Let's Read the Horus Heresy 17: Deliverance Lost

The last time he had been in the Isstvan system, his departure had been very different.

 - 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.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 16: Age of Darkness

He wanted to weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone.

 - Rules of Engagement, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness

This time on Let's Read the Horus Heresy, it's another short story collection, called Age of Darkness.

**

McNeill opens with a story about some Smurfs doing combat simulations; it's not bad, but they really are the most boring legion. Liar's Due by James Swallow is a really good Alpha Legion story, and after this and Nemesis, I'm kind of a fan. Nick Kyme's Forgotten Sons is, sadly, also very forgettable.

The first Horus Heresy novel I actually read was by John French, and this collection has his story The Last Remembrancer. I quite liked it, and on reading it, I realized why I've developed such a dislike of Rogal Dorn. He's a bully. I'm not sure I've seen an appearance from him yet where he doesn't threaten to murder people for crimes like disagreeing with him, or telling him something he doesn't want to hear.

Chris Wraight's Rebirth is a visit to the ruins of Prospero, and speaking of bullies, the comparison made in it between the World Eaters and Space Wolves is very apt. The World Eaters are a tragedy: genetic super-soldiers literally driven insane by their desire to emulate their deeply damaged Primarch. So far in these stories, in their interactions with the other legions, the Space Wolves and Leman Russ just come across as hypocritical assholes. Y'know, sorcery is terrible, unless a "rune-priest" does it. I freely admit I never liked the faux space viking thing, but it's not as if anything I've read so far has made me change my mind.

Gav Thorpe's story, The Face of Treachery, was just flat and boring. Little Horus, by Dan Abnett, wasn't really anything that special, but the quality of his writing really is head and shoulders above everyone else. I still like the Luna Wolves because of Abnett, and am trying to resist adding yet another legion to my Epic collection. Rob Sanders's Iron Within is a decent enough story about some loyalist Iron Warriors, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden finishes on a strong note by taking everything that was good about Descent of Angels and running with it.

**

So far, these anthologies have been a bit of a mixed bag. Both ones I've read have had some really good stories, a couple of bad ones, and several very forgettable ones. A I write this, though, Black Library are charging 6.49€ for an anthology, and 3.49-3.99€ for a single short story, so basically if there are two stories in an anthology that I'm interested in reading, it's actually cheaper to get the whole thing. So maybe I'll be reading a few more.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 15: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word

The Tower of Infinite Lords was less impressive than its name suggested.

 - The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, Gav Thorpe

Greetings from Kor Phaeron! The Lord Phaeron! The Bearer of the Word! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!

 - Castora, herald-slave of the Covenant of Vharadesh, probably

I decided it would be a good idea to follow up The First Heretic with Lorgar, to stay on a Word Bearers kick. This one's by Gav Thorpe, who was something of a controversial figure back in the day in the Warhammer hobby. I read a short story of his in Tales of Heresy, and it wasn't great. In this Primarchs novel - they don't seem to be numbered - he's taking us to the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis.

**

The book starts with a bunch of impoverished nomads on a desert planet, who come across Kor Phaeron's Mad Max caravan. Because I mean of course the religious fanatics are a desert people. There actually hasn't been a whole lot of orientalism in the Horus Heresy series so far, but Lorgar goes a long way toward fixing that. I half expected Kor Phaeron to have a harem.

Anyway the nomads have discovered a remarkable child in the desert. It's Lorgar, obviously, and Kor Phaeron takes him into the caravan and starts teaching him the faith. Even though there's an actual sandworm, it's a lot more Mad Max than Dune, because the religious content is really just thinly veiled Chaos worship. No human sacrifices, daemon-summoning or that kind of thing (yet), but it's very obvious that the Powers who rule Colchis are the Chaos gods.

Lorgar is instructed in their worship, but when he starts having visions of the Emperor and C. Magnus the Red, he replaces Lorgar as the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla and starts preaching the faith of the One, who will soon descend to them from the sky. Lorgar goes on to take over the biggest religious organization on Colchis, the Covenant, and unify the planet into a theocracy, while Kor Phaeron is an evil bureaucrat.

The problem is that this is all incredibly boring. It's not a bad story, but Thorpe's prose is so lackluster that nothing feels like it matters. Again, Lorgar is a sympathetic character, and so are several of the others, while even Kor Phaeron gets some good moments. But there's nothing exciting, interesting or memorable here, not even any really interesting fluff for wargaming. Given that the Primarchs ebooks currently cost twice as much as the main series, I would strongly recommend avoiding this even if you're a Word Bearers fan.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 14: First Heretic

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

 - The Horus Heresy: The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

"No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. There is no escape."

 - Lorgar Aurelian, probably

Here we finally are, with my legion: the Word Bearers. This is my first Aaron Dembski-Bowden book. He's highly rated by both Horus Heresy tier lists and reddit users, so let's see what we get. There's almost an element of danger here, because I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

**

I'm quite happy to say that The First Heretic more than fulfilled my expectations. Dembski-Bowden writes well, and I think he gets a crucial point: the Horus Heresy is, first and foremost, a tragedy.

So, the book finally stars the Word Bearers. Lorgar's seventeenth Legion, formerly the Imperial Heralds, known for their fanaticism in the Imperial cause and as the inventors of Chaplains, the skull-helmed heralds and confessors of the legions. The problem has been that in the previous novels, the Word Bearers have mostly been pantomime villains.

In The First Heretic, we finally properly see things from their point of view. The Word Bearers thing is that they're very religious, and basically worship the Emperor as a god. When we've encountered the Imperial cult in the previous volumes, their holy text has been the Lectitio Divinitatus, which attests the divinity of the Emperor. Lorgar wrote it.

Emps himself, however, does not approve. He also thinks the Word Bearers are moving far too slowly for the Great Crusade, and to chastize them, he sends the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia that the Word Bearers spent ages building for his glory. The inhabitants of Monarchia get to evacuate and send one distress call, which has the entire legion rush back. Emps himself then forces them to kneel in the ashes of the city, in ritual humiliation.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous success and the Word Bearers immediately mend their ways.

Several of the previous Horus Heresy novels have featured Word Bearers First Chaplain Erbs, always sort of lurking around, doing something villainous and best visualized as Mike Myers's Dr. Evil with his little finger to his lips. We now know where Erbs learned his trade: from Lorgar's adoptive father Kor Phaeron, a fairly ancient augmented human (i.e. not a proper space marine, he was too old for the procedures) who clanks around in Terminator armor like a mechanized Palpatine. The two of them encourage Lorgar to go on a quest to find gods who are willing to be worshipped, and again, those of you who know the lore know how this goes.

At the forefront of Lorgar's quest is captain Argel Tal, a name many people will recognize. He's an excellently written character, and so is Lorgar. The two of them carry the narrative, with Argel Tal as the point-of-view character who has his doubts about whether these are the kind of gods they should be worshipping. The story culminates in the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, where Lorgar duels Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard.

**

This is a very successful book. It's a tragedy for just about everyone involved, from the Emperor on down. It's a successful one because while Erbs and Kor Phaeron are still mostly just being evil, the motivations of the key characters are deeply understandable.

There's some talk in the book that each Primarch embodies some attribute of the Emperor, and passes that on to his legion. It's stated here that Lorgar's attribute is faith, which makes all of his Word Bearers fanatically loyal to him, and at least somewhat explains his deification of the Emperor. Now, because we've read The Last Church, we know that Emps is an angry New Atheist, so we get that this pisses him off. But Lorgar apparently never realizes this until the destruction of Monarchia and the humiliation of his legion.

You really do have to wonder what the Emperor was thinking. If Nicaea and sending the Space Wolves to destroy Prospero were terrible decisions, and Emps not telling Magnus what he was up to seems inexplicable, I think there's a good argument that the ritual humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers is what kicks off the whole Heresy.

Lorgar's greatest personal tragedy is that he's a genetically and sorcerously engineered super-soldier who doesn't want to be a soldier at all. He's a leader but not a warrior, but it's not like the Emperor asked him. He's the Primarch who doesn't want to be a Primarch. Clearly he's happiest doing theology and building cities for the Imperium, so I don't know, why not let him do that?

During the Drop Site Massacre, he charges Corax even though he knows it's a duel he can't win. But he's rather die than watch his legion butchered. That's real heroism. Like I said, how do you not feel for the guy? So far he's a rare Primarch in not being at all a buffoon or a lunatic.

Argel Tal is also very sympathetic. Like I said, he has serious doubts about what they're doing, but his loyalty to his Primarch is such that he doesn't just follow along, but volunteers. Of course, he comes to suspect that he's doing this because of the gene-seed he has from Lorgar, but he does it anyway. The stories of Lorgar and Argel Tal are properly tragic, the setting is very space operatic, and the whole thing is just a satisfying, well-written story.

**

The First Heretic also features a Legio Cybernetica unit attached to the Word Bearers, where some of the battle-automata have been inducted into the legion as honorary members. So I'm very much afraid that's all the justification I'm going to need to paint some Word Bearers robots in Legions.

Finally, I want to point out that Lorgar is consistently described as golden, and after the dramatic events on Khur, he spends quite a long time brooding and smearing himself with ash while wearing only a loincloth.

This, by the way, is where I abandon publication order. Like I said at the start of this project, I absolutely will not read all fifty thousand Horus Heresy books, and even though I've heard good things about Prospero Burns and Abnett's been quite good, I have to be honest and say that I find the whole space viking thing so unbelievably boring that I cannot face the idea of a whole novel of them. Because there will apparently never be another Elder Scrolls game, I have to reserve my viking cliche tolerance for another playthrough of Skyrim. So I will be back next time with something out of sequence.

To sum up, I found The First Heretic grand and intoxicating. It's by miles the best Horus Heresy novel so far, and I'd say that if you're interested in Warhammer and are going to read one book in the whole series, I'd make it this one.

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.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 6: Descent of Angels

It begins on Caliban.

 - The Horus Heresy: Descent of Angels, Mitchel Scanlon

The sixth book in the Horus Heresy series isn't available in print, so I bought it as an e-book from Black Library. I got a perfectly decent epub file for my money, and it was a good thing to read on my phone. Descent of Angels is Mitchel Scanlon's only book in the series, and it's a bit of a strange one.

**

Descent of Angels starts on Caliban, the future home world of the Dark Angels, well before first contact with the Imperium. The protagonist is a (very!) young knight called Zahariel, and we follow him as he joins Lion El'Jonson's knightly order. The knights wear primitive power armor and go on quests to rid the forests of Caliban of terrifying beasts. The first half of the novel is basically a post-technological Arthurian fantasy, and I really liked it. The knights' campaign culminates in a sort of medieval-Napoleonic siege and storming of the castle of an enemy knightly order, which at times is pure Sharpe, with the heroic warriors climbing up the breach in the walls with their standard waving. It's great stuff.

Then the First Legion and eventually the Emperor himself show up, and sadly, the story takes a decided turn for the worse. There's some decent stuff as the knights are tested and many are inducted into the I Legion, now the Dark Angels. There's a definite attempt to foreshadow some coming splits in the Legion, but the story feels artificial. There's a sub-plot where some disaffected knights try to assassinate the Emperor, and it's just poorly done throughout.

In the last part of the novel, Zahariel is a full Space Marine, and their chapter is sent to enforce compliance on the world of Sarosh, replacing some White Scars. Given the nature of the assignment, it's a bit of a mystery why a Primarch would be sent to do it. I'm also not too keen on the return to the theme of virtuous warriors versus corrupt civilians. It's a bit too militaristic for my taste.

I do like that the flagship of the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet is called the Invincible Reason, it's very French Revolution of them. I could definitely see a pre-Heresy Imperial ship called the Droits de l'Homme. L'Empereur Souverain? Tyrannicide, I think, would suit my Word Bearers better.

Even though the initial description of Sarosh isn't bad, this last quarter of the novel is clearly the worst part. It turns out everything on Sarosh is not what it seems, and after some events, the Dark Angels have to haul a psychic bomb into a cave on the planet. Again, the whole thing feels rushed and poorly done, and the attempt to foreshadow what everyone who knows their 40k lore knows will happen to the Dark Angels is just kind of clumsy. I've rarely read a book where the quality of the story, and even of the writing, dropped so sharply.

There's also a bit of a discrepancy between Descent of Angels and some of the previous books. In Horus Rising, one of the Luna Wolves is possessed by a daemon, and this is considered unbelievable by almost everyone, and needs to be carefully suppressed. In Flight of the Eisenstein and Fulgrim, daemons are treated as ridiculous superstitions. But in the last part of Descent of Angels, the idea of daemons entering the material world is discussed entirely matter-of-factly, without a 30k Scully in sight. So I'm quite confused as to what's supposed to be going on with this.

**

I've always liked the Dark Angels, not least because the excellent 1993 Space Hulk video game, where you play as the Deathwing, was a formative Warhammer experience for me. So I very much wanted to like Descent of Angels, and as a Dark Angels fan, I definitely enjoyed the first part of the book. It gave me a lot of ideas for fluff for my traitor Dark Angels. But unfortunately there's no getting away from how disappointing the last part of the book was.

On a broader note, the e-book experiment was successful, and I think I might try another one.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 5: Fulgrim

"The danger for most of us," Ostian Delafour would say on those rare occasions when he was coaxed to speak of his gift, "is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we hit it."

 - The Horus Heresy: Fulgrim, Graham McNeill

Yes, I am. Do you know my poetry?

 - Cornelius Blayke, presumably

In the fifth Horus Heresy novel, we get to spend some time with the Emperor's Children. Graham McNeill's at the wheel again; if it wasn't written on the cover, you could tell from the fact that every time we meet a woman, we're told about her breasts. Having said that, though, given that this is a book about the fall of a legion to Slaanesh, I was expecting a lot worse.

**

Fulgrim is quite a long book. It tells us about the Emperor's Children destroying a xenos species called the Laer, which also turns into the start of their fall to Chaos, and specifically Slaanesh, as both the Astartes and their attached remembrancers start pursuing ever more extreme sensations. Delightfully, this is underpinned by the philosophy of Cornelius Blayke, who seems to be an amalgam of William Blake and some other characters in the Warhammer timeline. I thought he was a wonderful invention, and the process by which the real Blake seems to have become confused with other historical persons is quite recognizable from actual history. Fulgrim also meets Eldrad Ulthran. I hadn't realized Ulthran was that old.

The co-starring legion in Fulgrim are the Iron Hands. Fulgrim's gang has a decent space opera interlude as they battle the fleet of a human civilization and its alien allies. During the climactic final battle, McNeill has this to say:

Trapped against the furnace of the Carollis Star, the democratic, multi-part confederacy of the Diasporex was proving to be its undoing. Set against the iron leadership of Ferrus Manus, their many captains could not co-ordinate quickly or ingeniously enough to outwit the tactical ferocity of a primarch.

 - Fulgrim, p. 193

Because as we know, multicultural democracies lose naval wars against strong leaders. So at times, the political values are quite clearly visible.

Eventually Fulgrim and Ferrus pick their sides, and the Emperor's Children fall so completely to Chaos that they invent Noise Marines. From a revisit to Isstvan III we go to the epic battle on Isstvan V, where the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard are nearly wiped out, and Fulgrim kills Ferrus Manus.

**

I've complained about it being unclear why the traitor Legions fall to Chaos in the first place. When it comes to the Emperor's Children, it both is and isn't quite clear. They're primarily corrupted by the Laer, but the alacrity with which most of them embrace it does strongly suggest that the legion was already headed for a fall. Why is that? Why is it that Bill and even Fulgrim himself have abandoned official Imperial xenophobia and are so willing to experiment with xenos technology, even organs? As with the Luna Wolves and the Death Guard, we're just not told.

I do like that Fulgrim is eventually a tragic figure, but I would have appreciated at least a little more insight into why he basically allows himself to be possessed by a daemon. I just don't really get it.

If the Emperor's Children remain slightly confusing, I have to say I feel bad for the Iron Hands, because they're such stooges throughout. The way the friendship between Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus is told, with the forging competition and everything, is actually really good. But it never really gets a chance to feel significant, especially since at worst, Ferrus Manus is a caricature like Rogal Dorn in Eisenstein. His elite Terminators get unceremoniously butchered by the Emperor's Children, and his "tactical ferocity" on Isstvan V consists of recklessly charging into a fight with Fulgrim and losing. I mean it's not like the Iron Hands have ever been a particularly popular legion or chapter, but still, I felt they were treated unreasonably poorly here.

**

So Fulgrim had some good bits in it, like Cornelius Blayke and the hunt for the Interex fleet. But overall, especially given its length, I think that of all the Horus Heresy books so far, this is the one I'd be least likely to re-read. Even though it has Isstvan V in it, most of it wasn't very memorable, and at worst, it was almost a slog. They can't all be winners, I suppose.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 4: The Flight of the Eisenstein

In the void, the vessels gathered.

- The Horus Heresy: The Flight of the Eisenstein, James Swallow

We're back with the Horus Heresy series, and the fourth book starts with what could be a reworking of the first line of Black Sabbath's War Pigs. This one's by James Swallow, and he takes us back to before the Heresy started, with the Death Guard. Our main character is Captain Nathaniel Garro, who we already briefly met, so we know where this is going.

**

As Garro hangs out with his battle-brothers and fights the xenos with Morty, the vibe is very Horus Rising, and that's definitely a good thing. I really like the first chapters. I like Garro, I like the camaraderie of the Death Guard, and Morty is entirely charming. I still don't get why they storm Isstvan Extremis. The retelling of the events at Isstvan III is very well done, and the various reactions of Garro and his command squad are well portrayed and add depth to the events. I like that the Sisters of Silence are there as well.

When I wrote about Galaxy In Flames, I said it felt like a real shame that we're not getting at all into what really happened to make the traitor legions fall to Chaos, and to be honest, I still don't get it. In the Death Guard, it's very clear that Typhon is in on the plan and Garro isn't. There's tension on the subject of the warrior lodges, with Garro holding very similar views to Garviel Loken of the Sons of Horus. Captain Grulgor of the Second Company clearly resents Garro because he's from Terra, but Grulgor comes across as pretty much an asshole. So as with the Sons of Horus, I feel like we're being given the mysterious warrior lodges and some petty personal prejudices as the reasons entire legions turned on the Emperor, and marines are entirely ready to murder their comrades in cold blood. It's quite unsatisfying.

Once we get to Isstvan III and the titular flight of the frigate Eisenstein, Swallow is in fine form as the horror thriller of a harrowing trip through the warp unfolds. They picked up Euphrati Keeler and her gang, and I was actually a bit surprised by how marginal they ended up being to the story.

One of the weaker moments of the book is their encounter with Rogal Dorn, who is almost buffoonish in his wild mood swings. I'm coming around to thinking of the Primarchs as something like Norse or Greek gods, except desexualized. Dorn's silliness is definitely inspiring me to paint more traitor Imperial Fists.

What is the thing with asexual space knights, by the way? Space Marines and their Primarchs are even less sexual than the Jedi. I'm not complaining about it, but I'm wondering why it's a thing. Sure, there's a sense in which Horus is Mordred, but the Emperor has no Empress, and there's not a Lancelot to be seen.

However, it's worth noting that the female characters are also quite desexualized, which is good compared to some other works in this series.

**

If Flight of the Eisenstein is reduced to a single main theme, it's the story of Nathaniel Garro's conversion. With the aid of his housecarl and Imperial saint Euphrati Keeler, Garro finds the God in God-Emperor. Because it's a conversion narrative and a very silly space adventure, it's easily the most entertaining conversion story I've ever read.

When I studied conversion stories as part of my degree in religious studies, one of the interesting points made in the literature was that conversion stories are almost always written from the perspective of the new faith, and not from that of the pre-convert. So as actual accounts of what led to the conversion, they're not very useful. That's sort of the case here, as we understand what Garro is converting to, but not really what from.

Part of this problem is that so far, the pre-Heresy Imperial Truth doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. It's presented as a sort of almost militant atheism and rationalism, somewhat reminiscent of revolutionary France. But in a space fantasy world of warp demons and psychic powers, its practicioners come across as hapless Scully skeptics, completely denying the observable reality before their eyes. When they chide people for believing in the Emperor as a god, or in daemons, it comes across as prejudice rather than an actual system of beliefs. So sadly, we've now been among the Luna Wolves and the Death Guard, and we still don't really understand why any of them fell to Chaos.

**

Overall, I liked the Flight of the Eisenstein. It was an enjoyable space fantasy, I liked many of the characters, and the thriller/horror elements worked. Good entertainment.

Let's Read Warhammer 40,000: Word Bearers: The Omnibus

'He did, sir, upon my honour,’ cried Macdonald, laying his right hand flat upon the table. 'And falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, I say.’

'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!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 3: Galaxy in Flames

"I was there," said Titus Cassar, his wavering voice barely reaching the back of the chamber.

 - The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames, Ben Counter

That's right, it's time for the third instalment of Let's Read the Horus Heresy. You may notice it starts with exactly the same words as the first one, which is a choice you can make. Again, the story picks up right where we left off, as Horus's fleet arrives in the Isstvan system and the Heresy gets properly started.

**

In this one, we meet Morty, who is amusingly described as being Darth Vader. We also get Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children back as a point-of-view character. While Tarvitz and the Death Guard assault a monitoring station, Horus and Erbs talk to the Chaos Gods. The nascent Imperial Cult on Horus's flagship hides Euphrati Keeler, who does another miracle, and eventually Isstvan III is assaulted by a force including the Sons of Horus captains Loken and Torgeddon, as well as Lucius. Tarvitz stays in orbit to co-ordinate.

Counter's writing is good, and the leering and misogyny of the previous volume are gone again. There's more sloppy editing; chapters 9 and 15 start with almost exactly identical words, for example. But overall this is a pretty good book and carries the story forward effectively.

The thing I talked about with the previous book, the emerging black-and-white divide into the good guys and bad guys, is only getting stronger, and still doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They're still presenting the secular Imperial Truth as a good thing, but then Euphrati Keeler's cult is also a good thing.

To take an example of the good guy-bad guy dynamic, Tarvitz is shown Fabulous Bill's evil lab and offered enhancements of his own. Tarvitz reacts with horror: it's blasphemous to use xenos technology to tamper with the Emperor's holy gene-seed. Now, you can read this with a sense of irony that the "good guy" is a fanatical xenophobe. But the trouble is that the scene is played entirely straight, with Eidolon and Bill as the cackling villains offering evil temptation and Tarvitz heroically resisting.

This time, there's some pretty good moments with the Sons of Horus, but Abaddon and Horus himself are just pantomine villains, with Horus especially a raging, scenery-chewing, ridiculously cruel bad guy. It's still a real disappointment after Abnett's excellent portrayal of Horus in the first book.

Again, I was left wishing that the second and third book would have gone at least a little into why some Marines stayed loyal to the Emperor and some split for Horus. The only reasoning we hear is some stuff about the Emperor abandoning them and Horus, but it's presented so half-heartedly that it's difficult to tell if the people expressing these sentiments are meant to be serious about them. We've now got traitors fighting and killing loyalists, without really properly understanding why they're doing it. It feels like such a missed opportunity.

**

In military matters, I have to say I don't understand why Horus's forces storm the monitoring station on Isstvan Extremis. If the objective was to silence the station and take out its sensors, why not just bombard it from orbit? But also, destroying sensor systems on another planet isn't going to stop anyone on Isstvan III seeing giant Imperial space cathedrals lumber into orbit and start spewing drop pods.

I'm also very confused by the Titan again. In Chapter 3, we meet the Moderati of the Dies Irae again, as they're preparing the Imperator Titan for battle. And they're doing it on board Horus's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Do Astartes command ships really have the capacity to handle Imperator-class Titans and their landing craft? I mean I can't say it's impossible, but until now the biggest thing we've seen launched is a Stormbird. I really would have thought that moving even parts of a Titan Legion around would be a considerable enough operation to require dedicated Mechanicum starships.

But there are combat support troops! As the Sons of Horus are prepping for the Istvan III drop, a communications squad is mentioned. I'm especially pleased since I already painted one. Ground surveys prior to the drop pod assault are mentioned! Even more shockingly, Lucius seems to actually exercise command, and the Emperor's Children have an officer co-ordinating their battle from orbit. On the surface, there's even artillery and armor.

Severe spoilers follow. Having said that there's now at least some attention being paid to warfare, I do need to ask this. After the bombardment, the survivors fight back for what we're told is months. Given that the plan all along was for the first wave to be wiped out in the bombing, why were they allowed to drop with months of ammo? Or how are they resupplying themselves? I'm sure they can scrounge some ammo off the dead, but for months? They still seem to have plenty of emergency medical supplies until the very end. If Space Marines routinely drop with gigantically oversized supply dumps, you'd really think someone would mention it.

In general, though, when Counter writes warfare, it actually sounds like war and not a tabletop skirmish game, so from a mil-sf point of view, this is by far the best book yet.

**

So the Heresy is now fully underway, with Keeler and the gang making their getaway on the Death Guard ship Eisenstein and the remaining loyalists purged from Horus's legions. I'm still enjoying reading these books; they really are good entertainment.

Let's Read Horus Heresy 2: False Gods

Cyclopean Magnus, Rogal Dorn, Leman Russ: names that rang with history, names that shaped history.

 - The Horus Heresy: False Gods, Graham McNeill

In the second book of the Horus Heresy series, we're in Graham McNeill's hands. False Gods is a direct sequel to Horus Rising, and Captain Garviel Loken is still our main protagonist. His relations with the other officers in the XVI Legion fray as they find out more about the terrible secret of space, Horus has a big fight and a dream sequence, and the remembrancers invent religion.

Also, Magnus's name is not Cyclopean. Although I suppose I may now start calling him C. Magnus the Red.

**

McNeill's writing is cruder than Abnett's, and he's in much more of a hurry. It's a shame, because I enjoyed the banter and personalities of the Luna Wolves in the previous book. They're now the Sons of Horus, and the battle-lines of the Heresy are being drawn, so everyone is gravitating toward either side, and hostilities are starting to break out.

The way McNeill writes women is much more unpleasant than Abnett. Early on, we find ourselves leering at Euphrati Keeler's breasts and subjected to crude sexual bragging and objectification that was absent from the previous installment. For some reason, there's a new remembrancer character, who mostly seems to be in the story as a target for McNeill's misogyny. Horus, who was unfailingly urbane and courteous in Horus Rising, belittles her and calls her "girl" in front of others. I mean it's still not that bad, as these things go, but it's decidedly unpleasant and a disappointment after the first novel.

There's some good stuff, though, like Horus's battle on the moon and the sheer distress of the Mournival when he's badly wounded. We meet Angron and Fulgrim, and Fabulous Bill puts in an appearance.

There's a detail that baffles me (slight spoilers). When Loken goes back to the moon of Davin and finds the plot object, he immediately recognizes it as "the anathame that was stolen from the Hall of Devices on Xenobia". How does he know that? We know what the anathame is and who stole it, so it's beknownst to us, but it's supposed to be unbeknownst to him, unless he's been listening in on the narration. Now, Loken recognizes the symbols on the box, so he could deduce that whatever this thing is, it's probably what the Interex said was stolen, and that would be enough for plot purposes. It just feels like sloppy writing.

**

When it comes to the military part of this military science fantasy, once again, there seems to be no reconnaissance, intelligence or indeed planning going on.

When Horus leads a force to Davin's moon, they land a sizeable Astartes force, Imperial Army and even logistics support (for once!), not to mention three actual Titans. Okay, they change landing sites at short notice, but still, shortly after disembarking, they're totally surprised to find, well, a gigantic object. No-one spotted it? There wasn't so much as a single recon flyover, or any kind of sensors on the orbiting warships? So far, many planetary landings seem to be total shots in the dark, with reconnaissance carried out on foot by the main force as they go.

I mean I hate to say this, but I'm pretty sure Abnett mentioned that XVI Legion was among the first to be issued new wargear like tactical dreadnought armor. Yet there doesn't seem to be a single skimmer or flyer capable of a recon mission in the entire expeditionary fleet. The idea that recon and sensor capabilities exist but go unused is frankly too ludicrous to contemplate in characters and units that are consistently described as very skilled in warfare.

There are also several times in the first two novels where entire starships suddenly appear out of nowhere, or the expeditionary fleet has no idea where active enemy ships might be. I refer anyone confused about this to Atomic Rockets, specifically their page Detection in Space Warfare and its famous sub-heading There Ain't No Stealth in Space. However terrible Imperial sensors supposedly are, their ships are powered by some kind of reaction drive, and especially with the sheer size of the ships, those things will be trivially detectable from several star systems over. So these kinds of surprises simply cannot happen.

You could make a plot point out of the fact that several Astartes officers only seem to exercise tactical leadership at the best of times. The most extreme example is Lucius, who's constantly addressed as Captain, but never seems to command anything. All of the officers are depicted as being at the forefront of the fighting, and it's not at all clear if anyone is exercising any kind of overall command and control. Even Horus himself seems to lead a multi-company operation purely by saddle orders. Again, I get that this is a novelization of a squad-level wargame, but still.

Also, as a dedicated Titanicus player, I'm almost mystified that the Dies Irae even appears in the novel. I was excited when we got to see the inside of a Titan and everything, and then it barely appears in the rest of the story at all. Chekov's Imperator!

**

I did enjoy False Gods, and the story is moving on quite efficiently. I understand that they need to get to the actual Heresy, it's in the series title and everything, but I wish the book wasn't in such a hurry.

The weakest part of False Gods is definitely Horus's conversion. His dream sequence is mostly boring, but it does have one somewhat interesting point. When Erebus (whom I just typoed as Erbs, which I might also stick with) shows Horus the future, we know that it really is what the Imperium ends up being. Horus, of course, can't know that, which is kind of lampshaded when C. Magnus the Red shows up. But it's a lovely irony for the reader.

My main gripe is that Abnett's Horus was an interesting, charismatic and memorable character, made tragic because you know what ends up happening to him. McNeill's Horus is far cruder and less nuanced, and this just makes his fall that much less compelling. I also wish Erbs was more of a character, but that's because I'm a Word Bearers guy myself.

In general, it's a bit dismaying how quickly Horus and his confidantes go from loyal Imperial warriors to murdering, moustache-twirling villains. This is also significant because of a much broader question to do with Warhammer in general.

Back when Warhammer started out, it was fairly clear that the Imperium was a horrible dystopia. The 2000AD influences were strong, and even if a human reader is quite likely to identify with humans, it was still obvious that the Imperium of Mankind is comically evil.

Since then, though, that hasn't really been the case. The space marines have very much been made into the heroes of the setting, and are consistently portrayed as such. When this idea of superhuman soldiers fighting horrible aliens attracts the worst kind of people, Games Workshop do condemn them, but at the same time they try to dodge responsibility for their fictional universe by claiming it's a parody. But it isn't any more.

False Gods is a very good example of this. No, the Imperium on its Great Crusade isn't a particularly nice place, and the more you know about the setting, the more nuance you can bring to it. But I will still defy anyone to honestly read False Gods and not come away with the impression that the loyalists are the humane and considerate good guys, while the traitors are sneering evil-doers. It's abundantly clear that Loken and Torgeddon are the heroes of the piece. I'm not saying they shouldn't be; I am saying that the black-and-white portrayal of the Imperium as good and its enemies as bad is in line with how Games Workshop generally presents things, and it's dishonest of them to argue otherwise.

If we want to think about the broader symbology of the egalitarian warrior lodges leading to corruption and damnation, and unquestioning worship of a head of state / father figure being the only way to stay pure, well, it doesn't really get much better.

**

So, I enjoyed False Gods, even though I'm disappointed that the nuance of the previous book has been abandoned. The story is moving on, though, and the heresy is getting heresier.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 1: Horus Rising

"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.

**

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.

**

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.

**

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.

Let's Read Tolkien 94: The Umbarian Gambit 36-

Umbar, the Fish Market

June 2, 3019

The shrimp were excellent.

Nah, you know what, he's lost me. I read several chapters of a thoroughly modern, really hackneyed and badly written spy novel, starring Baron Tangorn as James Bond in exotic Umbar, and was bored to death. I started skimming forward, and it just kept going and going. There's no longer any point in talking about anachronisms or themes: the story has nothing to do with Middle-earth or Tolkien any more, and I'm just not interested.

Sadly, this means I'll never find out what dazzlingly clever plot twists the dude came up with for the end of his story. I can live with that.

**

So, that was the Last Ringbearer, as far as I'm concerned. It's much more interesting as a concept than an actual text. I liked some of Yeskov's ideas, but the execution is so bad that I honestly can't recommend it to anyone.

When I started reading the Last Ringbearer, coincidentally a year ago, one of the great points Yeskov made in an interview I read was that a lot of Tolkien's Middle-earth doesn't really make sense. For all his talk of sub-creation, Tolkien wasn't really interested in creating a consistent, or even coherent, fictional world: he was interested in creating a backdrop for his stories and his languages. One of the reasons I was interested in the Last Ringbearer was that I thought Yeskov would try to make it all make sense. But he does the opposite. One of the central tenets of his reimagining of the War of the Ring fails spectacularly, and in general, his alternative versions of Mordor, Umbar and so on are a completely incoherent mess of orientalism and anachronism. Reading Yeskov makes you admire Tolkien's creative vision and consistency all over again, which, given the tone of Yeskov's work, cannot have been the effect he intended.

So anyway that was that. I can't say I think it's a coincidence that I've heard so many people refer to the fact that the Last Ringbearer exists, and so few references to its actual content. As I'm actually quite busy nowadays, my Tolkien-reading series will continue at some later time, maybe. For now, happy new year.

Let's Read Tolkien 93: The King and the Steward 31-35

Gondor, Minas Tirith

May 17, 3019

“Her Royal Majesty the Queen of Gondor and Arnor!”

We now go to Minas Tirith, where we get to know Aragorn and Arwen a little bit.

**

Aragorn, we learn, is unhappy: despite winning the throne of Gondor, Arwen refuses to actually marry him. They're only pretending to be king and queen, when in reality she's his elven "advisor". It turns out they're also running rival espionage operations, competing for the technical knowledge of Mordor and Isengard by running rival Operation Paperclips. After some repartee with Arwen, Aragorn receives the White Company, Faramir's former guards.

The scene then shifts to a quarry in the White Mountains where Kumai, a Troll engineer, is held captive along with a black Haradrim mûmak, sorry, múmak driver, Mbanga. We're given an infodump about how the Harad Empire fought against slavers from Khand. It's puerile, at best orientalist and cliched, and boring. The significance is that Mbanga gets into a fight with the guards and is killed. There's some very cringey orientalism about how he now gets to go to the heavenly lion hunt or something, and also a frankly uninteresting flashback to Kumai's war experiences. The guards also beat Kumai badly, but this provides an opportunity for him to be smuggled out of the quarry by the anti-Gondor resistance.

However, unbeknownst to Kumai but beknownst to us, it isn't actually the anti-Gondor resistance at all, but a fake resistance movement run by Aragorn's agents. Apparently they all have animal codenames, because Cheetah debriefs Mongoose and sends him to Umbar to capture Tangorn. And with that, chapter 35 and part II come to an end.

**

So, that was part II. I have to say, as a fantasy or adventure novel, this is really not very good. If it was an original IP, so to speak, I would not be reading it any more. So this is kind of a slightly weird exercise where I'm actually interested in Yeskov's alternative Middle-earth, but I'm finding it a chore to trudge through his prose. These chapters highlight the problem: I love the idea of elven and dúnedain spies racing to secure the legacy of Mordor; I dislike the silly stuff about Harad and Khand and so on; and I'm bored by everything else. The combination of the terrible narrative voice and the total incoherence of the fictional world is just really offputting. Also I actually miss Haladdin.

Looking at the table of contents, there's four parts and 69 chapters (nice), so I'm pretty much halfway through. I'm going to keep at this, mostly to see if he comes up with any other cool stuff. But I think I'll be sticking with this sparser narration, largely because I can't really be bothered to engage with the story more closely.

**

Next year: part III