Tablets were in use even up to the 19th century in different parts of the world, including Chile, Germany, the Philippines, and even the Sahara Desert. Example of hieroglyphics on a tablet. (Photo by Jeremy Zero on Unsplash) Egypt, Early 3000 BC The vast majority of what I’ve mentioned so far has shown events from an Imperial viewpoint, but there are a few books which take a look from different perspectives as well. These are all set after the Great Rift has taken place. For a long time Dark Imperium and Plague War were the two main books set in the current 40k timeline. They’re focused on Guilliman’s battles against the forces of his brother Mortarion, and as well as telling great stories they give a lot of information about Guilliman, Cawl the Primaris Marines and the state of the Imperium (and I assume Godblight does the same). Beyond the clarification of clerical errors or canonization, The Marvel Cinematic Universe - An Official Timeline has been bold enough to solidify one of the most important events to happen in recent years to the MCU. At the end of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the spiraling Scarlet Witch destroys the mystical Mount Wungadore, collapsing it upon herself. Though the collapse seems fatal, many fans called the off-screen death a bluff, not believing such a powerful being could perish in this way.

A Mad Scientist has built up a corporation to exploit his discovery that people can be squirted into the past, and returned the same way, through wormholes in the quantum foam. Well, not quite. In the schema of this novel, actual time travel is impossible. It is also impossible to transfer physical items any larger than the scale of the quantum foam from one parallel universe to another. It is, however, possible to strip a macroscopic object -- e.g., a human being -- down to its basic information and squirt this string of binary code through a wormhole into an exceedingly similar but different universe, where it will be automatically reassembled because, er, It Is A Fundamental Rule That This Is What Happens. (There are occasional trivial transcription errors, which can accumulate to become serious, so people make only a limited number of "trips".) Further, because some exceedingly similar parallel universes haven't progressed quite as far along the timeline as ours has, you can in effect travel into the past -- as into an area of the French Dordogne which Mad Scientist has been setting up to become -- you've guessed it! -- a sort of theme park. At around this time, the skin of sheep and goats were used to make parchment, a more durable alternative to papyrus. Roman scholar Varro described the invention of parchment in the ancient city of Pergamum as springing from the shortage of papyrus. This brief history tracing the evolution of books should help us appreciate books more—or at least the fact that we can get them so much more conveniently in this day and age! Building a project timeline can be rather difficult and time consuming. Templates help you save time and energy, providing you with a predefined structure for your tasks and milestones. A project timeline template will simplify the work of creating a clear schedule of your project, needing only minor data editing. Technically speaking then, The Devastation of Baal probably also fits into the timeline at some point after the events of the Dark Imperium books (now that they’re being adjusted to take place earlier on in the crusade) and The Great Work …but for the sake of ease I’ve included it here.The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems— of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations.” I hadn’t written an adventure story since Jurassic Park, and I thought it was time for another one.

Read my review of Ghost Warrior or my Rapid Fire interviews with Gav about Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider. What else? In recent years, most time travel stories have been comedies, or allegories. Even the famous novel by H.G. Wells just uses time travel to make a point about the society at the time the novel was written. But in Timeline, I wanted to write a time travel story that took its premise seriously. And I wanted to write a story that dealt with the reality behind our cliched images of knights and courtly love. I wanted to talk about what knighthood was really like.Timeline is impeccably researched. I know next-door-to-nothing about quantum physics, but Crichton has such immense game that from beginning to end, I was convinced that he knew what the hell he was talking about. Crichton devotes awesome attention to just how a tech company might send a human being across time and retrieve them. The team he assembles for this mission is expertly considered as well: historians, physicists and soldiers for hire, whose combat training turns out to be antithetical to exploring history. So I began to think: suppose it was really possible to travel in time. What would it be like? Would it be frightening? (I think it would be.) Would it be more dangerous than space travel? (Much more dangerous.) What would make you go anyway? I haven’t read this, the third book in the Dawn of Fire series, so I can’t say too much about it. From what I understand though, it changes the focus of the series away from Imperial forces battling Chaos and onto the Space Wolves facing off against the greenskin menace led by the legendary ork warlord Ghazgkhull Thraka. In China, the first movable type, made of wood, was invented around 1000 AD. However, the complexity of Chinese characters and the soaking properties of wood made it very labor-intensive to use, so that it did not really take off. Instead, in 1200 AD, the first metal movable type was invented in Korea, during the Goryeo Dynasty, producing the first book printed with metal movable type called the Jikji, printed in 1377 AD.

I haven’t actually read either of these, but as Darius points out in this interview Revenant Crusade is set post-Great Rift, after the events of The Devastation of Baal. Meanwhile the synopsis for City of Light specifies that it’s set “deep in Imperium Nihilus”. If you want to continue exploring the Blood Angels, these seem worth having on your list (see the Blood Angels list earlier for where they fit in the timeline). The molds that the Chinese used were made of clay, which breaks easily. The Koreans had their own version of moveable type made of bronze, which was sturdier. As early as AD 1377, a Buddhist book was already designed by the Koreans, called the Jikji. Moveable Type, 1000 to 1400 AD The novel spawned Timeline Computer Entertainment, a computer game developer that created the Timeline PC game published by Eidos Interactive in 2000. Additionally, an eponymous film based on the book was released in 2003. He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials – people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it. I’ve included these two audio dramas here because they feature a few key characters from the Gathering Storm stories, namely Inquisitor Greyfax and Yvraine, with a little bit of Guilliman and Eldrad Ulthran in the mix too. Of all the stories I’m including, these are the closest to direct follow-ons from the Gathering Storm.Eventually, it also paved the way for the digitization of books, beginning with the first book put on CD in the 1980s, The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia. Publishing in the Digital Age