- The Horus Heresy: Deliverance Lost, Gav Thorpe
I'm skipping Graham McNeill's The Outcast Dead, but I picked up the next ebook with some slight trepidation. I remember Gav Thorpe as a controversial character back in the old 40k days, to put it mildly. I've read a couple of his short stories over the course of this project, as well as Lorgar, and they haven't been very good. I'm a bit curious about the Raven Guard, though, and Deliverance Lost does also feature the Alpha Legion. So let's see what it's like.
**
Deliverance Lost starts where Thorpe's short story The Face of Treachery left off, with a Raven Guard ship rescuing Corax and the last survivors of the drop site massacre.
Both Face of Treachery and Deliverance Lost prominently feature a Thorpe invention called reflex shields, which make Raven Guard starships stealthy by redirecting their emissions into the warp. Coincidentally, during our Rogue Trader campaign, I had suggested that maybe the reason there are no kind of radiators on Warhammer ships is that they dump their excess heat into the warp. I mean basically the warp means magic exists, and as technology can interact with it, you can and indeed do have magical technology in Warhammer. So from that perspective, sure.
I have two questions, though. First of all, given that we've learned over the course of this book series that Imperial sensors are incredibly bad, I'm not sure what you need something like this for. Nobody seems to be able to see entire fleets of warships coming at them, cloaking device or no cloaking device.
But more to the point, the Raven Guard have this technology, and it's not even apparently particularly secret. Why doesn't anyone else? If you can do this, and the Raven Guard are known to be able to do it, surely other people can do it as well. If reflex shields really let entire space marine battle-barges sneak around a system packed with enemy ships, surely you'd think someone would be interested in them. So to me, this makes no sense from a wider point of view, but feels very Gav Thorpe.
As they're escaping the Isstvan system, the Raven Guard ship goes to "blacklight" protocols, where they power down all systems and divert everything to the engines - while still staying cloaked. As if the enemy sensors are detecting overall power output and not the plasma drives propelling the ship. If you can figure out the physics of that, more power to you.
**
The biggest problem with Deliverance Lost is that it's just boring. Thorpe's prose is plodding at the best of times. We get exhaustive descriptions of all the places the characters go to, and of the entirely humdrum things they're thinking, but neither places nor people develop any particular personality in the process.
The plot has Corax arrive at Terra, where the Emperor tells him where he can find some ancient gene-tech that he can use to rebuild his legion. It's hidden in a subterranean labyrinth that he has to puzzle out. Meanwhile, the Alpha Legion is fomenting an insurrection in the Raven Guard's home system. The trouble is that none of this is particularly interesting, not least because the writing is so leaden, so I gave up.
This is the first Horus Heresy novel where I simply cannot be bothered to keep reading. The characters and plot just are not one bit interesting, the story doesn't really tie in meaningfully with any of the broader narratives. As the Raven Guard started figuring out the Emperor's puzzle-labyrinth, I realized I just do not care what happens next.
Avoid.
