Olympus Mons burned bright and spat a plume of fire into the sky.
- The Horus Heresy: Battle for the Abyss, Ben Counter
Finally, a Horus Heresy book starring my guys, the Word Bearers. It's by Ben Counter, whose
Galaxy In Flames I quite liked. The Word Bearers have hatched a nefarious plot to attack the Ultramarines home world, and only a handful of loyalists stand in their way.
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Okay, first things first: this is really, really bad. Battle for the Abyss is absolutely the worst Horus Heresy book so far, and it's not even close. It's worse than
False Gods and more boring than
Fulgrim. If you're reading these, just skip it.
It has the occasional decent moment, and I wanted to like it: it's a story about a battle and chase between starships, and it has Word Bearers in it. But it was just such a slog to get through.
The plot feels like it's lifted from a bad Star Wars fanfic, with some warp stuff stuck on. Everything would make a lot more sense if the titular Furious Abyss was an Imperial death star or super star destroyer, and the protagonists were scrappy rebels fighting the Empire. The Abyss is supposed to be an incredibly powerful mega-battleship with a full chapter of space marines on board, and yet they can't destroy a single Imperial cruiser or defend their ship against a handful of marine boarders. None of this makes any sense at all, and makes most of the plot just fall apart even if you don't think about it.
The Word Bearers are just terribly written. Their leaders are generic sneering villains, and the regular marines are mooks who get slaughtered by the heroes like storm troopers being chopped up by Jedi. It makes no sense at all for a tiny bunch of loyalists to try to storm a battleship with something like a chapter of Word Bearers on board, except that these Word Bearers don't seem to be Astartes at all, based on the way the protagonists just carve through them. This is an exceptional Horus Heresy book in that the enemy space marines aren't presented as equal opponents in any way.
The loyalists themselves are all one-dimensional caricatures of their legions: the Smurfs are insufferably rigid and righteous, and their dialogue is horrible; the World Eaters are insane berserkers; the Thousand Sons officer is a competent psyker who means well but is persecuted; the Space Wolf is a drunken barbarian who hates the space wizard. The World Eaters captain becomes a bit more of a character toward the end, and I liked the Thousand Sons guy, but most of their interactions are completely forgettable.
My adopted legion identity with the XVII is starting to take root, because I was so disappointed by how badly the Word Bearers were represented, and I really, really hate the Smurfs.
**
When I wrote about False Gods, I noted that entire starships just mysteriously appear out of nowhere, and similar things have kept happening since. As a reminder of the pure physics of these things, in the words of the fantastic Atomic Rockets website:
There Ain't No Stealth In Space. Space is cold and empty. It is simply impossible for spacecraft, let alone gigantic floating space cathedrals propelled by massive reaction drived, to hide in space.
Battle for the Abyss forces us to revisit this issue, and ask: how incredibly bad are Imperial sensors?
When the Ultramarines battleship Fist of Macragge fails to show up, the protagonists commandeer an Imperial cruiser and go looking for it. When they reach the site of the last recorded transmission from the ship, they find nothing at all. The author tells us that this isn't unusual, as traces of space battles can simply vanish.
We actually know that the Furious Abyss destroyed the Fist of Macragge. The physics of blowing up a massive Imperial battleship without leaving even a spot of wreckage are frankly impossible, so I suppose the only question is: are Imperial sensors so bad that they somehow can't see the debris?
As the heroes pursue the Furious Abyss, it needs to dock for repairs. This is how chapter 9 starts:
The assault-boats docked quickly and without incident, the pilot having avoided radar and long-range scans to insert the Astartes squads outside the main thoroughfares of Bakka Triumveron 14.
So the cruiser Wrathful entered the system, flew close enough to the space station where the Abyss was docked, launched its assault craft, and no-one on the station or indeed the Abyss noticed a damn thing until the World Eaters started murdering people.
The omly way this makes any amount of sense is if Imperial sensors are really so bad that stationing people at viewports to look outside would dramatically improve their early warning capabilities.
**
So yeah, sadly Battle for the Abyss is the first Horus Heresy novel that I strongly recommend skipping no matter what you're interested in. It's just bad.
