HA, the "mighty" imperium of man will burn in the fires of war, and Abbadon will claim the ashes of Terra for the powers of Chaos, DEATH TO THE FASLE EMPEROR! Well yes I collect a chaos army, very interesting all the background and stuff.

40k rocks. A lot of good lit for it. They keep changing the game a bit too much for my taste. The game was better when it was simpler. Guard, Marines, Eldar, Orks, Chaos, and maybe Tyranids. Now the good old days are just "fluff".

I WANT TO BE AN IMPERIAL DREADNOUGHT!!

Dan Abnett is a very good 'Sci-Fi' writer (inverted commas as I still can't decide whether it ought to have that title, perhaps Science Fantasty would be better?) and his other books (Eisenhorn and Ravenor series) are pretty good too. However, if you want an idea of how edgy the 40k universe can be, try the 'Inquisitor' series ("Inquisitor", "Harlequin" and "Chaos Child"). They are somwhat disturbing. Some of the short stories are fairly twisted too. What Abnett does is focus on one very small aspect of a large area (campaign, sector) which is in itself a fairly small part of the Imperium itself. It's a fairly compelling view of a galaxy where nearly anything can be reasonably expected to happen. The games system now seems to me to be the weakest aspect of the genre - the background has far more potential than the games can reasonably portray. IMHO, the two best games set in that time period are Battlefleet: Gothic and the new Epic system. Both have sufficient abstraction that a more reaslistic view can be read into them, and they flow much better than the minutiae-studying 28mm scale, although it is from here that most of the 'fluff' derives.