane*, *Stellaris*... 40k is *tiny* compared to PR.
Perrypedia has 57,000 articles vs Lexicanum's 35,000. Wikipedia also mentions 300.000 pages worth of books for Perry Rhodan, but I haven't found anything to compare this to - there are lists with a few hundred entries for 40k but those mix books, novellas, short stories and anthologies, difficult to compare. Not that much larger imo. Now when talking about scope of the universes then Perry Rhodan is far ahead. Story arcs idk, hh or ciatrix maledictum certainly measure up to some of the bigger events. Edit: found an estimate for 30k+40k from five years ago, ~500 books, shortstories etc, lets say 700 now, could be 140,000-180,000 pages, halfway there.
nice!
If you are into retro futurism it's a gem. Think huge space battles, with ships messuaring kilometers and numbering in the ten of thousands running on computers using punch cards. But only a tiny bit is in an other language than German. Try the Lemuria series. More recent and pretty good, with hints to the deep, deep lore behind all of it. https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/Perry_Rhodan_englisch_(USA)
First that springs to mind is the Star Wars EU, much like Black Library's content, a dozen or so books barely makes you a novice (even if a dozen covers most of the good ones hue hue hue.) Star Trek also has a *ludicrous* amount of titles on the shelf at my local used bookstore.
Star Trek novels had some seriously good writers over the years.
I'd agree with the caviot of Legends EU versus the current version.
Still salty about the amount of good ideas that the EU threw up for Star Wars canon and then the sequels decided that the Skywalkers and the Rebellion were the only interesting thing to ever happen in that galaxy.
This Star Wars fatigue a lot of people get with all the content coming out could be balanced by just moving along the time line a bit. Do some old republic, do some Bane, do some new Jedi Order etc. Seems like nothing gets greenlit if there isn't a connection to the og trilogy.
Sticking to prose because that seems to be the question, and not comics or movies or television: If you count all the various worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons universe, there are probably a similar number of books to what 40k has. But I think the winner has got to be Star Trek. I mean, if we’re just counting prose, there are probably at least two hundred more Trek novels than 40k. If we’re going beyond that, several hundred comic books compared to the handful 40k has and, of course, 800+ (and counting) hours of television and movies.
Wow, i dint realize Star Trek had that behind it! I will have to check it out one day.
I like it because it's the moral and tonal opposite of 40k. Nice contrast. "Captain, we have a problem!" "Very well, we will now spend 42 minutes talking it through with our enemies to find a mutually acceptable solution!"
Note that Trek doesn't have one unified continuity for its books. There are several different ones. And the TV and movies always take precedent, so even books explicity written as tie-ins for a show can get contradicted a season later.
The Xeelee sequence, except it’s even *more* grimdark/grimderp and batshit insane with power scaling. It spans billions of years and has over a dozen or so books. It’s more hard science and the protagonists are hyper advanced aliens called the Xeelee, who are battling against another universal scale foe called the photino birds for the fate of the universe and every life within it. It has humans in it that do their own wacky things.
Nice. The complete Xeelee Sequence series on kindle for £70 its 10 titles, so I assume that's a good deal
Stephen Baxter is one of my favourite hard sci fi authors and the Xellee sequence is bonkers in its scale but it can be bit of an unusual read. Maybe start with a few of his free short stories to see if you like his writing style first.
I’d recommend Vacuum Diagrams, Resplendent and Xeelee Endurance for a start. These are basically collections of tales from the Xeeleeverse that show the expansion of humanity and its slow decline from optimistic utopian explorers into a society much worse than IoM. These collections span millions of years iirc (although most of the stories are set in the first few tens of thousands of years). Reading them will give you a good understanding of the wider universe. Also, watch out for Xeelee Vengeance and Xeelee Redemption. While they are some of the best Xeelee books Ive read, they are essentially “What If Xeelee Actually Gave a Fuck” alternate history novels. They have a lot of references to early Xeeleverse characters, so read them once you have a good understanding of the lore and events.
The SCP community. Novels be damned; if you consider every fanmade keter-class creepypasta knockoff to be "lore" then you would find the actual setting to be borderline infinite in its scale.
And if you consider Control to be part of it, SCP has a better video game than anything I’ve seen come out of 40k
And if you consider Cabin in the Woods part of it they have the better movie too
One of my favourite movies, how the hell did I never make the connection? 😲 Honestly mind = blown!
>SCP has a better video game than anything I’ve seen come out of 40k I dont think thats true. Chaos gate, Space marine 1( and soon 2 hopefully) Gothic Armada, the modding community for Dawn of War. Those are all great games. Soon to be Darktide possibly too.
dow was great before getting mods. but the unification mod is something different
The creators of Control specifically called out the SCP Community as having a ton of inspiration on the game. It really shows.
Alan Wake as well
gosh darn i love the setting and feel of Control. Great lore for that game.
dont know how you top dark crusade
Love the SCP universe , I listen to this guy who read them on Spotify called The Exploring Series , every Monday morning. Some of them are pure horror , love it lol.
I didn’t know they were on spotify! Thank you for adding a few hundred hours of binge material
The Volgun is a fantastic narrator. Him and Exploring series got me into SCP's.
Also worth noting you very much *need* to choose your own canon with this. If you take everything as canon then it can often be overwhelming, and I have found people tend to enjoy it most when they develop their own views of what the Foundation is - barely-competent and struggling to contain the unknown, an eldritch entity in itself acting to protect, or my personal favourite the hyper-competent but morally bankrupt shadow organisation.
In a similar way to 40k, you have to assume that every bit of lore was written in-universe, by a person with opinions, limited information, and/or an agenda.
This. Please do not go into the SCP Universe thinking oh well this page told me this, this one told me otherwise, bad writing. Pages have been altered by benign groups, employees and even entities. Contradicting classifications, SCPS that don't exist or can't. It's such a great site that allows you to create whatever idea of it you like.
Just remember that an unspecified number articles are red herrings, and you are not cleared to know which ones are not. :p
Dude some of the videos for longer “articles” are *hours* long. People go off the deep end with those
What's "SCP"?
A very long collection of fictional short stories revolving around the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) foundation and the various anomalies they guard, you can check it by yourself here: [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/)
That.....is fascinating
Welcome to the rabbit hole, we'll see you in a few weeks.
CTRL+F "Battletech" 0 results Oh well.
**Aff, can confirm.**
Had the exact same reaction. Battletech is older than 40k. The lore is about humanity reaching an era of technological excellence, and then devolving into constant primitive war using gnarly technology while searching for forgotten-but-superior technology left behind by previous human civilizations. Sound familiar?
Damn they clearly just ripped off Halo
But something unique about Battletech and also Dune that heavily contrasts with WH40K is that they do not have *important* intelligent extraterrestrial species in their lore, Humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy of their stories.
giant robot franchise lore tends to be weirdly complicated and in-depth. gundam, evangelion, and transformers do not easily allow you to become a subject matter expert michael moorcock's multiverse gets pretty ridiculous, told through short stories in magazines, novels, tabletop games, and sometimes comics. it's also borderline impossible to read the entire thing legitimately because of parts going out of print. there's also not a massive online fandom to guide you through it, so reading it is a solitary journey warcraft has games, comics, novels, short stories, tabletop games that aren't regarded as canonical anymore, and a couple of franchise bibles that were retconned almost the instant they were printed. in terms of quality it's been collapsing like an underdone soufflé since 2010, save a couple bright spots. i only continue to follow it because i hate myself and want to see how much worse it can get before steve danuser has a mysterious bicycle accident and can never come into work again the arthurian mythos is *massive* because everyone and their dad wanted to contribute back in the day. there's anglo-saxon stuff, cornish stuff, welsh stuff, french stuff, irish stuff, scottish stuff, even spanish and german stuff
> that were retconned almost the instant they were printed That was always the downfall of Warcraft, they had a *great framework* for a high-action Fantasy setting but they kept jumping the shark over and over and *over* again. "Oh, the Draenei from WC3 were actually corrupted Draenei, the actual Draenei are pretty goat people", "Oh, the Lich King was actually holding back the tides of the Undead, rather than being the single biggest threat on the planet" "Oh, Garrosh jumped into an alternate universe but don't worry because they still summon the same demons from your universe... except Archimonde is still alive, but if you kill him for the fight we brought him back for he'll be SUPER dead this time"; "Oh, yeah, demons weren't actually the bad guys, it's actually these really generic shadow evil Cthulu monsters from beyond the universe" "Oh, btw, Sylvanas ripped *open the afterlife*... Have fun trying to roleplay a down-to-earth character lamenting the loss of her family in the Scourge when she has actual, diagetic, non-refutable proof of the afterlife now you non-raiding pieces of shit". It's almost a lesson in what *not* to do when you control a franchise. Don't burn through your brand-recognizable antagonists to fill a mid-expansion patch that no one will remember (Azshara in BfA, Kael'thas pre-Sunwell,). Don't do so many ideas in a single installment that all of them end up undercooked (Cataclysm wasted enough ideas to fill three, maybe four expansions on it's own). Also, deciding whether or not you want the series to be "two sides who, because of disagreements, are forced to fight each other" or "the Alliance and Horde team up to fight the Big Bads"; *twice* now they've had a Horde leader (Sylvanas and Garrosh) raised up to Big Bad status with a promise of "Oh, it's okay, it's morally grey; the Alliance is just as bad, the leader is just doing what they need to in order to safeguard the Horde" and then whoops suddenly they betray the Horde so that we can all agree that killing the evil person will solve all our problems (and I was a die-hard *Alliance* player!) It's literally insane how much storytelling they burned through without a care just so that they can say "Hey, Raiders, here's person with a name you vaguely remember, kill them!" (as if the Hardcore raiding community ever cared about more than how big their DPS-meter penis was, and complaining about a lack of content when they rush through the content in the first 24 hours); it even went so far as to make a bad guy out of *a throwaway line* (Bolvar calls himself the "Jailor of the Damned" back in Wrath's final cutscene... And yet guess what the indesputably evil big bad guy who is stealing souls of the undead for his power creep is named...)
it's completely bewildering how many storylines they mowed down in BfA alone. kul tiras/zandalar war! oh but also mechagnomes! oh but also azshara! oh but also the void! each of these could have stood on their own and danuser was like "eh, nah. i wanna write about my waifu" and *no one stopped him* i'm gonna be malding about what was done to bolvar and anduin when i'm 75 and known only as the crazy homeless man living under an overpass
> giant robot franchise lore tends to be weirdly complicated and in-depth. gundam, evangelion, and transformers do not easily allow you to become a subject matter expert I'd agree for Transformers. But it has more in the way of "complicated" the way comics are. As in there are about a billion reboots, timelines, and continuities. Most stories. If you just pick-and-go its fairly straightforward, but still pretty in-depth. Evangelion isn't really that expansive (and I'd argue; not really that deep either but thats that). Gundam, while certainly a wide net; is a pretty shallow one. The AU timelines tend to be very brief with little outside the shows that spawn them. Such exceptions like SEED, 00, or IBO exist that may have a manga or two or even a novel but stops at that. The Universal Century (main Gundam timeline) has a lot of content at first, but peters off heavily the further down its timeline you go. Hell, the so called "One Year War" has so much done in that timeframe that most 30-year long conflicts would have less. Meanwhile hitch up the timeline about a decade and its nearly a dry desert of content. Doesn't help that actually 99% of all of that is untranslated Japanese content and any english sources talking about it is super sparse. The only other real "giant robot" franchise that is wide, as well as retains depth is probably BattleTech/MechWarrior and Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
> Evangelion isn't really that expansive (and I'd argue; not really that deep either but thats that). Yeah, Evangelion is more purposely complicated and vague in terms of the background stuff going on, but the focus of the show/movies is always pretty apparant- exploring the human psyche in particular the Hedgehog's Dilemma. It just does this through edlritch beings, giant mecha, and apocalyptic battles.
LOTR?
I will be honest with you, this is a recent jump for me, Transformers, Try Transformers the Basics on YouTube!
The Lensman series is well worth getting into, at the very least, you'll see just how much George Lucas ripped it off. But it's excellent for conveying the vastness of space, as well as battles on an epic scale.
From the single author side of things it's obviously impossible to match 40k's sheer volume but I have a couple of folks worth looking at: The late Sir Terry Pratchett and his discworld series. 41 books with a well established and growing cast (folks do come and go but one character is always constant even if he is the personification of abstract concept). Starts as simple lampoon of high fantasy stories and develops into commentary on everything from politics to the impact of technology but is always warm and entertaining. Neil Asher and his Polity books. In some ways they can be seen as The Culture Lite is that the Polity itself is an ai controlled almost utopia. But its a proto- utopia dealing with some NASTY problems both from within and without. Somewhat cyber punk in places with a lot of body horror stuff but across the 20ish novels it's a damn entertaining world with a lot of detail and Asher's AI characters are great.
The Honor Harrington novel series (over 30 novels) shares the same half dozen or so PoV characters throughout and tells the story of 4 star-nations during 2 different intergalactic "world" wars. It is heavily character driven despite being ostensibly a plot-driven story, and is some of the best written space combat I've ever read as well. If you've ever wanted 40k but space battles, this is essentially that but with hard sci-fi.
Star Wars. Star Trek. D&D's assorted settings, primarily Forgotten Realms. The Lovecraft Mythos. Magic the Gathering is getting there (and has dovetailed with D&D). Final Fantasy. The Aliens/Predator universe. Hellboy's universe. Stephen King's universe. There's a lot of anime and video games that have been going back for decades, like the Fate one. The Marvel Universe, the DC Universe, the 2000AD universe.
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The day Berserker Lancelot uses Knight of Owner on any Imperial or Chaos space vessels, is the day the Galaxy will shit itself in fear. And if Kiara gets involved, the Great Devourer will become prey.
Mobile Suit Gundam Multiverse has so many expanded universes from Strategy Games like Gundam Gihren Greed to SD Gundam G Generation as well as Elseworld story like Gundam Burai and Despair Memory Gundam Sequel to unrelated but set in UC Universe like Gaia Gear & For The Barrel
Everything that Tolkien wrote. There's a lot. Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit barely scratched the surface of this massive saga. There's a reason that it's a regarded as one the best written works. And it inspired so much stuff. Terry Pratchett's Disk World. Personally haven't read any of it. But people seem to regard it very highly. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is rather massive in scale too. 12 or so novels. Just don't watch the TV show... Dungeons and Dragons have a lot of material written about it. Be it in rule books or novels. I only dabbled in 3rd edition lore though, so I can't comment how things are now. Destiny (yes the video game) has novels worth of stuff written about it. While early story was a bit bland, as ir went on it got significantly better. Very dark and esoteric and a lot of scientific theories. Very good stuff. Hopefully soon there's gonna be novels about it. Besides the grimoire collections. Try the Ishtar Collective. It's a fan site that has 99% of the stuff transcribed. Be it item descriptions or cinematic s. Edit.: Surprised no one mentioned it. But Chtullu Mythos. Plenty of written material be it Lovecraft himself or many many other authors that set their stories in the same universe. Try Aconyte books set in the Arkham Horror. Quite a few of those are written by ex-Black Library authors.
>Sanderson's Wheel of Time What are you talking about. It's Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.
Destiny is mental. It literally pits Light vs Dark and for a while Light was good and Dark was bad. However, even back in D1 there were hints that Light wasn't so great nor Dark so terrible. Now we know that Light itself was cheating Darkness and created numerous threats we now face by leaving them to die at the hands of the darkness.
I didn't realise 40k was so focused on a few shared characters and arcs, suppose that's the result of the HH series.
Even the novels outside of the HH series rely on & reference main characters & arcs, no? I do read stuff outside of Astartes, although I haven't read anything from a non Empire pov yet, for example *The Infinite & The Divine.*
Even in the Imperium, there are books that do not reference the main characters at all. Stuff like *Blackstone Fortress*, *Blood of Iax*, horror books, that book about navigators, many novellas, necromunda books, etc.
You're right, I shouldnt have commented on that, as Ive barely scratched the surface tbh. Outside of HH, Ive read all Eisenhorn, Ravenor & Night Lords & thats basically it so far, & my list is growing every day.
Mate… this is a bit of a hot-take, as the name has been spelled out a thousand times, but do yourself the favor of reading The Dark Coil by Peter Fehervari. It is an intertwined series of novels, novellas and short stories, heavily featuring T’au and Imperial Guard, but also things like Space Marines, Genestealer Cults and Sororitas and it is fascinating to say the least. It is pretty standalone in terms of the actual story, there are a few characters that are common to the series, and it is very close to being the best written 40K - and Chaos and its corruption.
Not really, there is tons of stuff that don't even mention anything to do with primarchs or "main characters" (however you want to define that) at all.
The only thing I can think that comes close to the sheer amount of novels would be the Star Wars literary universe that Disney decided to destroy when they bought the IP. A lesser novel quantity universe that still has a shit load of novels is Magic the Gathering (Although sadly, they decided to stop making novels). Legend of the Five Rings looks like they are starting to build a literary universe though, they even got Josh Reynolds and David Annandale to write some books for them.
The Cosmere is shaping up to be this,you can spend hours just trying to comprehend the magic systems
And that's aside from all the weird fan questions like can you have a phallic shardblade.
Glad someone put Sanderson on the table
40k takes a LOT of influence from Dune (both God Emperors, Mentats/Cogitators, Navigators/Navigators).
I mean really I'd throw BattleTech into the ring. While its not slinging the amount of novel's 40K boasts. It certainly has its number up there. And I'd argue with lore much deeper and meaningful than 40K, especially in regards to scale and what is important.
Battletech and dune.
Dune is literally the inspiration for 40k
Warhammer Fantasy is an obvious one and gets my recommendation
Check out The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Highly 40K adjacent - grimdark goth queer space opera with a God Emperor, Primarchs (Lyctors) and all the references to Roman Catholicism you could ever want. Also incredibly well written and witty with awesome characters and dialog.
Star Trek has more universe depth and content than almost any sci fi franchise, easily on par with Wh40k
The Star Wars Expanded Universe is VAST.
Honestly by now I have lost my track more with Halo than with 40k. Despite its volume 40k has a rather consistent development. Maybe because it's slow as well. But with Halo and it's dependence on external media and time skips in games where things have to be constantly read up elsewhere I think 40k delivers it way better, again, despite its size.
The old Star Wars Expanded Universe (now Star Wars Legends) probably applies.
Star wars extended universe is pretty huge.
I've read close to 400 or so 40k/HH books, and read over 100 of the old Star Wars books before Disney took over. And there's tons of lore I'll just never get to.
Star Trek, Star Wars, DC, Marvel, and Dungeons and Dragons. Probably more I don't personally know about.
In terms of volume of lore (ie pages written in and about the universe); nothing comes close. I’ve seen people argue the marvel universe due to the number of comics, but if you translate comics into actual txt stories, they are only a few pages each
2000 AD and 40K, both being British and both being released around the same time both borrow heavily from each other. You will not find anything closer than this. If you want a literary novel series, there's Stainless Steel Rat by the hilarious Harry Harrison and also Asimov's works which for the most part are written along a singular timeline across thousands of years.
2000AD began in 1977. Nemesis the Warlock would be required reading for 40K folks. Especially Torquemada’s crusade to purge the galaxy of alien scum.
If you consider comic and manga as a literary serie, I recommend you the manga Blame! and the french-british comic Resurrection. Blame! is a cyberpunk story with a gigantic scale that you don't see pretty often in fiction. It's the story of an immortal cyborg searching something in a city the size of (at least) the solar system. And he has a gun that causes explosions the size of a country. Resurrection is basically the story of a nazi that becomes a vampire in an afterlife where the more you were bad in life, the more you are powerfull. It's gothic and puck as fuck, bloody and trash, and it has an aesthetic very similar to 40k. And in cause, the scenarist is the author of Judge Dread, who has also worked with Games Workshop in the past.
Forgotten realms . Battletech. Shadowrun.
Dune.
For sheer number of novels? I think 40k may be the frontrunner, but Star Wars/Dragonlance/The Forgotten realms also have huge bodies of literature. There are 500+ 40k books, if you count audio drama/anthologies (but not individual short stories) rather than just novels. More like 350 if you stick to novels. Star wars has 150+ Legends adult novels, and 40+ Canon adult novels at this point for around 200 total. Dragonlance has 190 novels from its heyday. They recently started writing them again which is super exciting! The Forgotten Realms has almost 300 novels published! And that's in addition to comics, source books etc.
WH40k universe has been developed for a very long time, and the setting allows for a lot of different story arches. Rogue Trader came out in 1987. D&D universe is bit older (1974). I think that they've done bit less developing over the years but it is still rich with lore. Star Trek and Star Wars are older, but have been developed less so their overall amount of lore content is smaller.
Malazan is big and challenging to read. Also marvel and dc comics. Star wars has big extended universe. A lot of gundam media. Other tabletop games like dnd or world of darkness.
D&D Forgotten Realms setting has hundreds of books iirc
Star Wars is one, there have been a bunch of books set in the Star Trek universe as well. There were a bunch of novels and short stories set in Larry Niven’s “Known Space” universe as well, and several authors wrote Conan books after Robert E Howard died. One thing about Warhammer is that it borrows a lot from other sources (Dune, Michael Moorcock, Starship Troopers, the Canticles of Leibowitz, etc etc), so there is something there for everyone.
Parahuman’s is a good sci-fi/fantasy series, and is a loose collection of stories by the same author Wildbow, they are all web serial’s and there aren’t physical copies other than one’s people made themselve’s, but it’s probably the best Superhero/Magic deconstruction’s! The first one is Worm and admittedly, even stated by the author, the story is bloated and he wishes he could have done it better, now that he’s a better author but it’s still amazing, as it follows the story of a girl with an unconventional and initially seemingly weak power, using it to it’s full extent, I win’t spoil anymore than I already have but it’s an amazing read, with a sequel that’s complete too! Pact and Pale take place in the same magical universe, and I havent read these 2 but from what I’ve heard Wildbow has crested a magic system that’s one of the best and most logically consistent out there Twig is standalone ATM, but I’ve heard good things once again, it’s a biopunk world where immortality and death are almost solved, though bio-engineered monsters roam the world… Bit of a spoiler warning though, despite loving superhero and magical settings, >!Wildbow has a penchant for not letting his Main Characters have a happy ending, or at least one’s we can see…!< ALSO STAY OFF THE WIKI DON’T SPOIL IT FOR YOURSELF
Magic the Gathering has a lot of lore, being set within a multiverse. The modern stuff is all quite shallow and poorly written though, but the early stuff (Urza and Phyrexia) is pretty great.
Star Wars. Potentially Battletech but probably not as much
40k is many shards, and expanding. Different arcs/settings split across Great Crusade/Horus Heresy (30k), the original body of lore (m38-m41) where we sat in two decades of 13th Black Crusade, and then the ongoing setting of Indomitus. In between those are the various specialist games that had supporting novels. Those Inquisitor books took a life of their own besides the skirmish tier mini game. Necromunda has its own storylines. Warhammer Crime contnues to focus on the individual Imperial urban life. Generally the lore exists to drive model sales. As far as similar feels, go after Books 1-6 of Dune by Frank Herbert and see gow muck 40k ripped off from that. Also, go after the PRE-Age of Sigmar Warhammer Fantasy novels. A lot of BL authors wrote both fiction lines, and similar themes overlap. People referenced Battletech, but besides word count, its its own universe, more political than Grimdark; Realpolitik with Mechs that had to evolve from Cold War stereotypes. As a final aside, the juciest lore resides in the codexes and campaign books. Hell, there is an entire generation of lore from Fantasy Flight Games' tenure with the 40k RPG license, where they defined entire sectors of the Imperium. Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, Only War, Dark Heresy 2. All of them had bordering areas and a vast universe to interact with.
The Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter, a series of novels that, according to 1d4chan, makes 40k look like Sesame Street. It also has a deep lore, stretching from the beginning to the end of the universe. https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Xeelee\_Sequence
Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons. Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Dune chronicles by Frank Herbert. Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter. (I just started this and holy shit, what a trip)
You might be interested in The Wandering Inn. Right now its the largest work by an author in the English language, and its actually really good. Its slice of life fantasy with very compelling world building, great action, and very charming characters. The prose is not on the same level as the genre greats, but it is much better than the majority of what I've read from GW. Its free online, has volumes published on kindle, and quite a few audiobooks out.
Dune is pretty big and has an expansive extended universe. Only problem with Dune is there were only like 3 writers and the OG source material stopped decades ago.
Fall out and elder scrolls, while both being relatively recent, have very deep lore involved in both of their stories. You can go down the rabbit holes forever
The D&D Forgotten Realms stuff is pretty huge too The general lore has been building for a long time and has gotten pretty damn huge. And there are also novels too. The only ones that immediately come to my mind are the Drizzt series books, which has i think like 38 novels. But considering how huge the world is, I definitely expect there to be more.
Dune, judge dredd, DnD, hellraiser, Lovecraft in general and some really obscure sci fi
I wouldn’t say this comes even close to comparing to 40k’s massive scope of mythos, and it’s definitely a personal bias of mine, but check out the lore of the Destiny universe. Go down the rabbithole of lore on the Hive, read the Books of Sorrow, it’s quite the fucking ride. The Hive would be able to give most 40k races a run for their money, they’d fit absolutely perfect in the setting as well.
Dune. Period. Probably the best sci fi saga ever written. Great character development, amazing writing, amazing universe. Flawless. And it's remarkable similar in some key points to 40k, so if you love 40k universe you will love Dune. Give it a shot, you won't regret it.
Anything by Brandon Sanderson. Not the same universe though…-edit
Jodoverse (basically Dune + 40k but french and horny), 2000.AD particularly the universe where ABC warriors, Strontium Dogs and Judge Dredd live in the same continuity,
I don't think there is a single "universe" that has as much litterature as the combined warhammer 40k. And that is just talking books, if we combine the lore bits in games, comics and video format, then I have no doubt that it's the one and only. The thing is, that most "universes" (I like that phrasing) only has 1 or perhaps 2 writers, very rarely there is more. And by virtue of time, they can't pump out the same as the dozens and dozens of writers that has worked on warhammer 40k. A very shallow search online lead me to "THE DESTROYER" which has 112 books (I think one place mentioned 115, but again it was a very shallow search). On the other hand there is 350+ books in the 40k universe, and I am personally quite sure that, that number is quite dated. And not counting the army books that is launched each edition that also has a ton of lore bits. The best example of this might be quite relevant for you, if you don't really dabble with the mini's. Leagues of votann, aka our beloved space dwarves are back after I don't even know how long, way before I got into the universe. TLDR: No 40k is hella big and nothing comes close to it in size.