'Why, yes,’ said Jack, who was as well acquainted with old omnibus as any man there present. 'Falsum in omnibus. What do you say to omnibus, Stephen?’
'I concede the victory,’ said Stephen smiling. 'Omnibus routs me.’
- Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain
I'm currently reading the Horus Heresy novels, or at least as many of them as I can get my hands on. I found the first three at our friendly local game store, but had to order the next few from Games Workshop. I wanted to keep reading Warhammer nonsense, though, so as a dedicated Word Bearers player I got the Word Bearers Omnibus to tide me over.
Whereas the Horus Heresy novels I've read so far focus on telling the big story of the Heresy, as near as I can tell this is a standalone Warhammer 40,000 story. The Word Bearers Omnibus consists of three novels and a short story, chronicling the adventures of the Dark Apostle Marduk. In the first book, they play Epic, in the second they play Space Hulk, and the third book is 40k.
**
I liked this giant of a book quite a lot. The story is pretty good, and I really liked the characters. When I read False Gods in the Horus Heresy series, I was disappointed that the Word Bearers in it, including Erbs himself, were so one-dimensional. Here we have excellent XVII Legio characters, and they really made this omnibus bus. Marduk is interesting, and his interactions with the other Word Bearers are really good. I especially liked Kol Badar. There are several other brief point-of-view characters, and I think the Enforcer from the first book is definitely my favorite.
A couple of random observations. In chapter 12 of the first book, the Elysian brigadier gets incredibly pissy with a techno-magos who suggests that his casualties be reprocessed into nutrients, and later one of his subordinates is horrified by the idea. I get that the point is that the Elysians honor their dead, but surely corpse-starch is a pretty well-known thing? It'd be an interesting plot point for some regiments to be honored with the distinction that their dead don't have to go into the tanks.
There's an interesting bit in the same book on the subject:
Fallen warriors were dragged back, for to leave them upon the field of battle would have been a gross sacrilege, and in addition, the wargear and gene-seed of the Legion were far too precious to abandon. (p. 122)
Wouldn't it be interesting for this to be a story point and a game mechanic? Sadly, it's not even really consistent across the whole trilogy, as the third book describes Word Bearers ignoring their fallen. But it would be kinda fascinating to portray this in a game.
On a broader matter of representation, I wonder if this trilogy happens to straddle an interesting historical moment. The first book, Dark Apostle, came out in 2007 and is aggressively masculine. I think one female character, a Chaos cultist, speaks in it, and she doesn't even have a name. Dark Disciple, 2008, features Dark Eldar women and a brief appearance by a female Explorator, but again, even compared to the roughly contemporary Horus Heresy novels, it's dead butch. Rather like in False Gods, women are there to be leered at or victimized.
But at the beginning of Dark Creed (2010), a White Consul Space Marine is addressing the "men and women" of an Imperial Guard regiment, and it's not the only time inclusive language is used either. So that's a definite change in representation.
As mil-sf, I really liked the first book. The next two were much more 40k, but my only real issue with them was that the Word Bearer casualties seem massive throughout. I'm willing to accept that some of the stuff in the second book is intentional risk-taking, but overall, there are Chaos Marines being killed left, right and center. When we're told someone's a veteran of centuries of fighting or whatever, the only thing you can think at some point is: how? At the rate Word Bearers die throughout the second and third books, how are there any Heresy survivors left any more?
Finally, to echo what I was saying about the Horus Heresy novel False Gods, it's very obvious throughout the trilogy that the Imperium are the good guys. Loyalist Marines are portrayed as literal knights in shining armor; the Imperial fortress world in the third novel sounds like a paradise, albeit a militaristic one. The first novel goes on about how the Word Bearers make an Imperial world they occupy into a polluted hellscape - which is what I thought Imperial worlds already were. So for all that Games Workshop maintain that 40k is a satire and the Imperium aren't presented as the good guys, well, this omnibus definitely doesn't bear that out.
**
Having said all that, I definitely enjoyed the Word Bearers Omnibus. It was a fun read, and gave me lots of fluff ideas for my own Word Bearers host. I really like how it went all in on the Word Bearers as the bad guys, with appropriately diabolic plots and machinations and such. The first book is especially great on this, but I liked the whole thing.
I'll be back with more Horus Heresy soon!
