Review: The Best Aeldari Fiction Yet?

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:16]Hello and welcome to the YouTube channel for craftworldeldar.com.

[00:00:20]I'm Brent and in this video I'm going to be reviewing what I think is the single best piece of Eldari focused fiction to come out of the Black Library so far.

[00:00:30]I'm going to be talking about Mike Brooks' Void Scarred which dropped back in October so in 2025 it's been out less than a year and it is an absolute delight. And I say this as somebody who has probably consumed somewhere between 60 and 70 Black Library novels. A handful in print mostly as audio books. In fact a lot of the print Black Library books that I've read have been Eldari focused because often they don't get an audio edition and this one is my favorite by a considerable margin.

[00:01:02]The single worst thing about this book is that it's going to make you want to collect corsairs. It's focused on corsairs although craftworlders feature heavily, drukari feature significantly.

[00:01:17]It's a corsair story and it's so cool and so compelling and does such delightful things expanding the lore for corsairs that if you read it as an Eldar player you might be in danger of spending a significant amount of money on swashbuckling space elf pirates.

[00:01:38]In this video I'm going to tell you a bit about what I think makes this book stand out as unusually strong and let's be clear not only is this I I think the strongest of the Eldari stories but it is I think uh compared to all of the Black Library novels it is a it is a good one it is a strong one. There's a there's a kind of a wide range of quality that comes out of the Black Library. I I always enjoy reading 40K books or or listening to them. And in general, I think they range from being sci-fi masterpieces to kind of fun pulp that if it weren't 40K, maybe you wouldn't be into.

[00:02:14]And Void Scarred would be a delightful story even if it were skinned in a completely different setting.

[00:02:21]It's well written, incredibly well edited and structured. The plot's good, the characters are a delight, the world building's good. It's just good. So, let's dive in.

[00:02:30]Although there are at least three point of view characters in the book, right?

[00:02:35]You We do that thing where chapters jump between the perspectives of different characters.

[00:02:40]The text is primarily concerned with the rise of Myron Storm Dawn, who is a former Craftworlder turned Corsair Baron navigating outcast politics, Craftworld plots, and the antagonism of a hilarious and weirdly charismatic band of Ork pirates.

[00:03:00]Uh the adventure is gripping in its plot, but delightfully engaging in its lore, especially in the way in which Corsair culture incorporates both former Drukhari alongside former Craftworlders, and it investigates that what turns out to not really be a tension in a really curious way that expands the 40K world and the Eldar IP.

[00:03:23]Uh Corsair culture ends up being its own distinct thing, aspiring to reclaim some of the best elements of the Eldari identity before the fall, while always flirting with disaster because and and elves who become Corsairs know this.

[00:03:39]They know that they are taking a risk by stepping away from both the path system employed by the Craftworlders to prevent them from falling to Slaanesh, but also the geographic advantages of the dark city being located in the webway and the various ways in which they torture and murder people to keep Commorragh at bay.

[00:03:58]And what emerges is this culture that is expressive of the emotional intensity of space elves integrated with a freedom that's not possible in Commorragh because of the threat of being murdered and not possible in the craftworlds because rigid adherence to discipline is how they get by. It really is its own thing. The concept is sort of intoxicating as presented by Mike Brooks. And I as much as possible, I'm going to do this review without spoilers.

[00:04:26]I will tell you a bit about the story, but I will tell that you the same things that I would tell to fellow 40K fans if like we just played the games together and we were out at the pub for a drink and I was trying to sell them on it without spoiling it. So, no worries on that front. But I have to tell you some things. Otherwise, you know, how can I talk about it?

[00:04:44]So, let's start with this.

[00:04:46]Uh although the plot is great and the setting is cool and the culture building is good, it's very much a character-driven story.

[00:04:55]Uh I've already mentioned that swashbuckling baron, right? Myron Stormdon, whose aristocratic swagger is sufficiently checked by his principles and also vulnerability so that he is as charming to the reader as he is to other characters instead of sort of being insufferable.

[00:05:13]Despite embodying that sort of haughty space elf stereotype, he's easy to admire and easy to like, which is great.

[00:05:22]Uh he quickly acquires a companion. I don't think this is really giving any anything away who is uh a recently exiled craftworld admiral. Myron himself was a craftworld admiral at some point.

[00:05:33]We find that out almost immediately.

[00:05:35]And there's a a recently exiled craftworld admiral who is discovering the corsair life at the same time that we the reader are and so his discoveries about the culture and the tensions and how all of this works becomes a vehicle for the reader, like a way into the text, so we discover it, too, which is cool.

[00:05:56]It makes it possible for Mike Brooks to explain aspects of the world and the setting in a way that does not feel like exposition at all. It feels like a character is developing and growing, which is awesome.

[00:06:08]Both of these characters are uh point of view characters.

[00:06:12]Uh there's also an enigmatic skeptical warlock who doesn't really like the corsairs. He's not a POV character, but he's cool.

[00:06:20]Uh there's like a shade runner bodyguard who grew up in Commorragh, but turned her back on the dark city, and despite kind of being a comic book character, like in some sense, all of these characters could be characters in a well-written comic book. They're archetypal and larger than life without being boring or stereotypical.

[00:06:41]And then the other major POV character There's some other There's some uh POV characters that don't get a lot of a lot of POV screen time, but there's another POV character who is an orc pirate captain with like a five-cornered hat, and uh he wears spirit stones as cufflinks and has this like a ridiculously elaborate parody of like an age of sail outfit, and he is just hilariously over the top as an orc, but really well-written.

[00:07:13]And he has this subaltern much-put-upon mech boy who's always who's like trying to make these essential new technologies for the captain of the freebooters while keeping himself from getting murdered by the captain.

[00:07:27]And it actually turns out Mike Brooks has written a bunch of orc fiction for Warhammer, and wow, is he good at it.

[00:07:33]The orc chapters are just an absolute delight. Even if you don't think you're interested in orcs, I'm telling you, they're great.

[00:07:41]And I really think this is no easy task, too.

[00:07:43]It writing Eldar characters is no easy task. In fact, I think the hardest characters to write in the 40K universe are the ones who come dangerously close to just hyperbolizing some particular human stereotype.

[00:07:58]Uh perhaps rendering Orcs and Elves maybe the hardest to do well uh because you know, there's a degree to which like Orcs are very much like a goofy parody of a regional British working class vibe. In the same way that Elves are kind of like possibly narrowly hyperbolized haughty effete aristocrats with big feelings, right? There's like how how much variability can you really get? And the answer is a lot. Like you can you can do this very very well.

[00:08:37]And honestly, I think even Space Marines uh it's Space Marines when the Black Library got started, it was not obvious that you could have interesting novels about testosterone-vending machine no-neck space knights who all call one another brother and don't have any of the flaws that typically make characters in literature interesting except maybe pride. I talked about this in another video that I made about uh Black Library novels. That it really seems like maybe Space Marines shouldn't work as characters in a novel, but uh Black Library authors cracked that code, you know, 25 years ago. And Dan Abnett in particular is extraordinary at making them deep and interesting and all different from one another.

[00:09:20]And Mike Brooks is a really hecking good at writing Xenos, and that's hard.

[00:09:25]Because without compromising the sort of fundamental concept of you know, Orcs as being like Orcs and Elves as being like Elves, he gets a tremendous amount of individual personality variability and believable depth of character, which is awesome.

[00:09:41]All of the characters are starkly different from one another and all of their relationships have a a different and understandable vibe, which is great.

[00:09:50]Oh, and to that point, uh the the audio version is narrated by Nathaniel Priestley and he is amazing.

[00:09:58]He is equally believable as an emotionally complex haughty commissar Baron and also a savagely brutal but childishly innocent but nevertheless incredibly cunning orc pirate captain.

[00:10:17]I mean, like any of the best narrated 40K novels, it's like a masterclass in voice acting. It's so good.

[00:10:25]Uh okay, so aside from the fact that the characters are fabulous and fabulously voiced, I also love that the book is uh just a in terms of its its structure.

[00:10:36]It's tight, it's well-edited, well-struc- It's structurally reminiscent of a Bernard Cornwell novel, if you've read any of those. He's written a lot of historical uh war novels. He's famous for The Last Kingdom, which got a television series, the Sharpe books. If you live in the UK, you definitely know about Sharpe, right? And there is most of uh Cornwell's military stories, they do have kind of a in some sense a predictable structure in so far as there's usually some kind of scuffle in the beginning, there's a battle in the middle and a battle at the end, and in some sense the action is all constructed around these conflicts, but nevertheless the structure doesn't feel contrived and uh the character development never seems subordinate in any way to the action, which I think is a serious problem for the weaker Black Library novels, where it's like it's really about the action scenes and sometimes the action scenes are like and in I don't know. They're not always great.

[00:11:42]Uh sometimes they feel a little bit like the pulp sci-fi novel equivalent of like an 8-year-old boy making shooting noises for his G.I. Joes with tremendous enthusiasm and lots of saliva, but little in the way of substance. Like somebody uh somebody at Black Library was like, "There has to be this much action." And that's the focus and everything is sort of been corporately arranged, right? But like in in the best ones, uh it always every time there's an action scene, in some way the characters are developing and the complexities of the complexities of the plot and the story are developing. And Void Scarred is like that. It never stops developing its characters or its story in in order to make like bolter sounds at the reader.

[00:12:24]Instead, even though to some degree I think the the story probably is framed around these conflicts, the conflicts are just another vehicle for developing the characters in the story, which which is what you want. That's what makes a a compelling novel instead of an uh perhaps a verbose and image-driven, but ultimately empty description of fighting.

[00:12:47]In fact, I think one of the things that makes Mike Brooks so good is he the storytelling is excellent. He never relies on exposition independent of the narrative. He never just stops and tells you about stuff.

[00:13:00]Uh you discover you discover the things you need to know about the world, which are excellent, as the characters grow and develop and the plot advances. And that is that is skillfully done.

[00:13:11]That's a writer who really knows his craft instead of, you know, somebody with a lot of knowledge of the game and a big vocabulary kind of doing the best they can.

[00:13:21]Mike Brooks is a professional for sure.

[00:13:24]Oh, uh Uh, this one is also this next one is going to make me sound slightly snobby.

[00:13:29]I really like that the grammar is good.

[00:13:31]And don't get me wrong, I do not mind grammatical liberties in spoken and written English. In fact, it it's often appropriate. Like the orcs should talk like orcs. What I mean is that sometimes I get annoyed in Black Library novels when aristocratic graduates of Schola Progeniums or 1,500 year-old haughty elves or emperor's children obsessed with perfection get pronoun case wrong or use the phrase begs the question to mean invites us to ask, which isn't what it means.

[00:14:07]And probably very few people care about this, but it it it bugs me. And it happens even in some of the Black Library novels that I think are total masterpieces. They're great. I love them. Which is side note, Michael Brooks Mike is equally good at orc dialect and the icy precision and good manner manners of, you know, former residents of Commorragh.

[00:14:31]And the pacing's fantastic. There was no time during this novel once the story really got going that I wasn't just completely into it.

[00:14:40]In fact, I think the weakest part of the unfortunately the weakest part of the novel is the prologue. There's a to my mind totally unnecessary like captain's log in entry by this Imperial Navy officer before the story actually starts essentially just explaining who the Eldari are and what they're like from the perspective of the Empire of Man.

[00:15:04]And it is well-written and well-voice acted, but it does just move it essentially moves through all of the space elf stereotypes that we are familiar with. We never meet that Imperial officer. He doesn't have any particular interesting character qualities. We don't learn anything new or interesting about corsairs or space elves.

[00:15:23]It's just like a different way of delivering the information that you would find on the first two page spread of like the Eldari codex or something, but from the perspective of the Imperium.

[00:15:32]I don't really know why that part's there, but um hang in there through the first few minutes and it's not bad I mean it's there's nothing wrong with it, but you stick with it uh until the actual story starts and I think you're going to find it riveting.

[00:15:44]And let me be clear about one other thing. I would love to do this video with spoilers. I would love to just tell you how cool Myron Storm Don's character arc is and rant like a mad woodsman about the Corsair princess that we meet and talk about how even Mike Brooks is in between locations like this Leagues of Votann Maw size-ly esque market is such a great idea or the Corsair politics or when the exodite characters show up. But to talk about any of these things in detail would take something away from you and I don't want to do that. I just want you to listen to this book and like it as much as I did or read it for that matter, but it is a great audio experience.

[00:16:29]So that's what I've got. If you have your own ideas about uh which Eldari fiction you particularly like from the Black Library, please leave those in the comments below. Uh if you have suggestions for other readers, if you have your own thoughts on Void Scarred, I'd love to hear them. I would love it if we could keep spoilers out of the comments just so uh if people who are going to read the book want to scan the comments, they're not in danger of seeing something that could be an obstacle to the best possible experience of the text.

[00:16:56]And if you are willing to be siren songed into adding some corsairs to your collection if you haven't done already, it is a good time to do that. With 11th edition right around the corner, we currently have two corsair focused detachments and they just got their own box and there are all these new units.

[00:17:12]So it is to be fair a great time to be adding corsairs to your collection anyway.

[00:17:18]and so if you are looking for something to listen to while you paint those pirates or are looking for something to paint with a thematic paired listening experience, I think Voidscarred is perfect.

[00:17:31]And I'm very much hoping that we get additional Eldari content from Mike Brooks in the relatively near future. I would love for Games Workshop to give him more opportunities to develop the faction.

[00:17:43]Oh, the other thing I'm going to do cuz I can't help myself. Well back I wrote and recorded an Eldari short story exemplifying some of what I would like to see done with the faction in future Black Library stuff.

[00:17:53]And so I'll link it. I I'd be flattered if you'd give it a listen. I know that unofficial fan fiction can be a pretty hard sell.

[00:18:00]But if you don't already have an Audible subscription, I think it's worth getting one uh just to start with Voidscarred.

[00:18:06]I think it might be the best $15 a month I spend on anything.

[00:18:09]Okay, uh that's it. Back again soon with something new. Many thanks as always to my patrons, the Magnet Baron, and all of you for listening. Take care.

[00:18:19]Bye.