Let's Read the Horus Heresy 13: Nemesis

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember.

 - The Horus Heresy: Nemesis, James Swallow

This one's by James Swallow, who also did Flight of the Eisenstein, which I liked. Nemesis tracks a team of assassins sent to kill Horus, and a murder investigation on an Imperial world. It's quite good.

**

Like so many scifi novels, Nemesis has two plots that initially start out completely separate from each other, but obviously the reader knows that they'll eventually meet. This requires some faith in a author, and I remember giving up on Peter F. Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction when he introduced what felt like the twentieth separate and unconnected plot. Nemesis also requires a little bit of faith when one plotline is an Execution Force of Imperial assassins working up to murder the Warmaster, and the other is a detective story that seems to have nothing at all to do with it.

It's worth it, though. The Assassinorum plotline is a very classic one where they assemble a team of dysfunctional individualists to do an apparently impossible mission. You've seen the movie, you've played the video game, you know how this goes. But it's competently done and enjoyable; as with Eisenstein, Swallow writes a good Warhammer thriller. Oddly enough I think the experience is enhanced by the fact that if you know anything at all about the Horus Heresy, you know they won't be successful.

I also really liked the police procedural plotline. The Horus Heresy books are so focused on the space marines that it's just good to read a story where for something like 90% of the time there isn't a suit of power armor to be seen. The way the two stories link up is actually interesting enough that I'll just say that I thought this was a very good Horus Heresy book and leave it at that.

Something Nemesis has in common with Eisenstein is that in both books, Rogal Dorn is a complete moron. Here he tries to pick a totally pointless fight with the Custodes and is just generally an ass. I'm coming around to the idea that one way to look at the Horus Heresy is that the whole Primarch project was just a really bad idea.

**

So anyway, I liked Nemesis. And speaking of Primarchs and really bad ideas, next up, it's Lorgar.

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.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 9: Mechanicum

It never rained on Mars, not any more.

 - The Horus Heresy: Mechanicum, Graham McNeill

We're back on Mars, this time with with McNeill and the Machine Cult. There's Knights, Titans, a bunch of protagonists who actually kinda don't really matter, but Knights blow up, Titans fall over and fun is had.

**

I have to say that McNeill's prose has definitely improved since Fulgrim. Even his descriptions of female characters aren't nearly as leering, and none of Mechanicum feels like a slog to get through.

Our protagonist is a scribe called Dalia Cythera, arrested for a tech-heresy on Earth and taken to Mars to assist an adept of the Mechanicum in her super-secret project. She's a sympathetic character, but oddly, the super-secret project and the stuff she gets up to doesn't really matter, because at the same time, we get to follow the outbreak of the Horus Heresy on Mars through a Legio Tempestus Titan princeps and some House Taranis Knight pilots, and frankly that's much more interesting.

Somebody online said that Mechanicum is a YA novel, and that's actually very exactly true of the Dalia plotline. It's not a bad thing, it's just a little surprising.

The stories sort of intersect when a machine run by as abominable intelligence (AI) tries to murder Dalia. I found it a little weird, as the void-shielded murderbot was a good antagonist, but I felt like an abominable intelligence should have been a bigger deal? Men of Iron and all that?

Other than that, though, I don't really have a lot to say about Mechanicum. It has some good background on the Machine Cult, and especially toward the end, there's solidly entertaining mil-sf action with Titans and everything. I enjoyed it.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 8: Battle for the Abyss

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.

**

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 only 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.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 7: Legion

The Nurthene uttered some of the usual gibberish before he died.

 - The Horus Heresy: Legion, Dan Abnett

"Brother Alpharius, be so kind as to pass me my powerful Astares binoculars."

"Yes, Brother Alpharius."

 - Alpharius, probably

After the previous novel's post-technological fantasy, here's Dan Abnett with a total change of pace and scenery. The previous Abnett book in the series was the first one, and it was probably the best one so far, so I'm actually kinda expecting something.

**

As it happens, I was not disappointed. Legion is really good.

I'll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Some of Legion is very silly, even by the standards of this series, and the endless macho posturing starts getting very boring very quickly. Abnett is very sure to let us know that everyone is dead 'ard or whatever, and keep letting us know. It's actually very much like the characters in Darktide, which uncoincidentally boasts Abnett as a writer, and which I may have compared to a Guy Ritchie gangster movie parody.

Luckily, even though Legion shares some of the macho stupidity of Lock, Bolt and Two Smoking Barrels 40,000, the British entertainment product it far more closely resembles is 'Allo 'Allo. We have a main character who works undercover, pursues a totally unlikely romance, more or less disguises himself as an onion seller, and tries to stay alive amidst the conflicting schemes of a foreign intelligence organization, the army, the secret police and the Alpha Legion. Go on, tell me Lord Commander Namatjira isn't General von Klinkerhoffen, or that you can't see John Grammaticus bemoaning what a tangled web we weave.

The one disappointment in all this is that as a mirror image of the macho bullshit, Legion objectifies women in a way that Horus Rising very notably didn't. Or I mean to put it another way, I'm sure there was a very solid plot reason to create an Imperial Army regiment that has a permanent cadre of horny teenage girls. It's not bad by mil-sf standards, but combined with the very manly soldier men being dead butch, it starts to get quite tiresome.

What rescues Legion from its flaws is the plot, and especially the Alpha Legion. It starts out as a decently entertaining spy thriller that aspires to Alistair Maclean, and turns into space opera. This is a combination that's intensely Warhammer, especially if you remember that the previous novel was a post-technological Arthurian romance, which makes a wonderful combination. It's also very enjoyable, and clearly rises in quality toward the end.

There are many good characters in Legion, but the ones who really steal the show are the Astartes. In one early scene, there's an Alpha Legion marine pretending to be their Primarch, and another one pretending to be their other Primarch pretending to be a regular marine. And it only gets better from there. When I looked into 28mm Horus Heresy, I found the Alpha Legion interesting; now I'm trying paint schemes for them in 8mm.

**

So far, Legion is the best Horus Heresy novel. Do read it.