Let's Read the Horus Heresy 12: A Thousand Sons

The Mountain had existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imagine.

 - The Horus Heresy: A Thousand Sons, Graham McNeill

It's time to finally properly meet C. Magnus the Red and his legion. It's a Graham McNeill joint, which we can tell because the first chapter discusses how fuckable the young female Remembrancers are. Lexicanum tells me that this was the first Black Library novel to ever make the New York Times bestseller list, so let's see how he did it.

**

A Thousand Sons (nb. there are more than one thousand of them) starts with the titular legion hanging out on a desert world, meeting some Space Woofs, and going on to fight some bird-dudes with the woofs and the Word Bearers. Our main point-of-view characters are Ahriman and a human remembrancer dude.

The juxtaposition of the hapless human Remembrancers and the inscrutable superhuman Astartes is honestly kinda boring by now. I understand that it's useful to have regular humans alongside the space marines, but I feel like we've already done this same exact thing with the Sons of Horus and the Emperor's Children. The Remembrancers are sympathetic enough, but some of the sub-plots involving them feel like unnecessary padding in what's already a fairly long book. Shades of Fulgrim, in other words.

A Thousand Sons feels like a throwback to the first Horus Heresy books in good ways as well. I like the Thousand Sons characters, and Magnus and Ahriman are particularly successful. McNeill's done well in making Magnus and his legion tremendously arrogant, but in a very believable and human way. The Space Wolves are less successful, mostly coming across as silly barbarians. If you want mindless berserkers, the World Eaters have consistently been more sympathetic and interesting.

The Word Bearers play a small part in the proceedings, but at least they get to be a proper legion doing proper legion things, instead of just having Erbs loom around sinisterly like an Astartes Dr. Evil. We also meet Lorgar, who helps calm C. Magnus the Red and Leman Russ.

After all this, it's time for the Council of Nikaea, where the question of whether space marine legions should make use of psykers is debated. I have no idea why it's been named after one of the great Christian ecumenical councils, especially since no-one gets punched in the face by Santa Claus.

After Nikaea, everything goes from bad to worse. The remembrancers have a totally unnecessary sidequest involving the psychneuein, which seem to have been as annoying in the 31st millenium as they are in Gladius, and everything culminates where those of you who know the fluff know it does.

**

A Thousand Sons is too long, but it's a successful book because in the end, it's a successful tragedy. The decision at Nikaea is wrong and, as we know, eventually gets reversed. Magnus and his legions are wrong to ignore it, and Emps is wrong to not tell Magnus about what he's doing.

So far, the most significant error in this whole mess, the hamartia of the Horus Heresy, if you will, is the Emperor not telling any of his Primarchs what he was up to. It's what makes Horus doubt him, and makes Magnus try to contact him and fuck everything up. Having said that, the decision to send Leman Russ and the woofs to destroy Prospero seems totally insane. So yeah, at the end of the day, if I have to pick a side on this, then I say Magnus Did Nothing Wrong (tm).

This was a good book.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 11: Fallen Angels

There were no trumpets to announce their arrival, no cheering crowds to welcome them home.

 - The Horus Heresy: Fallen Angels, Mike Lee

We're back with the Dark Angels, as Fallen Angels picks up where Descent of Angels left off. The cousins Zahariel and Nemiel are back on Caliban and with the Lion's crusade fleet, respectively, and Astelan from Tales of Heresy is on Caliban as well.

**

So this is the story of how the Dark Angels on Caliban end up rebelling against the Emperor, told simultaneously with Lion El'Jonson and Nemiel out fighting for the forge world of Diamat against Horus's forces. It's an interesting piece of background, and I wanted to make some Fallen Dark Angels for my 40k Chaos army, but they got dropped in 9th edition, I think, just before I got around to actually building the models. This has happened to me enough times in 28mm GW that I'm kinda tired of it.

There's some shoddy editing: Astelan has a power sword on page 125 of the electronic book, and on 173 it's a chainsword, and there's the occasional typo. The biggest problem of all, though, is that it's all just kind of flat and uninteresting. The way everyone keeps calling everyone Brother all the time, you fully expect Hulkamania to run wild on you, but sadly, in Fallen Angels, nothing really runs wild at any point.

The Lion plotline is honestly just kind of boring? There's some decent action, but it's just really not very interesting, and it doesn't really tie in at all with what's going on back on Caliban. The story there is better, but also rather uninspired, with a very by-the-numbers Aliens knockoff, which the writer apparently liked so much he did it twice.

Plot spoilers, but at the end of the story, Caliban is in revolt against the Imperium and Luther is apparently trying to summon a daemon. This is a bit of an abrupt turnaround for him, and again, why this happens, or why Lion El'Jonson seemingly turned on his homeworld and abandoned his mentor, is never really properly explained, or at least in a way that feels satisfactory.

As with several of the previous volumes, we again have a whole lot of space marines going from swearing eternal loyalty to the Emperor to more or less deciding "you know what, fuck that guy" in pretty much the blink of an eye. Given that this series of books is about, you know, the Horus Heresy, it feels like a pretty big omission that I still can't exactly tell you why the rebels decided to rebel.

As military science fiction, there's not really a whole lot here. There's a very Second World War naval battle in space over Diamat, and the fighting on the planet is intensely 40k with its APC rushes and almost turn-based exchanges of fire. Like I said, on Caliban we get Aliens, but with Warhammer space marines instead of Michael Biehn, and then Aliens again, and never a Ripley in sight.

**

While the pace of the Caliban storyline picks up toward the end of the book, it's still not particularly well executed, and the Diamat part is frankly boring. Fallen Angels isn't as bad as Battle for the Abyss, but it's not very good either. In fact, it's very much like the latter part of Descent of Angels. If I'm honest, even if you're into the Dark Angels, I'd skip this one.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 10: Tales of Heresy

He had been circling for ten months.

 - Blood Games, Dan Abnett, in The Horus Heresy: Tales of Heresy

Okay so somehow, I feel like I only just started reading these, and here we are with book ten. Tales of Heresy is a collection of seven short stories from various authors: some of them are good, some are not, and some are all right.

**

The first story is Blood Games, by Dan Abnett, and it's apparently one of the first stories about the Custodes, making it the prose equivalent of that John Blanche art. It starts off really good, but I think it'd have been better without the second half. Still, it's not bad, and it's fun to have a Custodes story.

Mike Lee's Wolf at the Door is pretty good, although it's kind of wild how inconsistent different Black Library stories can be with each other. In this one, hordes of Dark Eldar are no match for a squad of Space Wolves, which is really weird to read when the last time I read about them was the Word Bearers trilogy, where they were... different. Still, it's a decently written story, and although the ending is overly dramatic and a bit clumsy, at least the Imperium come away as kinda bad guys.

Speaking of bad guys and Anthony Reynolds, Scions of the Storm is his contribution to the volume, and I don't know. I didn't think it was very good. Once again, the Word Bearers are almost comically evil sneering villains. I like that some of the characters from the Word Bearers trilogy are there, but little else. Which is more than I can say for Gav Thorpe's first appearance in this series, Call of the Lion, which is just bad.

At this point, I was really not sold on this anthology. Imagine my surprise when Graham McNeill's The Last Church, where the Emperor is a New Atheist, turns out to be great, and Matthew Farrer's After Desh'ea closes out the volume by making me like Angron. So there were two excellent stories lurking in there, as rewards for everyone who made it that far. I'm glad I read it.

**

As a postscript, I am now perhaps slightly annoyed that in addition to my Word Bearers and Alpha Legion, this and the sympathetic World Eaters captain in Battle for the Abyss now make me want to paint some of Angron's guys as well. It hasn't even been a year into the 8mm hobby and it's getting out of hand already. Reading these books was a bad idea, and I'm going to keep going.