"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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