Let's Read the Horus Heresy 3: Galaxy in Flames

"I was there," said Titus Cassar, his wavering voice barely reaching the back of the chamber.

 - The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames, Ben Counter

That's right, it's time for the third instalment of Let's Read the Horus Heresy. You may notice it starts with exactly the same words as the first one, which is a choice you can make. Again, the story picks up right where we left off, as Horus's fleet arrives in the Isstvan system and the Heresy gets properly started.

**

In this one, we meet Morty, who is amusingly described as being Darth Vader. We also get Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children back as a point-of-view character. While Tarvitz and the Death Guard assault a monitoring station, Horus and Erbs talk to the Chaos Gods. The nascent Imperial Cult on Horus's flagship hides Euphrati Keeler, who does another miracle, and eventually Isstvan III is assaulted by a force including the Sons of Horus captains Loken and Torgeddon, as well as Lucius. Tarvitz stays in orbit to co-ordinate.

Counter's writing is good, and the leering and misogyny of the previous volume are gone again. There's more sloppy editing; chapters 9 and 15 start with almost exactly identical words, for example. But overall this is a pretty good book and carries the story forward effectively.

The thing I talked about with the previous book, the emerging black-and-white divide into the good guys and bad guys, is only getting stronger, and still doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They're still presenting the secular Imperial Truth as a good thing, but then Euphrati Keeler's cult is also a good thing.

To take an example of the good guy-bad guy dynamic, Tarvitz is shown Fabulous Bill's evil lab and offered enhancements of his own. Tarvitz reacts with horror: it's blasphemous to use xenos technology to tamper with the Emperor's holy gene-seed. Now, you can read this with a sense of irony that the "good guy" is a fanatical xenophobe. But the trouble is that the scene is played entirely straight, with Eidolon and Bill as the cackling villains offering evil temptation and Tarvitz heroically resisting.

This time, there's some pretty good moments with the Sons of Horus, but Abaddon and Horus himself are just pantomine villains, with Horus especially a raging, scenery-chewing, ridiculously cruel bad guy. It's still a real disappointment after Abnett's excellent portrayal of Horus in the first book.

Again, I was left wishing that the second and third book would have gone at least a little into why some Marines stayed loyal to the Emperor and some split for Horus. The only reasoning we hear is some stuff about the Emperor abandoning them and Horus, but it's presented so half-heartedly that it's difficult to tell if the people expressing these sentiments are meant to be serious about them. We've now got traitors fighting and killing loyalists, without really properly understanding why they're doing it. It feels like such a missed opportunity.

**

In military matters, I have to say I don't understand why Horus's forces storm the monitoring station on Isstvan Extremis. If the objective was to silence the station and take out its sensors, why not just bombard it from orbit? But also, destroying sensor systems on another planet isn't going to stop anyone on Isstvan III seeing giant Imperial space cathedrals lumber into orbit and start spewing drop pods.

I'm also very confused by the Titan again. In Chapter 3, we meet the Moderati of the Dies Irae again, as they're preparing the Imperator Titan for battle. And they're doing it on board Horus's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Do Astartes command ships really have the capacity to handle Imperator-class Titans and their landing craft? I mean I can't say it's impossible, but until now the biggest thing we've seen launched is a Stormbird. I really would have thought that moving even parts of a Titan Legion around would be a considerable enough operation to require dedicated Mechanicum starships.

But there are combat support troops! As the Sons of Horus are prepping for the Istvan III drop, a communications squad is mentioned. I'm especially pleased since I already painted one. Ground surveys prior to the drop pod assault are mentioned! Even more shockingly, Lucius seems to actually exercise command, and the Emperor's Children have an officer co-ordinating their battle from orbit. On the surface, there's even artillery and armor.

Severe spoilers follow. Having said that there's now at least some attention being paid to warfare, I do need to ask this. After the bombardment, the survivors fight back for what we're told is months. Given that the plan all along was for the first wave to be wiped out in the bombing, why were they allowed to drop with months of ammo? Or how are they resupplying themselves? I'm sure they can scrounge some ammo off the dead, but for months? They still seem to have plenty of emergency medical supplies until the very end. If Space Marines routinely drop with gigantically oversized supply dumps, you'd really think someone would mention it.

In general, though, when Counter writes warfare, it actually sounds like war and not a tabletop skirmish game, so from a mil-sf point of view, this is by far the best book yet.

**

So the Heresy is now fully underway, with Keeler and the gang making their getaway on the Death Guard ship Eisenstein and the remaining loyalists purged from Horus's legions. I'm still enjoying reading these books; they really are good entertainment.

Epic: Let's Paint Legions Imperialis

"You already have a uniform, Colonel, issued to you by the Emperor. That's who you're fighting for. Let the traitors alter their uniforms."

 - Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

I waxed poetic earlier about how Epic, specifically Space Marine, was my first love in wargaming. That meant that when Adeptus Titanicus came out, I got the starter box and a bunch of stuff, and then went on to buy some Aeronautica Imperialis as well. Hell, I even tried Battletech.

And then, in July, Games Workshop announced that Epic was coming back. And then announced that it was delayed. The delay went on and on, and we were told nothing about what was going on and why. Frankly, I started to feel a little silly that I'd been excited about the whole thing in the first place. We never were told what caused the delay, and I'll admit it played a part in my decision to buy no new minis in 2024.

However, it is now 2025, and I have the Legions starter set.

**

The box comes with a lovely hardback rulebook that's the same quality as the Titanicus books, but easier to read, for which my aging eyes are grateful.

There's an infantry box of space marines and Solar Auxilia each, some vehicles for both, and two Warhound Titans, as well as two whippy sticks, templates and dice. I also bought a Legions Astartes Battleforce, which gave me another pair of infantry sprues and a bunch of other marine things.

If I have a criticism of the starter box, it's that it actually doesn't come with that much stuff. You have enough infantry for two companies, with some attached units, and a smattering of tanks that don't make a formation for either faction. Also there's no terrain at all. This is actually a bit of a problem for us Titanicus players, as most of us won't have bothered with terrain small enough to be useful to infantry!

Another problem, which has been widely noted, is that there aren't a lot of order tokens, and they're printed on ridiculously flimsy card that's very prone to tearing. The comical quality of the printing is such that even the envelope the token sheet was in was terrible, the flap came off in bits instead of opening. How I yearn for anything even remotely like the 2nd ed Space Marine order counters.

As for the rules, my first impression is very positive. They strongly remind me of old Space Marine, which is a good thing, and the basic rules seem fairly streamlined. There's some odd things, but I'll get into those when and if I actually get a chance to play this.

**

What delights me as a Titanicus player is that the two Warhounds come with a whole new suite of weapons. To be honest, Titanicus feels pretty much dead right now, so it was a pleasant surprise to find not just lots of new weapons, but Titanicus weapon cards for them online as well.

Obviously I had to build some of them. I was thinking about ordering a volkite eradicator anyway, and the Incisor melta lances suit my Ferrox Maniple.

The new weapons are the same excellent quality that we're used to with Titanicus.

**

Because the Legions supplement Rise of the Dark Mechanicum includes rules for fielding a Titan army, it turns out I actually have a tournament-size army and then some in my Legio Venefica Titans and Auxilia Daedra Knights: they add up to 3490 points in Legions. However, they wouldn't be a very practical army, as only the Knights would be able to capture objectives. So I'm going to build some Space Marines who can do that.

The first Legions thing I actually did was order the appropriate flying bases for my Aeronautica Marine flyers. So perhaps counterintuitively, I have Titans and aircraft, but no ground troops.

I'm not sure how I feel about the textured bases, but I do know that they don't match the desert aesthetic I had decided on for my Titans. So I tried gluing on different amounts of ballast, and painting the exposed areas Light Grey, and I think it turned out all right.

As you can see, my Marines will be Word Bearers. When I got back into Warhammer ages ago, I decided that my legion of choice would be the XVII, because I had recently finished my theology degree and it was obvious that the Word Bearers were the theologians of the Chaos Space Marines. I carried that over into Aeronautica, and now I'm very surprised to find that the Word Bearers actually have a useful Legion trait! Unlike the other, lesser Legions, I can give orders to Broken detachments. So we're definitely sticking with Word Bearers.

**

The first formation I'm going to build is the most basic building block of Marine armies: the Legion Demi-Company. Entertainingly, the rulebook tells us that Legion companies were made up of three demi-companies. A demi-company has four compulsory detachments: an HQ, a Support and two Core detachments, both of which have to be tactical marines. It can get a whole bunch of different optional detachments, and all non-infantry models in the formation get a bonus when contesting objectives. I like that, as it encourages combined arms.

I got started with the Contemptor Dreadnoughts. Frankly, I've never been a fan of the design, but they're right there on the infantry sprues.

Some of those bits are tiny. But I maybe have to take back what I said, because at this scale, Contemptors are cute.

Each infantry sprue comes with two Contemptors, and building all of them from the starter set and the battleforce box gave me eight: four with twin lascannon and four with assault cannon. They were pretty easy to build, even though the smallest parts were a bit fiddly.

I painted them very simply: Burnt Cadmium Red base coat, Dark Red drybrush, Gunmetal Grey details with a Black Glaze wash. This is the paint scheme I used for my Aeronautica models, and it seems to work quite well at this scale.

They form the Dreadnought Talon As living dwellings in whom the strength of man rejoiceth.

**

What I really need, though, is infantry. Each sprue has a command stand, four stands of tactical marines, and one each of assault, plasma gun support and missile launcher support marines, as well as two stands of Terminators. There are some sergeant models for all of them.

The infantry are, of course, very tiny. Handily, the only assembly that's required is gluing the missile launchers on the support marines, and even though it's a bit fiddly, it can be done on the sprue. The majority of the models are attached to the sprue by their base, so with a very small amount of work, you can paint all the models on the sprue and then clip them off to glue onto the bases.

Painting the models was quite simple, and I went with the same formula as the Dreadnoughts.

As painting all that infantry is very fiddly work, I also built the three Predators from the starter box, and two Rhinos from the battleforce.

Both the Rhinos and Predators have several weapon options, which if I'm honest I'm not sure I'm a fan of. I can understand different turrets for the Predators, but choosing between sponson weapons just seems overly fiddly and unnecessary at this scale. They've also been made quite difficult to magnetize, although at this scale that wouldn't be my first choice anyway.

I also painted the two Sicarans.

Again, it's a bit weird that you get two squadrons of battle tanks, because the only Astartes formation you can make out of the box is a demi-company, and you can only attach one battle tank detachment to it. To make an armored company, you need a heavy armor detachment, like these Kratoses from the battleforce box: the squadron Behold! his mercies flourish.

I also built one of them into a commander. If you make a Solar Auxilia tank company, you have to upgrade one of the tanks to a tank commander, but the space marines only got tank commanders in the Great Slaughter supplement, and they're a separate detachment.

However, this lets me build my first formation: a Legion Armored Company.

**

I'm sorry, did I say infantry? I seem to have ended up painting tanks. Here's a tactical detachment.

I've painted these guys to match my 28mm signals squad, so their right shoulder pads are white and bear the signals insignia. Here's the whole demi-company, i.e. the infantry contents of one infantry box: one HQ stand, two tactical detachments, and two stands each of Terminators, Assault Marines, and plasma gun and missile gun support troops. They are the 2nd (Signals) Demi-Company Mightier are your voices than the manifold winds, 5th (Combat Support) Company, 2nd Battalion, Morbid Fane Chapter, Word Bearers Legion.

And here's all the marine miniatures from the core box.

**

So, I quite liked painting little tanks, and painting the infantry wasn't nearly as much of a chore as I'd feared. I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, but frankly, I'm having enough fun building and painting the minis that I want to collect more of them.

I hope GW keeps supporting the game, even though I'm not that keen on the system of releasing themed campaign books that also include rules. There's already some really good models, and I'd love to see some Rough Riders for the Solar Auxilia, more marine infantry and super-heavies, and Rough Riders. There's also still some gaps in the order of battle, most prominently that there's nothing in the marine artillery slot yet.

To conclude, I'm absolutely delighted that Epic is back, and I've enjoyed building and painting these minis more than any hobby project in a long, long time.

Let's Read Horus Heresy 2: False Gods

Cyclopean Magnus, Rogal Dorn, Leman Russ: names that rang with history, names that shaped history.

 - The Horus Heresy: False Gods, Graham McNeill

In the second book of the Horus Heresy series, we're in Graham McNeill's hands. False Gods is a direct sequel to Horus Rising, and Captain Garviel Loken is still our main protagonist. His relations with the other officers in the XVI Legion fray as they find out more about the terrible secret of space, Horus has a big fight and a dream sequence, and the remembrancers invent religion.

Also, Magnus's name is not Cyclopean. Although I suppose I may now start calling him C. Magnus the Red.

**

McNeill's writing is cruder than Abnett's, and he's in much more of a hurry. It's a shame, because I enjoyed the banter and personalities of the Luna Wolves in the previous book. They're now the Sons of Horus, and the battle-lines of the Heresy are being drawn, so everyone is gravitating toward either side, and hostilities are starting to break out.

The way McNeill writes women is much more unpleasant than Abnett. Early on, we find ourselves leering at Euphrati Keeler's breasts and subjected to crude sexual bragging and objectification that was absent from the previous installment. For some reason, there's a new remembrancer character, who mostly seems to be in the story as a target for McNeill's misogyny. Horus, who was unfailingly urbane and courteous in Horus Rising, belittles her and calls her "girl" in front of others. I mean it's still not that bad, as these things go, but it's decidedly unpleasant and a disappointment after the first novel.

There's some good stuff, though, like Horus's battle on the moon and the sheer distress of the Mournival when he's badly wounded. We meet Angron and Fulgrim, and Fabulous Bill puts in an appearance.

There's a detail that baffles me (slight spoilers). When Loken goes back to the moon of Davin and finds the plot object, he immediately recognizes it as "the anathame that was stolen from the Hall of Devices on Xenobia". How does he know that? We know what the anathame is and who stole it, so it's beknownst to us, but it's supposed to be unbeknownst to him, unless he's been listening in on the narration. Now, Loken recognizes the symbols on the box, so he could deduce that whatever this thing is, it's probably what the Interex said was stolen, and that would be enough for plot purposes. It just feels like sloppy writing.

**

When it comes to the military part of this military science fantasy, once again, there seems to be no reconnaissance, intelligence or indeed planning going on.

When Horus leads a force to Davin's moon, they land a sizeable Astartes force, Imperial Army and even logistics support (for once!), not to mention three actual Titans. Okay, they change landing sites at short notice, but still, shortly after disembarking, they're totally surprised to find, well, a gigantic object. No-one spotted it? There wasn't so much as a single recon flyover, or any kind of sensors on the orbiting warships? So far, many planetary landings seem to be total shots in the dark, with reconnaissance carried out on foot by the main force as they go.

I mean I hate to say this, but I'm pretty sure Abnett mentioned that XVI Legion was among the first to be issued new wargear like tactical dreadnought armor. Yet there doesn't seem to be a single skimmer or flyer capable of a recon mission in the entire expeditionary fleet. The idea that recon and sensor capabilities exist but go unused is frankly too ludicrous to contemplate in characters and units that are consistently described as very skilled in warfare.

There are also several times in the first two novels where entire starships suddenly appear out of nowhere, or the expeditionary fleet has no idea where active enemy ships might be. I refer anyone confused about this to Atomic Rockets, specifically their page Detection in Space Warfare and its famous sub-heading There Ain't No Stealth in Space. However terrible Imperial sensors supposedly are, their ships are powered by some kind of reaction drive, and especially with the sheer size of the ships, those things will be trivially detectable from several star systems over. So these kinds of surprises simply cannot happen.

You could make a plot point out of the fact that several Astartes officers only seem to exercise tactical leadership at the best of times. The most extreme example is Lucius, who's constantly addressed as Captain, but never seems to command anything. All of the officers are depicted as being at the forefront of the fighting, and it's not at all clear if anyone is exercising any kind of overall command and control. Even Horus himself seems to lead a multi-company operation purely by saddle orders. Again, I get that this is a novelization of a squad-level wargame, but still.

Also, as a dedicated Titanicus player, I'm almost mystified that the Dies Irae even appears in the novel. I was excited when we got to see the inside of a Titan and everything, and then it barely appears in the rest of the story at all. Chekov's Imperator!

**

I did enjoy False Gods, and the story is moving on quite efficiently. I understand that they need to get to the actual Heresy, it's in the series title and everything, but I wish the book wasn't in such a hurry.

The weakest part of False Gods is definitely Horus's conversion. His dream sequence is mostly boring, but it does have one somewhat interesting point. When Erebus (whom I just typoed as Erbs, which I might also stick with) shows Horus the future, we know that it really is what the Imperium ends up being. Horus, of course, can't know that, which is kind of lampshaded when C. Magnus the Red shows up. But it's a lovely irony for the reader.

My main gripe is that Abnett's Horus was an interesting, charismatic and memorable character, made tragic because you know what ends up happening to him. McNeill's Horus is far cruder and less nuanced, and this just makes his fall that much less compelling. I also wish Erbs was more of a character, but that's because I'm a Word Bearers guy myself.

In general, it's a bit dismaying how quickly Horus and his confidantes go from loyal Imperial warriors to murdering, moustache-twirling villains. This is also significant because of a much broader question to do with Warhammer in general.

Back when Warhammer started out, it was fairly clear that the Imperium was a horrible dystopia. The 2000AD influences were strong, and even if a human reader is quite likely to identify with humans, it was still obvious that the Imperium of Mankind is comically evil.

Since then, though, that hasn't really been the case. The space marines have very much been made into the heroes of the setting, and are consistently portrayed as such. When this idea of superhuman soldiers fighting horrible aliens attracts the worst kind of people, Games Workshop do condemn them, but at the same time they try to dodge responsibility for their fictional universe by claiming it's a parody. But it isn't any more.

False Gods is a very good example of this. No, the Imperium on its Great Crusade isn't a particularly nice place, and the more you know about the setting, the more nuance you can bring to it. But I will still defy anyone to honestly read False Gods and not come away with the impression that the loyalists are the humane and considerate good guys, while the traitors are sneering evil-doers. It's abundantly clear that Loken and Torgeddon are the heroes of the piece. I'm not saying they shouldn't be; I am saying that the black-and-white portrayal of the Imperium as good and its enemies as bad is in line with how Games Workshop generally presents things, and it's dishonest of them to argue otherwise.

If we want to think about the broader symbology of the egalitarian warrior lodges leading to corruption and damnation, and unquestioning worship of a head of state / father figure being the only way to stay pure, well, it doesn't really get much better.

**

So, I enjoyed False Gods, even though I'm disappointed that the nuance of the previous book has been abandoned. The story is moving on, though, and the heresy is getting heresier.

Warhammer 40,000: Renegade Armiger Moonshadow

After my 500-point battle at Red Rocket against the relentless space wizard fuckery of the Grey Knights, I wanted some space wizards of my own.

**

The ninth edition Chaos Knights codex lets you make one Knight in your army a Tzeentch psyker. So I want a psyker-Armiger, and I also want to build a sort of mini-Abominant model for it.

I started with a tail, following the example of my Knight Rampager, also from the Abominant's electroscourge, and also had one of the birds perch on the meltagun.

The carapace weapon is very easy to magnetize, so I did.

To my delight, I found that the slot in the arm weapons where they would ordinarily pivot on their mount is exactly the size of a Primal Horizon 1/4" × 1/16" magnet.

So this was a very easy magnetizing job, and now worth doing since the new Armiger box comes with both sets of weapons. I did the same on the mounts as I had on the big Knights: chop off the whole tab and stick a magnet on.

Then I forgot to take more pictures, so here's the finished model.

She is Renegade Armiger Moonshadow.

I'm quite happy with how the Abominant bits worked!

**

That was a fun model to build and I'm happy with the result. I don't think 10th edition has psyker Armigers, at least for the moment, but based on what Goonhammer is saying about Chaos Knights, they sound fun.

I think I'll be spending most of this year at a very different scale, though!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 1: Horus Rising

"I was there," he would say afterwards, until afterwards became a time quite devoid of laughter.

 - The Horus Heresy: Horus Rising, Dan Abnett

So last year, I made a sort of New Year's resolution to not buy any miniatures. I kept it, mostly, but I knew that in 2025, I was going to start playing Games Workshop's latest 8mm offering, Legions Imperialis.

In case anyone reading this doesn't know what I'm talking about, I will try to very briefly explain. One of my hobbies is miniature wargaming, which involves building and painting little scale models and then playing a wargame with more or less complicated rules, on a tabletop, against another person who also has some little toy soldiers.

My favorite wargames are by a UK company called Games Workshop, and they are set in GW's Warhammer universe. In its various science fiction and fantasy versions, Warhammer has been around for about as long as I have, so a little over 40 years. I got my very first Warhammer game in 1992 or 1993, I think, and I've been at it more or less ever since.

The science fiction version of Warhammer was originally called Rogue Trader, but later became Warhammer 40,000. It's called that because it's set in the year 40,000, and is often referred to 40k. In its early years, Rogue Trader/40k was a very silly mishmash of fantasy in space, scifi, 2000AD comics and basically just everything the people writing it thought was cool. It gradually evolved into a more definite setting: a dark future where an oppressive Imperium of humanity rules the galaxy. If you're aware of something called grimdark, well, as the Wikipedia page will tell you, the term itself is from 40k.

The Imperium is basically lifted wholesale from the Nemesis the Warlock comics published by 2000AD, with a little Dune thrown in. I still think the first part of the new Dune movies is the most Warhammer movie that's ever been made. GW also stole the idea of Chaos from Michael Moorcock's Elric stories to be the Imperium's main enemy, and a whole bunch of stuff from Tolkien and all of the other usual suspects.

Rogue Trader was in 28mm scale, meaning it was played with miniatures of such a size that the distance from the ground to human eye level is 28mm. So a model of an average-sized human will be about 3cm tall. Warhammer has more or less stuck with this scale, which is a big reason why it's almost certainly the most popular miniature wargaming scale today.

Back in 1988, GW had an idea to make a game in an entirely different scale: 6mm, or thereabouts. This meant they could have models of huge war machines the size of buildings, which they called Titans. The story I've been told is that only problem was that they could only afford to make one kind of Titan model. So whereas in Warhammer 40,000, one player might play as the Imperial Guard and the other would have space elf miniatures, both players in this game would have the same models.

To justify this, someone at Games Workshop came up with the idea that maybe the Imperium had a huge civil war, where one side started worshipping Chaos. And so, the Horus Heresy was born.

**

Over time, the Horus Heresy became a crucial part of Warhammer lore. The Imperium is ruled by the immortal God-Emperor of Mankind. To conquer the galaxy, he created the Space Marines, genetically enhanced super-soldiers grouped into twenty legions, each led by a super-super-soldier called a Primarch. The mightiest of these Primarchs was called Horus, who led the XVI Legion. He fell to Chaos and rebelled against the Emperor, starting the giant civil war that was named after him: the Horus Heresy.

My favorite GW game at the moment is Adeptus Titanicus, which is set in the Horus Heresy. It's an 8mm scale game where both players command an army of giant Titans. In 2023, GW published Legions Imperialis, an 8mm wargame with Space Marines, tanks, aircraft, artillery and everything. I knew I wanted to play it, so when 2024 and my miniature-buying hiatus drew to a close, I decided to pick up one of the Horus Heresy novels from GW's fiction-publishing arm and read it. It was The Solar War by John French, the first book in the Siege of Terra series.

Quite frankly, I expected very little from a Warhammer novel published by Games Workshop. It is, of course, a very silly book. But I was entertained enough by it that when I was reading it on my way home from our local hobby store, I missed my stop on the subway. So clearly, I needed to read more of these. I decided that not only would I start at the very beginning, but also that I would inflict this experience on the three people who read this blog.

Welcome to Let's Read the Horus Heresy.

**

The first book in the Horus Heresy series is called Horus Rising, and it's by Dan Abnett. Now, I have to say, I've been playing a lot of Darktide, and they made a big deal out of it having a plot written by Dan Abnett. It's been a decidedly underwhelming experience, to put it mildly. Then again, I quite liked some of his Marvel stuff, like the Thanos Imperative. But once again, I'm not expecting too much.

At this point, I do want to say that there are fifty-four (54!) Horus Heresy novels, plus the eight Siege of Terra novels, one of which is in three parts. I do not think I can possibly manage to read all of them. The legion I collect is the XVII, the Word Bearers, because I have a degree in theology, so I'm probably going to focus on the novels involving them, and any other stuff I may find interesting. We'll see how it goes. But I want to make it clear that I am not promising to read every single one of them. Anyway I'll see which ones I can get my hands on; it seems that once again, Games Workshop don't want to sell us products we want to buy, and most of the series seems to be totally unavailable in print.

My other disclaimer is that these novels, at least so far, are not great literature, nor do I imagine they have ever aspired to be. They're about super-soldiers in power armor in space, and they are deeply silly. I also honestly don't know what anyone entirely unfamiliar with Warhammer would make of any of this. To those of us who've grown up with it, so much in these books is very meaningful, but without that background, would be baffling or meaningless. You can read the Horus Heresy novels without knowing the first thing about Warhammer. I'm just not sure why you'd want to.

**

Having said all that, I've now read Horus Rising, and it was very good. Abnett's prose is clear, concise and businesslike, and he tells a good story. This is head and shoulders above the usual airport thriller fare.

What it is in practice is mostly heavily armored men fighting, or talking to other heavily armored men, mostly about war and fighting. We're firmly in the realm of military science fiction, or perhaps better, military science fantasy. There are actually several female characters, some of them quite central to the larger plot, but all of the space marines are men, and definitely very butch.

For those readers not aware of the history around this particular issue, Games Workshop made many female miniatures back in the old days, but now grown men on the Internet throw terrible temper tantrums at the idea that fourty thousand years in the future, a woman could possibly be a super-soldier.

 I haven't thoroughly checked, but I'm pretty sure Horus Rising doesn't pass the Bechdel test. It outdoes the Hobbit in actually having female characters who get to speak, and there's only one scene of gratuitous female nudity, and almost no overt misogyny. So in terms of gender representation, I'd say it exceeds expectations, but those expectations weren't so much low as infernal.

A big reason why Horus Rising sucked me in is the characters, and here, of course, the weight of the Warhammer universe makes itself felt. The protagonist of the book is captain Garviel Loken, a space marine officer in Horus's XVI Luna Wolves legion. Loken is a sympathetic character, firmly wedded to what in his time was the official Imperial credo of science and atheism. The Emperor, while he was still walking around, absolutely forbade anyone from worshipping him as a god, and Loken is a good space marine.

By himself, Loken wouldn't be a very interesting protagonist. Where the book shines is its portrayal of the Luna Wolves, and especially the characters who Warhammer fans know will later become unthinkably infamous. Abnett's Horus is excellent. He's almost theatrically charismatic, and portrayed as a skilled leader and politician, stage-managing his appearances with the aid of the senior Luna Wolves captains. The most pleasant surprise, to me, was how much I like Abaddon. Appropriately and tragically, the primarch Sanguinius also makes a sympathetic appearance.

Only the Emperor's Children are a little lackluster. Their appearance centers on building up Saul Tarvitz, so both Eidolon and Lucius come off as quite cartoonish and silly, although Lucius does get some decent character moments. I'm personally disappointed as I have Lucius in my commander deck.

In addition to the marines, Horus Rising also features a whole ragtag band of remembrancers, official Imperial propagandists in a variety of forms. They're mostly there so we can see the space marines from the outside, but through them, we also get to see things like the early signs of the Imperial cult. They're decently written, and a nice change from the super-soldiers.

**

I'd be a bad military historian if I didn't have something to say about the actual fighting. As this is basically a Warhammer, or at least 28mm Horus Heresy, novelization, I suppose it's appropriate that the combat is intensely tactical in scope.

Everything is a small-unit action, and mostly close combat. Most of the time, there are no supporting arms: both the palace-fortress and rebel stronghold on Sixty-Three-Nineteen are stormed by squads of space marines; in the latter, Terminators advancing across open ground, in a situation that surely would call for even the most rudimentary artillery or armor support. There, even the Imperial Army seemed incapable of anything except infantry assaults.

The drops on Murder seem completely insane, and the criticism Horus and the Mournival level at Eidolon is, if anything, too mild. A landing on an unknown xenos planet goes wrong and no-one's heard from again, so you send in a drop pod assault without even any real idea where they're going. It's so colossally stupid it makes the idea of III Legion as some kind of martial exemplars look ridiculous, underlined by the absolutely childish behavior of Eidolon and Lucius. And again, no support arms: no casualty evacuation, no ammunition resupply, just get in the fucking drop pod, Tarvitz. Very, very silly.

**

Having said that, though, Horus Rising was a very pleasant surprise. It's quite well written, and the action kept me entertained. The knowledge of what's coming, foregrounded by the introduction of daemons, Chaos and the Imperial cult, and above all by the very successful sympathetic portrait of Horus and the Luna Wolves, sets up a lovely dramatic tension throughout. I had a very good time reading it, and would recommend it to anyone who's into Warhammer at all.