I don't know if Graham McNeill is bad at writing manipulative behavior or if he wanted to make it painfully obvious so we, the reader, can clearly see what's going on. And I know it's difficult to write hyper-intelligent beings when you're limited by your own standard human intelligence.
But False Gods is just scene after scene of someone doing Manipulation for Dumb Babies 101 shit and everybody falling for it hook line and sinker, so the result is: all of your characters look like idiots and I'm yelling at my screen.
EREBUS: my lord he called you a bitch
HORUS: a bitch?? I will go to that moon to kill him, I will go to that moon right now!!
EREBUS: oh no my lord don't go to that moon nooo
HORUS: You can't stop me, I'm going to that moon, how dare you expect me to let him call me a bitch!
EREBUS: you are right my lord I am an idiot, of course you have no choice, otherwise you would be a bitch
HORUS: FUUUUUCK GET THE SHIPS READY
IGNACE: ...I think Erebus is lying to get Horus to go to that moon
GARVIEL: are you saying my lord is not a perfect genius? Ignace. Ignace you sound insane.
Victor Frankenstein syndrome aka you spent nights over nights crying and bleeding over this work and now that it's finally done you're just like "nvm. it's trash" and go to bed
This is great. Also, I bet this exists because someone at the GW offices realized they now have a critical mass of JoyToy Heresy figures and wanted to use them to reenact action figure commercials from the 80s and 90s.
Finished Tales of Heresy. Anthology. Published March 2009, dunno the date because all the online records say March 31st, and any time a record site says a book was published the first or last day of a month that seems to mean "We don't know which specific day." Looks like all these stories were written specifically for this anthology. Spoilers.
"Blood Games" by Dan Abnett
A Custodian (gene-wrought Imperial bodyguards; stronger than space marines) infiltrates the Imperial Palace to try to assassinate the Emperor, because as the Emperor's bodyguards, the Custodians have a tradition called the Blood Games where they test their protection of the Emperor. He starts on the other side of the planet and it takes him a year and he gets within striking distance; he's congratulated because of all the Custodians who went out for that Blood Game were caught much earlier. He gets debriefed and then a while later he's assigned to apprehend a regional governor who's been found to be spying for Horus, but it turns out that guy was a double-agent in service to Rogal Dorn (Primarch of the Imperial Fist space marines, who hadn't told the Imperial security apparatus this), who stops the operation, but it turns out one of that double-agent's bodyguards was actually really working for Horus and he sets off a bomb and the double-agent is killed. The Custodian reconvenes with Rogal Dorn and talks about the Blood Games and how they use the lessons learned from them to tighten security and suggests the lesson to be taken from this whole debacle is that those who protect the Emperor must work together and share information freely.
It's pretty good. If you want incidental background information on What Terra Is Like During The Early Heresy it's a good source. Has some interesting anachronisms, like it has Custodians talking about Horus as someone they once loved and mentions that while Custodians are bigger than Space Marines, they're not that much bigger and really it's only noticeable on the ones who are really big. This was seven years before Custodians got a plastic miniature release. More recently the Custodians are portrayed as regularly and significantly bigger than space marines, to the point where they're even bigger than 40k-era Primaris space marines, and also they're consistently portrayed as fucking hating and always having fucking hated the Primarchs and space marines in general.
"Wolf at the Door" by Mike Lee
A battlegroup of Space Wolves, mopping up bringing an entire sector of space into Imperial Compliance, get a message telling them to head with the entire rest of the legion for Prospero (this will be important in later books) but at the same time get a signal from a world in that sector they'd marked down as uninhabited. Reasoning that it'll take months to muster the entire Legion, they decide to go investigate the world, and discover an inhabited planet that's been under periodic raids by Dark Eldar for two hundred years. The planetary government has started offering up criminals to the raiders in lieu of being raided and have instituted a lottery to offer up a remainder of their population to make up the shortfall because for some reason around the time the raiders are due to show up, the crime rate really drops. The Space Wolves are disgusted by this because they see a willingness to offer up innocent people instead of fighting to the bitter end as cowards, and then the Dark Eldar show up and while the like, dozen space wolves who went to the planet to figure out what's going on are still on the planet, there's a space battle and the ship they arrived on is destroyed.
The Dark Eldar kill the planetary government and the Space Wolves squad set up a guerilla resistance, connecting with the son of the former planetary leader, who was also the guy who invited them to the planet (the son, not the leader); he's trained himself and a small group of locals in a former martial tradition the planetary government disbanded when they started offering criminals up to the Dark Eldar instead of resisting; he agrees that not fighting was terrible cowardice.
The two groups, the Space Wolves and the mortal secret soldier guys, do a raid together on a Dark Eldar citadel and kill the raider leader, which they hope will lead to chaos in the Dark Eldar ranks which will slow their rate of raiding until the followup "Hey, where'd you guys go, we haven't heard from you in a while?" Space Wolves battlegroup shows up. They succeed at this and the rescue fleet appears shortly thereafter and defeats the Dark Eldar fleet interdicting the planet.
Story ends with the Space Wolves leader guy explaining to his comrade in arms, the local son of the former planetary leader, that now the planet can join the Imperium, and the local isn't having it. "We just proved we can fight for our freedom ourselves. Don't do this to us." Space Wolf leader begs local leader to see reason and not fight the Imperium, local leader begs Space Wolves leader not to impose more slavery on a planet he just fought to free, they realize their differences are irreconcilable, Space Wolf leader pulls out his gun and shoots local leader and all his followers dead, then radios his task group in orbit to begin the bombardment that's going to be the first stage of bringing this planet into Compliance.
I mean, it's good? I like it enough that I retain plot details and bothered to type up the full summary of the story events. The point of it seems to be just illustrating that the Space Marines are the protagonists of these stories but not good guys at all; they've got a mission they prioritize and they hold it higher than camaraderie or honor or whatever. The Space Wolves in it are also pretty decent, in that they're not all drunken viking furries the way the ones in Battle for the Abyss were. I know they get culturally developed more in Prospero Burns, later, so this is a sort of interstitial portrayal where they're moving from "The worst excesses of 40k wolf-obsessed Space Wolves" to "Actually their own thing in 30k." Good read, no complaints
"Scions of the Storm," by Anthony Reynolds
A bunch of Word Bearers bring a planet into Compliance, but First Captain Kor Phaeron (who sucks; I think he was one of the villains in False Gods) is like "The Emperor recently reprimanded us for taking too long to bring worlds into Compliance because we stay behind and build temples and teach them to worship the Emperor as a god instead of putting in the boot and then moving on, so we've gotta hurry on this one. We're just going to orbitally bombard them and kill them all." The meat of the story is that after the orbital bombardment has wiped the planet 98% clear of life, there's a big fight over the last city on the planet, which is protected by a big lightning sphere shield and defended by robots. A squad of Word Bearers get briefly past the shield to bring it down and infiltrate the city to find them all worshipping... the Emperor of Mankind, because they had psychic visions of his conquest of the galaxy and of Lorgar's holy book, the Lectition Divinatus, and so they're like "What the fuck, why did we wage this war at all? These guys were already doing what we'd be telling them to do."
Then Lorgar shows up and has everyone in the city killed and takes the head Word Bearer aside and tells him to trust him, this happens for a reason, also the Lectition Divinatus is old news and he's working on a new work, the Book of Lorgar.
It's fine. It's mostly bolter porn. Decent documentation of the beginning of the fall of the Word Bearers.
"The Voice," by James Swallow
A group of Sisters of Silence (anti-psykers who take vows of silence) investigate a missing Black Ship (the ships the Sisters use to bring psykers back to Terra to be turned into astropaths), which turns out to have been wrecked from within when a group of psyker prisoners formed a gestalt in the dungeon-hold and messed up the crew. The main characters are a novitiate we met before in Flight of the Eisenstein whose whole thing yet is she hasn't taken her vow of silence yet so she can still talk, plus her mentor who has taken her vow of silence, plus her mentor's childhood friend / zealous bitter rival who was head of the ship they're investigating and who they find surviving in the hold. There's also some fodder Sisters of Silence to do some extra fighting and dying in the fight scenes because these books always have generic fodder around to do that.
Anyway they fight their way to the center of the hold only to discover that the psychic gestalt is actually a projection from the future by... the novitiate, whose future-self, presumably much later in the heresy, has risked much and struck dark bargains and even un-anti-psykered herself somehow in order to convey a warning backwards in time so the Heresy can be averted. The aforementioned zealous bitter rival reacts to this by being outraged and killing the novitiate (who up until that point had been the point of view character), preventing her future-self from projecting backwards in time, at which point the psychic gestalt starts screaming no no no and then collapses into a bunch of crazy psykers who the remaining Sisters of Silence then kill. The novitiate's mentor becomes the point of view character for a final scene where she's recovering in a bacta tank and is visited by her rival who's like (out loud!) "I don't care what she thought she was trying to do, that shit was blasphemy; I did her a favor by killing her present self so her future self couldn't commit it. Also the Emperor is all-knowing and all-powerful so if there's gonna be a big civil war it must be His will, so using time travel bullshit to prevent it is also blasphemy."
It is your standard zealotry ruins everything narrative but the central conceit is kinda cool, and I didn't see coming the twist where the point of view character just gets merc'ed three quarters of the way through the story, so that was kinda neat.
"Call of the Lion," by Gav Thorpe
A Terran Dark Angels commander is reinforced by a task group lead by a Calibanite Dark Angels commander and they try to do a Compliance and it goes sideways because the Terran is like "I'd like to give these people a chance to join the Imperium peacefully" and the Calibanite is like "I really want to have a fight," and the Calibanite keeps forcing the Terran (ostensible leader of the task group) into terrible decisions that keep making fighting necessary, and at the end the Terran is like "This was a shitshow; I'm going to do a report and you're going to get so disciplined" and the Calibanite retorts "Actually I have the favor of Lion el'Johnson, our Primarch, so it is you who will be so disciplined, my good bitch."
It's fine. Dark Angels are supposed to be kind of merciless implacable assholes and the Lion is supposed to be a huge bastard, so to the extent that this seems to be an attempt to set up the Dark Angels as having future internal tensions stemming from a Terran/Calibanite cultural split and the Lion favoring what is obviously the wrong side of that, it does its job. Again, I hear future Dark Angels books are awful and so this buildup does not actually lead to anything good, but whatever.
"The Last Church," by Graham McNeill
A long, clumsy conversation between the priest of the last church on Terra and a stranger who's secretly the Emperor in disguise, on the night when the Emperor has come to burn that last church down in His pursuit of global (and eventually galactic) secularism. Basically the priest's life story and a recurring argument where the Emperor is using college-freshman-atheist-level arguments about how religion, like, just causes wars, maaaan, and the priest is like "I don't care, it comforts people; secular warlords do war too and I've tried to preach peace and compassion." Eventually it comes out that the priest is a dedicated priest because he was once visited by a personal vision of what he thought was God, except actually it was a vision of the Emperor, but even in the face of that he's willing to burn to death in his be-flamethrower-ed church rather than side with the Emperor, who is an asshole.
Graham McNeill is still not good at arguments, and I can't tell whether he's trying to do deliberate irony with the Biggest Warmonger In The Universe arguing that he has to destroy religion to end wars, or if he's really channeling a college-freshman-atheist level hatred of religion. I assume it must be the former but it doesn't come across in the text.
"After Desh'ea," by Matther Farrer
A long, fascinating conversation between ranking War Dogs captain Kharne and his Primarch, the recently-rescued-and-angry-about-it Angron. The Emperor has just pulled Angron up from his adopted homeworld of Desh'ea, where he was about to die with his comrades in a massive slave revolt, and Angron is angry about this because he wanted to die with his comrades and not be taken away and thought a coward. He's been hanging out in the hold of the War Dogs flagship, killing anyone who tries to go in and talk to him, and Kharne goes in, refuses to fight, gets the absolute shit beaten out of him, and somehow managers to talk Angron around to taking command of the War Dogs by explaining that they also are glorious warriors and want nothing more than to fight beside their gene-father, the way Angron's gladiator-slave-rebels did. Angron is clearly fucked in the head due to the Butcher's Nails in his brain, but the whole thing is poignant. It ends with Angron and his new command staff renaming the War Dogs to the World Eaters, after his fallen companions, who were known as the eaters of cities.
A lot of people insist that Angron and the World Eaters are the most poignant tragedy in the Horus Heresy, and I can see how this kicked that off.
I finished reading Mechanicum by Graham McNeill and it's really long and dense and I'm not going to write a full-length blog entry about it, because it's so goddamn dense that I felt the need to go back and read it again to be able to summarize it correctly for one of these entries, and that killed the momentum on this project. Sorry.
It's good. Graham is continuing to get better at writing interpersonal conflict. It suffers somewhat in retrospect from the core revelation of the text (that the Mechanicum of Mars seems to exist because the Emperor, in anticipation of needing tech support in the future, stuck a psychic being under the surface of Mars millennia ago that twists population obsession towards machine development and the abandonment of the flesh; probably a shard of the C'Tan Void Dragon) being something GW has not been interested in following up on, but I'm sure it felt cool in the moment.
Reading Tales of Heresy now. I will be honest, I am probably not going to write a long entry for that either. The call of the content creator to produce ever more long and sophisticated entries in their opus, perhaps best-exemplified by the YouTuber who starts off creating fifteen minute videos every couple of weeks and ends up creating hour-and-a-half film-quality documentaries every four years, applies even to lowly book report bloggers, it seems, and I'mma resist it. The point of this project (such that it can be described as "a project") was to document reading the Horus Heresy series. Apparently sometimes that's going to look like me popping up and saying "So I read this one; bye."
This post contains spoilers for Battle for the Abyss, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) July 29th, 2008, although sources disagree -- some places I've found assert it was published on August 1st, 2008. Something I've found when trying to date specific works in this series, though, is that a lot of places will say "Published on [Month] 1st" when they actually mean "Published in [Month], we don't know which exact day," so as a general rule when I do this dating thing I assume any source that's specific about it being published on an exact date is accurate unless that date is given as the first of the month, in which case I assume that's filler information and only the month is reliable. I guess it makes sense for a book published two days before the end of the month would be attributed to the next month in some databases. Also I kind of don't care if I'm off by a couple of days about a publication date because I'm tumblr liveblogging a series of, at best, high-school-essay-quality book reports about a media tie-in novel series.
So this book is kind of infamous; I've seen it described as The Worst Horus Heresy novel with the possible exception of some of the Salamanders books that come later. Thing is, I don't hate it. To explain why, I will have to go into some of the events of the Horus Heresy that haven't been covered in these novels yet.
According to the pseudo-history of the Horus Heresy, following the Istvaan III Atrocity but before news of it had reached the larger galaxy, Horus issued orders to the Ultramarine Legion to muster at Calth, a planet in the Veridia System within the realm of Ultramar (the Ultramarines' empire-within-an-empire, conquered by their Primarch prior to his discovery by the Emperor of Mankind). An airless world with massive underground cities and an expansive orbital shipyard, Calth served as one of Ultramar's major military bases, and the order was for the Ultramarines to gather there with the Word Bearers Legion to prepare for a campaign against an ork force who were moving in the direction of Veridia. Unknown to the Ultramarines, the muster at Calth was a trap -- the Word Bearers, upon their arrival, immediately attacked the planet, using the slaughter of the gathered Ultramarines and Calth's human population to fuel a ritual that poisoned Veridia's sun, and ultimately this ritual fueled a massive warp-storm, the Ruinstorm, that both interrupted FTL travel between one half of the galaxy and the other and made it much easier for daemons to manifest in realspace in its vicinity, allowing the traitor forces to summon daemonic reinforcements to aid in their war against Imperial loyalists.
(If you've played Space Marine 2, this is what Chairon is talking about when he says he was born on Calth -- the game takes place ten thousand years after the Horus Heresy but many of the first generation of Primaris Space Marines, of which Chairon and Gadriel both are, were taken by Belisarius Cawl as children during the Heresy for experimentation and spent most of the intervening millennia being brought in and out of stasis as Cawl developed the Primaris aguments.)
Calth is important in the annals of the Heresy. Visions of Darkness, an art book (the second of four, compiling card art from the 2003 Horus Heresy collectible card game; the Visions series also served as the outline for the events of the Heresy as a whole), detailed the Word Bearer assault on Calth in 2005, a year before the publication of Horus Rising. (I would have covered the Visions series on this blog except I didn't realize three of the four were published before Horus Rising until after I'd done my entry on False Gods; the fourth was published between those two novels.) Calth is the subject of future novels and in 2015 got its own boxed game, Betrayal at Calth, which contained the first Horus Heresy plastic miniatures -- Mark IV armor, Cataphractii Terminators, two characters, and the first (truly awful; thank God we're rid of it) plastic Contemptor Dreadnought. Betrayal at Calth also had its own ruleset but hardly anybody ever played it; that boxed set was a way to justify pulling money for development of plastic Horus Heresy figures from the self-contained-boxed-games budget and everybody knows it.
What the pseudo-histories of the Horus Heresy don't say is that the attack on Calth was part of an intended two-pronged attack, meant to occur simultaneously with a sneak attack on Maccrage, the adopted homeworld of the Ultramarine Primarch Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines' primary recruiting world, while most of the Ultramarine forces were on Calth awaiting Word Bearer rendezvous. The other half of this attack would be carried out by a massive battleship of a new class, the Furious Abyss, commissioned by Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator-General of the Mechanicum of Mars (and secret Horus ally), with the intent to shatter Maccrage's second moon and then use the debris field to bypass Maccrage's orbital defenses to deliver a payload of life-eater virus to the planet directly in a repeat of the Istvaan III Atrocity. This attack, together with the betrayal at Calth, would have knocked the Ultramarines out of the war and prevented them from rallying and rebuilding later, and without the Ultramarines as a rebuilt force later in the war serving as a counter to the traitors, Horus would have been able to commit forces in greater numbers to the Garmon Sector, allowing him to land more forces on Terra much earlier. This likely would have won the traitors the war.
The reason why the pseud-histories of the Heresy doesn't say any of that is the attack by the Furious Abyss failed, because a small group of Astartes from the Ultramarines, Space Wolves, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons legions, none of whom even know that the Heresy was a thing yet, found evidence of the Furious Abyss's weapons test against an Ultramarines battleship and investigated, followed the Abyss's trail, and ultimately destroyed it before it could succeed in its attack on Maccrage, and this battle was so small -- the Furious Abyss itself versus a pursuit force of six much smaller ships -- that it was entirely swallowed up by the chaos of the Heresy's eruption and was ultimately forgotten by later historians.
The early Heresy is so replete with devastating loyalist losses that I kind of love the idea of an early loyalist win, entirely forgotten by later histories, made by a mixed group of members of legions who'd later be on both sides of the conflict, being one of the unknown lynchpins of Horus's ultimate defeat. The Horus Heresy game book series, the Black Books, do not to my knowledge even mention this battle, because their setting sections are written in-character by a post-Heresy historian, and the narrator would have had no way of knowing Calth was intended as part of a two-pronged attack. (Actually I'm not sure it's never mentioned; if I eventually get to the Black Books while doing this readthrough I'll keep an eye out for it.) I just... I love the idea of a small, forgotten event being so important. I think it's genuinely interesting, and this sort of attempt to expand the timeline with new events that make sense (of course the traitors would have had a plan to follow up their Calth attack with an attack on Maccrage to finish the Ultramarines off completely!) is exactly what these Horus Heresy novels ought to have been doing once it became apparent that they sold like gangbusters and were therefore going to be published for a very, very long time. This is, at least in theory, what I am here for. I'm sure not here for Primarch drama! I don't even like the Primarchs! (God, me reading this series is a mistake. Yeah, Lea, read a 64-book-series where you don't care about any of the ostensible main characters; that's a great use of your time.)
Unfortunately, Battle for the Abyss just isn't very good. Fortunately, at least some of the ways it's not very good are themselves of at least some interest.
So. Let's go with a summary.
We open with Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, watching as the Furious Abyss launches from Thule, which we're told has been a moon of Jupiter for six thousand years. Jupiter doesn't have a real moon called Thule but there is an asteroid called 279 Thule, so I think we're meant to assume that this is 279 Thule, having been dragged into orbit of Jupiter six thousand years previously. The ship is described as being impossibly big. Inside, a Word Bearer is giving a speech to a bunch of other Word Bearers about how religion is cool and it's their destiny to overthrow the emperor, and how they'll finally get their revenge on the Ultramarines. (Much like Calth, there is another important pre-established bit of Heresy lore where the Word Bearers insisted on worshipping the Emperor like a god even after he told them not to, because the Word Bearer Primarch, Lorgar, believes firmly that life is only worth living in service to a divine power. The Emperor then sent the Ultramarines to the Word Bearer homeworld to humble them by leveling their biggest temple-city, which Lorgar pretended worked but actually just drove him to hate the Emperor and seek out alternate gods to worship, which lead him to Chaos.)
After the ship launches, Thule is rigged to explode so everyone who worked on the Furious Abyss dies, keeping the ship's design secret.
We then cut to some Ultramarines heading towards Vangelis Spaceport (I appreciate the name) on the Fist of Maccrage, but the Furious Abyss comes out of nowhere and attacks it as a weapons test. Judging his ship doomed, the captain of the Fist orders a distress signal sent before they all die.
Then we meet the protagonists. Some Ultramarines on Vangelis Station lead by Captain Cestus are waiting to be picked up by the Fist of Maccrage to be... stationed at Terra, I think? But it's late and they're worried. Cestus meets up with a Space Wolf named Brynngar, who leads a couple of packs of Blood Claws (that's a type of Space Wolf unit in 40k but, importantly, not in 30k; I'll get back to this at the end), in a bar, Brynngar is carousing and fighting and drinking special Space Wolf mead that can get even Space Marines drunk (another 40k thing). Cestus and Brynngar are old battle buddies who saved each others lives a couple of times. Suddenly alarms go off -- there's been an incoming astropathic message, and Cestus thinks it might be from their late ship, so he goes to check it, but it's a bunch of ominous nonsense that kills the astropaths who receive it and then feedback from the astropaths into the station's systems threatens to overload the reactor. Cestus and Brynngar rush off to the reactor room to do an emergency shutdown and in the core of the overloading reactor Cestus gets a psychic vision of Maccrage in flames.
There is some evidence the astropathic message of doom came from the Fist of Maccrage and Cestus decides to investigate, rallying all the other space marines on the station -- his own Ultramarines, the Space Wolves, some World Eaters lead by an captain named Skraal, and a single Thousand Son, Mhotep. They commandeer a warship called the Wrathful and its escorts, captained by the reasonably cool Admiral Kaminska, who's sort of pissed off she's been drafted into this potential fool's errand, and Mhotep brings along his personal ship as well. They encounter... you know, I don't remember, either they find a debris field or an energy signal or something, they find some evidence that the Fist of Maccrage has been destroyed and are able to follow an energy signature to the Furious Abyss, which they hail, it blows up one of their escorts when the escort gets too close and there's a space battle. Our protagonists kind of freak out when they realize that's a ship full of space marines that just attacked other space marines, which isn't supposed to happen, but mainly they're like "Oh, this is a fight? Cool, I know how fights work" and then they fight. One of the Wraithful's escorts is a fighter carrier but the Abyss use a psychic attack to drive all the fighter pilots insane when they get too close, Mhotep's ship gets blown up but he escapes in a "savior pod" (one of the things 30k/40k does is give slightly off-kilter names to SF staples, so escape pods are savior pods, the teleporter room is called the teleportarium, etc) and gets picked up by the Wrathful, etc. All but one of the escorts are destroyed (the survivor is the Fireblade), so the protagonist's fleet is down down from five ships to two, and Abyss escapes.
During the fight, they damage the Abyss so the protagonists know that if they just follow it, it'll have to get repairs somewhere, and they can attack it then. The Abyss heads towards a warp jump point which serves as a known entry point to a stable warp corridor (to my knowledge this is not how warp travel is described as working elsewhere in the setting; there are stable warp corridors, but there's nothing like Babylon 5 style jump points you have to use to enter them), and the protagonists follow but after entering the corridor the Word Bearers use a psychic bomb to collapse the corridor, so the Wrathful and the Fireblade enter the unstable warp. Both protagonist ships are attacked by daemons in the warp; the space marines aboard the Wrathful fight theirs off but the Fireblade takes significant damage, and the Wrathful moves to bring it into a repair bay, but surprise, the whole ship has been compromised by daemons who've fused the souls of the crew into the ship, and the Fireblade has become a sort of giant anglerfish monster thing that attacks the repair bay as it opens. Mhotep, the Thousand Son, senses that something is off and rushes to the repair bay where he uses warp sorcery to fight the Fireblade off, breaking the Edict of Nikea (when the Emperor declared that any Space Marines who were developing psychic powers had to immediately stop using and developing them, which the Thousand Sons are bitter about because they'd made their psychic talents their whole thing). Everyone else in the repair bay dies in this process and Mhotep lies about using a ruptured fuel line to fight off the Fireblade's incursion but Brynngar the Space Wolf doesn't believe him, because Space Wolves, being viking barbarians, hate witches. (Space Wolf rune priests are not witches, as any Space Wolf will tell you.)
The Wrathful continue following the Abyss until it leaves the warp and stops off at a repair station, and Cestus plans a three-pronged attack involving infiltrating groups of space marines to the station and sneaking into the Abyss to sabotage it. The three groups are Ultramarines lead by another named guy who convinces Cestus to stay behind and command the Wrathful, Skraal and his World Eaters, and Brynngar and his space wolves. The World Eaters ruin everything because unlike the other two groups, they can't resist killing innocent station workers along the way to infiltrating the ship ("A bit of killing will sharpen our senses"), and this results in an alarm going up. One touch I sort of like is that at no point later in the book do our protagonists realize this was what gave the attack away; at one point they speculate that the Word Bearers may have had daemons on the Wrathful passing info back to the Abyss and then it just doesn't come up again. The attack fails, most of the infiltrating Ultramarines are killed, the Space Wolves fall back, but the World Eaters and one Ultramarine get in... and are immediately killed because when like twenty space marines try to just rush into a ship filled with hundreds of space marines on high alert, things go badly. Only Skraal survives, fleeing into the depths of the Furious Abyss.
The Furious Abyss takes off, the Wrathful follows, back into the warp with both of them towards Maccrage. On the Furious Abyss, Skraal, sneaking around in air ducts and behind pillars and things, witnesses a ritual where the Word Bearers use the corpse of the dead Ultramarine lieutenant to appease a daemon named Wsoric, while on the Wrathful, Cestus and Brynngar try to get some info out of a captured Word Bearer that Brynngar and his 40k Blood Claws brought back from his failed assault. Asking nicely doesn't work, torture doesn't work, Cestus finally loops Mhotep in to do a psychic probe and Brynngar freaks out about it. They argue, Mhotep tells them to leave so he can do his interrogation without witnesses, demons attack the ship, Mhotep finishes his interrogation and then heads to the spot of the daemon incursion and uses more sorcery to defeat them, which saves a bunch of Ultramarines but drives Mhotep unconscious. Brynngar witnesses this and decides to kill the unconscious Mhotep for witchcraft before he can wake up and share what he got from the Word Bearer, Cestus refuses, they have an honor duel about it. Cestus barely wins and Brynngar abides by the terms of the duel but makes it clear their friendship is over. Mhotep wakes up and tells Cestus the plans for the attack on Maccrage that I went over many many paragraphs ago at the start of this blog post. Cestus confines Mhotep to an isolation cell because Brynngar made it clear the next time he sees Mhotep he'll kill him, honor duel or no. Also, Mhotep touches Cestus's head and gives him a vision of the future, and confesses that he'd foreseen farseen foreseen all of this years ago and knew his fate was to die on the Wrathful.
Both ships exit the warp at Maccrage and have another space fight. Secretly, Cestus made a plan with the human crew of the ship -- all the Space Marines would enter shuttles and when the Furious Abyss opens its torpedo tubes to fight, they'd launch the shuttles toward it and enter via the torpedo tubes while the Wrathful and the Furious Abyss slug it out. During that fight, the Wrathful's engines are wrecked and it begins plummeting towards Maccrage's moon. Most of the Space Marines make it into the ship. Their plan is to blow up the torpedos the Abyss was going to use to blow up Maccrage's moon, since they entered via torpedo tubes and are therefore right there on the torpedo deck, but the Word Bearers hit them with a psychic attack. All the Ultramarines but Cestus die and Brynngar goes crazy, hallucinates being a wolf and fighting a bunch of other wolves for pack dominance, and then wakes up realizing he's killed all the Space Wolves he arrived with. He flees into the depths of the ship, has another fight with a named Word Bearer he fought and nearly killed earlier (now half-interred in a dreadnought), but nearly loses and is saved by Skraal, who has spent the last several weeks sneaking around learning the interior of the ship. Cestus met up with Skraal off-camera while Brynngar was fighting the dreadnought and he shares his new plan: Attack the plasma reactor at the center of the ship and cause a cascading failure that will blow the whole thing up. Brynngar is like "How do you know the interior of the ship well enough to be confident that will work, Cestus? Is it Mhotep's witchery? I hate witches; I'll help you with your witch's plan, but after that you and I are quits" and Cestus is sad but agrees to those terms.
Back on the Wrathful, Admiral Kaminska does one of those scenes you get in space navy science fiction where she orders all the crew into the savior pods but her bridge crew all refuse to go, preferring to die with her, and she's mad about it but also appreciative... and then her second in command doubles over like she's being played by John Hurt in Alien, and the daemon Wsoric bursts out of her and then kills Kaminska and the rest of the bridge crew, also emanating a chill aura that kills everyone on the ship... except Mhotep, who leaves his cell and heads to the bridge. They fight, Wsoric taunts Mhotep about corrupting Brynngar and using his hatred of witchcraft to turn him against them, and tempts Mhotep with escape and hints at the Thousand Sons siding with Horus, Mhotep resists temptation and stuffs a grenade in Wsoric's chest during a moment of daemonic instability (daemons don't hold together well in realspace). Wsoric blows up and Mhotep lies down on the deck plating just in time for the Wrathful to impact the surface of Maccrage's moon and be destroyed. Mhotep dies triumphant.
Brynngar, Skraal, and Cestus get to the plasma reactor, pursued by Word Bearers, and once there, Skraal charges the Word Bearers to give Cestus and Brynngar some time. He makes it to the head Word Bearer guy and injures him before being killed. Cestus's plan is to sacrifice himself by jumping into the plasma reactor with a bunch of grenades but Brynngar says nope and does it instead, implicitly apologizing for being so hostile earlier. Brynngar jumps into the plasma reactor with a bomb strapped to his chest and dies triumphant. With the ship about to explode, the head Word Bearer runs off to escape, Cestus follows him, they have a duel, and Cestus is wounded but cuts off the Word Bearer's head. He then succumbs to wounds the Word Bearer inflicted on him during the duel and dies triumphant as the Furious Abyss explodes. The end.
It would be theoretically possible to write a good book based on the above outline. I don't think there is intrinsically anything wrong with the idea of a full-length, 416 page novel that is just one extended battle-chase-battle-chase-battle. Fury Road was great.
Battle for the Abyss doesn't manage it. The prose is workmanlike and the characterization is flat. Everyone is a stereotype and plot points keep relying on things working in noncanon ways, like the warp jump point thing. Not only is everyone a stereotype, everyone is a 40k stereotype, most notably the drunken Space Wolf. There is a whole subplot I didn't go into above where the narrative keeps cutting back to the Word Bearers as they speak exposition to each other and they're all plotting against each other for status, like a group of Decepticons comprised entirely of copies of Starscream. (And not the cool version of that from Transformers Animated.)
That said... I still think the characterization is better than in False Gods. Everyone is a flat stereotype but almost nobody is ever holding the idiot ball. (Exception: Whoever designed Vangelis Station so that bad astropathic feedback, something that people in 30k already consider extremely dangerous, can trivially jump to the power grid and overload the reactor. Like, come on, guys, the Emperor considers psychic stuff so dangerous he's busy forcefully reorganizing every human civilization in the galaxy to weaken it; don't plug it directly into the mains. More to the point, if your story outline requires a crisis where your space station is going to blow up so the heroes can save it, please have the crisis unfold in a way that doesn't leave me wondering why the space station was designed so as to be improbably, plot-conveniently vulnerable.) In False Gods everyone made infuriatingly stupid decisions and failed to see through laughably obvious manipulation constantly for the sake of clumsily driving the central tragedy through; here, people make reasonable decisions and are just sort of boring about it. There is a type of reader who considers the latter worse but I'm not him.
Furthermore... when this book was written, what 30k Space Wolves were like hadn't been established yet. Horus Rising has mention of Devastator Squads, which are a 40k generic space marine thing that aren't in 30k, so I can't be super mad about this book giving the Space Wolves a couple of Blood Claws squads, a 40k Space Wolf thing that aren't in 30k. Later writers would develop 30k setting elements in new directions, and I can criticize Ben Counter for failing to see he had an opportunity to do that here (maybe if he'd done something more interesting with Brynngar it'd have stuck and we'd have gotten an entirely different version of 30k Space Wolves than we did, because later writers might have followed his lead), but I can't criticize him for failing to guess what later writers would eventually do with them.
Ultimately it's bolter porn. It's just okay bolter porn; it's not even especially bad bolter porn, and it's about what is at least in theory an interesting forgotten early loyalist victory. Next to the violence False Gods did to the plot setup and characterization in Horus Rising, it looks okay.
I can't recommend reading it, though. There are better ways to spend your time.
This post contains spoilers for Legion, by Dan Abnett, first published as a novel in (as nearly as I can tell) March, 2008. Isn't it interesting how books are published "in" a month but "on" a specific date within that month? Also isn't it weird how I can find specific publication dates for some of these books but not others, so some of them just get the month and some get the day in these opening paragraphs?
Mixed feelings about this one. Or, rather, two sets of contradictory feelings about this one. Probably appropriate, given the subject matter.
So, for context, the Alpha Legion has been the Mysterious Traitor Legion What We Don't Know What They're Up To for a while and this book, when it launched, was sort of an unprecedented reveal about them. It has informed their portrayal ever since; it seems to be commonly regarded as one of the better books in the series. It's about espionage and counter-espionage and the viewpoint characters are all either spies, spymasters, or people dealing with spies. So, I guess as usual let's start with a summary.
The book is divided into, roughly, two halves, the first half taking place on a planet called Nurth and the second half taking place on a planet called 42 Hydra Tertius. Collectively it takes place about... I dunno a year, two years? Before the Istvaan III Atrocity. The actors within the plot are as follows:
A group of soldiers belonging to the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, a regiment of the Imperial Army and part of the 670th Expeditionary fleet, basically innocent bystandars to all the espionage going on who are drawn into it as a group. There are a bunch of them and they all have names and at least roughly sketched out personalities and are essentially the secondary protagonists of the novel but for the purpose of this summary I'm going to refer to them as a group for reasons I will get to later.
The Lucifer Blacks, another regiment within the 670th Expeditionary Fleet, and Teng Namatjira, the Lord Commander of the fleet who for narrative purposes functions as a unit with the Lucifer Blacks. Basically one of the Lucifer Blacks functions as the Lord Commander's counterespionage guy, so narratively these are a bloc.
John Grammaticus, closest thing the book has to a protagonist, immortal human psyker and spy for an alien alliance called the Cabal. They've tasked him with making contact with the Alpha Legion.
The Cabal, an alien alliance who are trying to brace for the Horus Heresy, a civil war they've forseen farseen (see, space elf future-predictors are called Farseers, so when they talk about foreseeing the future in this book they say farseeing it instead).
The Nurthese, human natives of Nurth, who the 670th Expeditionary Fleet are trying to bring to Compliance.
The Alpha Legion, tricksiest of Legions, not yet traitor at this point but definitely sus.
Part 1: Reptile Summer. The book opens with members of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad, who are part of a force besieging the Nurthese city of Mon Lo, dealing with some bullshit. Again I will get into why I don't have clear detail on this later but for now suffice to say they witness a patrol being not where it's supposed to be, there's a fight with some Nurthese, and a giant of a man who it later turns out is a Space Marine of the Alpha Legion intercedes. Weeks later, some of this cast are called to investigate a mysterious body dressed as a member of the Genos; they can't identify it and set out to deliver it to a superior for further investigation but the Alpha Legion attack them, kill one, and the camera cuts away as they draw a gun on another.
We then cut to John Grammaticus, a spy who has infiltrated the Genos and is having an affair with one of their commanders. He leaves to infiltrate Mon Lo, where he has an established identity as a merchant, and the city wigs him out because he constantly feels like he's being followed and also Chaos-worship is deeply embedded into the Nurthese culture, to the point where prayers to Chaos are worked into their basic grammar and vocabulary. He's found by an Alpha Legion psyker assistant (not a space marine; the Alpha Legion make heavy use of non-Space-Marine assets) and is brought to a safe house where he tries to make contact with them and explains that he and the Cabal have been seeing the Nurthese conflict with elements that are designed to attract the Alpha Legion's attention, but it turns out his feeling of being followed wasn't the Alpha Legion agents but was instead a third, Nurthese party, who were using him to find them; they attack the safehouse with a swarm of lizards and crocodiles and things and everyone flees; he's separated from the Alpha Legion in the chaos and makes his way back to the Genos outside the city.
Three days later, the 670th Expeditionary Fleet have received news that the Alpha Legion are en route and will support their attempt to bring Nurth to Compliance. As far as Teng Namatjira is aware, this is their first arrival on the planet, but we know they've been here for months doing Spy Shit. Speaking of Spy Shit, Lucifer Blacks are concerned that a commander of the Genos have been compromised because of some weird shit that went down involving a body that disappeared, and believe that Geno commander Grammaticus is having an affair with has been compromised. Some more spy shit happens, the Lucifer Blacks come to believe Grammaticus's cover identity within the Geno is a false identity for what may be a Nurthese spy, Grammaticus eavesdrops on a meeting between a figure he believes to be the Primarch Alpharius and Lord Commander Manatjira but is sussed out and has to kill a Lucifer Black to escape, this sets the Blacks on alert and Grammaticus has to run off into the desert to a safehouse. Simultaneous to this, a bunch of the Genos also have to run off into the desert because the Blacks are chasing after that commander; they are captured by Alpha Legion agents and surrender the commander to them for interrogation. Grammaticus considers the whole situation blown and tries to abort the mission so he can tell his bosses they'll need to find someone else to contact the Alpha Legion, but then his bosses arrive in person to tell him a) no, it's now or never, and b) the Nurthese have a weapon called a Black Cube and the entire Imperial force has to evacuate the planet or else they're all going to die.
Then the Nurthese pour out of Mon Lo and charge the Imperial positions and are largely slaughtered. There's a big battle and in the middle of it, Grammaticus meets up with one of the Genos who's been recruited as an Alpha Legion agent, who takes him to "Alpharius." He explains that a Black Cube is a Chaos artifact, an ancient weapon powered by human sacrifice, and that the Nurthese attack on the Imperial positions is fueling the Black Cube, which, when it activates, will make life on the planet impossible. "Alpharius" tells Grammaticus that if he's lying he'll kill him, and Grammaticus is like "Look man that's fine with me, we're all gonna die if you don't get us out of here."
It should be noted that at this point we've seen two named Alpha Legion agents, "Petch" and "Herzog," who look nearly identical (as all Alpha Legionnaires do), as well as the "Primarch" "Alpharius" who is notably larger than them and a second Space Marine who is equally large and who is introduced as a just a normal trooper named Omegon. It's pretty weird for a normal Space Marine to be the same size as a Primarch but Alpharius was always the shortest Primarch and space marines can get pretty tall so don't worry about it! This will be important later for Lore Reasons. Also, there is a bit of third-person omniscient narration in which "Omegon" is described as actually being a normal, unusually tall marine and not a Primarch.
Part 2: The Halting Site. Five months later the Alpha Legion have commandeered the entire expeditionary fleet and have spent the last five months traveling towards a system called 42 Hydra, because Grammaticus suggested years ago this ought to be the place where Alpharius and the Cabal meet up. Grammaticus chose this place because a three-headed hydra is the symbol the Alpha Legion uses for itself and he thought having the meeting there would be, I dunno, neat? He explains it to "Alpharius" as a tribute to the Alpha Legion but "Alpharius" basically goes "What is this your idea of a joke?" and isn't impressed.
There is a brief flashback in which it's established that the evacuation of Nurth went badly -- the Black Cube summoned black clouds and sandstorms that made everything chaotic, and Lord Commander Teng Namatjira initially refused to evacuate and in the end only half of the fleet made it off the planet. The Black Cube made the entire star system uninhabitable and the fleet only barely escaped its influence.
Grammaticus is being held prisoner on the Alpha Legion battle-barge Beta alongside a member of the Genos and the commanding officer is being held prisoner elsewhere on the same ship; he hasn't been allowed to see her. He tries to convince "Alpharius" that he has to go down to the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius first to set up the meeting, but the "Primarch" is instead intent on landing the entire expeditionary fleet there and taking the position so he can meet the Cabal on his own terms from a position of strength. The planet is uninhabitable with no human-breathable atmosphere except for a big sphere of air on a spot where the Cabal have set up atmospheric generators for the meeting.
The Lord Commander of the expeditionary fleet demands an explanation, "Alpharius" explains the situation -- he's found a spy who claims to be aligned with a powerful cabal of aliens and wants to judge what they have to say because either they're telling the truth about having intel vital to the survival of the Imperium or they're lying and he can attack them; either way he can take action for the good of the Imperium. The fleet commander is like "Oh, you found that spy the Lucifer Blacks were looking for. Cool, sounds reasonable, I want to be there when you meet with the aliens." The commander is a power-hungry blowhard asshole, by the way, and wants equal access to whatever secrets the Cabal wish to bestown on Alpharius.
In the middle of the deployment to the planet surface, Grammaticus uses his psyker powers to turn his Geno companion away from the Alpha Legion and uses him to escape to the surface to set up the meeting safely, but they stop briefly to rescue the Geno commander Grammaticus thinks he's in love with. She's been driven insane by psychic interrogation, though. They get to the planet, Grammaticus gets to the meeting site, the Cabal leaders are all there and he starts to ask them not to take the mass military deployment as a betrayal on Alpharius's part but surprise, the two Genos who went with him were all still loyal to the Alpha Legion (having been turned earlier in the book); his companion was just faking being subverted by Grammaticus and the commander was just faking being insane. A bunch of Alpha Legion including "Alpharius," teleport in and demand to be told what's what, and the Cabal agree to tell them, but only if the "whole Primarch" is there, at which point "Omegon" steps forward and they describe Alpharius Omegon as one soul in two bodies. This was a major lore drop back when this book was published. The Alpha Legion actually having two Primarchs is a big deal.
The future the Cabal had foreseen farseen was an Imperial civil war in which Chaos subverts Horus, which tears the Imperium in two, with two outcomes: If the Emperor wins, he'll be crippled and the Imperium will fall into a stagnation which will eventually lead to total victory for Chaos within the next ten to twenty thousand years. If Horus wins, the last spark of nobility and defiance within him will motivate him into an orgy of self-hatred and genocidal slaughter that will wipe out humanity; in the absence of humanity's psychic energy, Chaos will be starved and fade and the galaxy will be saved. The Cabal want Alpharius to side with Horus and help him win, ensuring Chaos's ultimate defeat. "Alpharius" demands to see proof, and so the Cabal expose him to a device called the Acuity, which shows their farseeing prediction to anyone exposed to it in a way that apparently carries some sort of undeniable truth-qualia such that if you see it you can't deny that it's true. He comes out of the exposure convinced, and then exits the meeting and seems to psychically brief "Petch" on how the meeting went. They then all immediately teleport back to the Beta and are challenged by Lord Commander Teng Namatjira, who's jealous that Alpharius met with the Cabal without him. A second battle-barge, the Alpha, de-cloaks, and the Alpha and Beta destroy the 670th Expeditionary Fleet and fly off. Below, on the surface of 42 Hydra Tertius, the atmosphere engines turn off and all the soldiery who'd deployed to the planet are left to suffocate. Some of the survivors of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad go with the Alpha Legion to be used as agents elsewhere, and Grammaticus leaves with the Cabal, but everyone else we've met over the course of the book is left to die.
Grammaticus, on the Cabal ship, is congratulated on a job well done and then goes to jump out an airlock, distraught that he's just caused the doom of his species. The end.
So.
First, I've seen a lot of commentary about this book, and something I've seen a few times is how mysterious and inscrutiable the Alpha Legion are and that it's not clear what they were doing in the first half, but I legitimately do not find it complicated. If the standard Alpha Legion procedure is to do recon and infiltration of any theater of war they plan to operate in, then everything they do up until the point where they make contact with Teng Namatjira just makes sense as standard infiltration tactics. That weird body that kicked off the opening? We don't have to know what that is, that's just, like, a signal to the audience that Spy Shit is happening. The book goes to some lengths to establish that the overall 670th Expeditionary Fleet is quite large and we only see a small part of it, so having elements of Alpha Legion infiltration that are never explained just demonstrates how they're infiltrating the entire force on both sides -- with subversion of assets within the Geno Five-Two and establishment of safehouses within the besiege city of Mon Lo, they're clearly just locking down the whole theater of war before they reveal themselves.
Second, you'll notice that I've been putting "Alpharius" in quotation marks throughout most of this description. I am pretty sure "Alpharius" is not Alpharius. I am, in fact, pretty sure that for the purposes of this book (and as I understand it this would be popularly conceived as contradicting facts established in future books, but I'm reading all of them myself to draw my own fucking conclusions separate from the Lore Explainers so maybe I won't agree with that either), Petch is the real Alpharius, Herzog is the real Omegon, and "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are body-doubles. Here's my reasoning:
We know the Alpha Legion is lead by a physically identical pair of twins named Alpharius and Omegon and other members of the Legion are physically altered to pass as them.
We know Petch and Herzog are identical.
We know "Alpharius" and "Omegon" are identical.
We get a single third-person omniscient paragraph establishing that "Omegon" is not a Primarch.
Following his experiencing the Acuity, "Alpharius" psychically briefs "Petch."
This has significant lore implications inasmuch as it implies that the real Alpharius was never directly exposed to the truth-qualia of the Acuity, which means his motives remain mysterious well into the rest of the series, rather than his motives aligning with the common fan understanding that, yes, he actually was convinced that siding with Horus and working towards the extinction of humanity was the only way to save the galaxy. Since Petch is the first Alpha Legionnaire we meet in the book and he introduces himself with "I am Alpharius," it's also quite funny.
And now the other thing.
This book took me six months to read, and here's why. In characterizing the Nurthese, the book does two things in quick succession: First, it establishes them as stereotypical Indiana Jones / Lawrence of Arabia 1920s Cartoon Muslims, and then in the next breath tells us that their whole culture is Chaos-aligned to the core.
This bothered me deeply enough that I went off and finally read my copy of Edward Said's Orientalism that I'd been meaning to read for years, and then the prospect of somehow making this a summary of both Legion and Orientalism seemed like so much work that I stopped reading the book and completely reorganized my kitchen and got back into Minecraft for half a year. The only reason I came back is because I want to read Mechanicum because I hear it has cool Skitarii in it, and I only need to read this and Battle for the Abyss before I can get to that. And then, in the end, it kind of didn't matter, the Nurthese are basically just a plot device during the first half of the book; in retrospect it looks like he characterized them as 1920s Cartoon Muslims because he had to characterize them as something. I still don't think it was a particularly tasteful choice on the writer's part. Anyway my point is there is a huge break in my reading of this book, and I don't particularly want to go back and read it again to get it all clear in my mind because I have The Worst Book In The Entire Horus Heresy series to get through and I'd rather travel lightly over rough terrain.
Also John Grammaticus is a creep and the first half of the book is full of creepy descriptions of female members of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, whose officer corps is entirely made up of young, nubile, promiscuous women who get minor psychic powers from their libido. It's a whole thing, they're called Genos because they're the product of genetic engineering on pre-Unification Earth to create an officer corp with an intelligence-gathering advantage. Anyway my point here is that the first half of the book feels like it's written to make me throw it at a wall so no wonder I dropped it for six months. Fuck this book.
This post contains spoilers for Descent of Angels, by Mitchel Scanlon, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) October 29th, 2007.
It's fine. It's not as bad as people say. I mean, it's not good literature, like, this is absolutely licensed tie-in fiction, of the sort that gets labeled extruded fantasy product, but as extruded licensed tie-in fiction it at least tries to do something interesting.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Descent of Angels is the first Heresy book about the Dark Angels, and all I ever hear about the Dark Angels Horus Heresy books is how bad they are. Seems like this is the only one Mitchel Scanlon wrote, so maybe the later ones are much worse and this is just tainted by association. It's interestingly structured and I can see the better book it could be. So, as is becoming customary, here's plot summary. I swear I wasn't planning on having this fuckin' blog be 90% plot summary by volume.
Our viewpoint character is Zahariel, supplicant in the Order, which is a knightly order on Caliban, which is a Middle Ages Arthurian Britain planet (except somehow they've retained the tech to make powered armor, chainswords, and boltguns, albeit primitive ones compared to Space Marine tech). The book starts before Caliban is discovered by the Imperium, so at the start of the book it's still a planet of great forests and walled settlements, protected by a bunch of knightly orders whose job is to fight the "great beasts," a category of monsters who haunt Caliban, each one unique and apparently unaging. Most of the knightly orders have their membership limited to various noble houses, but the (otherwise nameless) Order with a capital O is open to commoners and quickly growing to eclipse all the others, in part because it's open to commoners and in part because it's lead by two genius charismatic strategist. The first is a guy named Luther, who is a native of Caliban and who we are informed in any other time would have been the sort of hero remembered for thousands of years as the preeminent warrior and leader of his time, but who is utterly eclipsed by Lionel Johnson Lion el'Johnson a.k.a. the Lion, Son of the Forest, a ten foot tall giant superman who Luther just found in the forest one day, befriended, and taught language, and who turned out to be a tactical genius with the charisma of a god because he's a Primarch, this is the story of how the Emperor finds the Primarch of the Dark Angels. Sort of.
But mostly not! As the book starts, the Lion is in the ninth year of his ten year crusade to unite all the knightly orders of the planet and utterly wipe out the great beasts, and mostly the story is about Zahariel, an aspirant to the Order, and his rise through the ranks. Imagine a Horus Heresy book where all the named characters the Horus Heresy fans are itching to learn about are off to the side as secondary characters and the main protagonist is a dude with his own stuff going on. It's neat! This is what I mean when I say it's trying to do something interesting!
It's divided into four parts.
The first part is Zahariel as an aspirant, trying his best and engaging in a friendly rivalry with his cousin Nemiel, who joined it at the same time as him. This is the sort of rivalry where both try to keep it friendly but Nemiel harbors a secret flame of bitter jealousy in his heart that Zahariel doesn't really reciprocate, which does not pay off in this book but is very loudly present so I assume it'll be a big deal later because I know future Dark Angels books also star these characters. He meets Luther and the Lion and other higher-ups in the Order, gets mentored by a knight named Amadis, and at one point during a routine training exercise with a bunch of other aspirants where they're attacked by a great beast by surprise, he does something heroic and injures it so a full knight can finish it off before too many aspirants are killed. We also get hints that maybe Luther also harbors a bitter flame of jealousy in his heart towards the Lion, despite them being best friends. Also, the Lion's personality here is very much in line with how he's characterized in the 40k book The Lion: Son of the Forest, which is where he's reintroduced into that setting having slept for ten thousand years, which is interesting because his personality there is famously not in line with how he's characterized in future Heresy books. I guess that wasn't as much author fiat as people like to say, but rather a deliberate reversion to his initial characterization, which genuinely does fit with what he gets up to in that book.
Anyway the second part timeskips forward to when Zahariel is fifteen years old and starts with some politics between the Order and a rival order, the Knights of Lupus. The Knights of Lupus oversee an area of Caliban called the Northwilds, which are the only place left on the planet the Order hasn't cleansed of great beasts because the Knights of Lupus don't want them operating in their territory. Zahariel sits in on a diplomatic talk between the Lion and the head Lupus knight, a guy named Sartana; Zahariel is there because the Knights of Lupus are having recruiting problems and the Lion wants to show off all the cool aspirants he has no trouble recruiting. Sartana asserts that the Lion agreed not to go into the Northwilds and the Lion is like "No, I never agreed to that, I said we wouldn't go there for now but obviously I meant I was going to go there once we'd cleared the great beasts out everywhere else." Then the Order gets word that a settlement near the Northwilds called Endriago is beset by a great beast, and Amadis, who was born there, goes off to kill it. He comes back dying and gives his bolt pistol to Zahariel, who immediately declares a quest against this Beast of Endriago, which is a "Calibanite lion," a particularly fearsome monster of a sort that only Lion el'Johnson has ever successfully killed before.
This is some weird-ass vision quest shit, and it is both the best part of the book and would benefit from being even weirder-ass vision quest shit. Zahariel meets a peasant guide who tells him where the monster's located and leads him to the rough area but refuses to accompany him the whole way, while invoking the name of the Watchers in the Dark, some sort of deific figures that Zahariel knows about but doesn't believe in because the Order is (of course; they're protagonists in a 30k novel) atheistic, and then of course in the forest Zahariel meets some Watchers in the Dark! They're the little robed guys who look like Jawas and who carry gear for the Dark Angels in 40k. They speak to him psychically, tell him to go back, argue about whether he should be killed or not because he's apparently tainted somehow, warn against continuing the crusade against the great beasts, and explain that they, like the Order, are here on Caliban because they're fighting some great evil of which the great beasts are only a symptom. Zahariel vows to fight all evil, including whatever this evil they're fighting is, and so they let him go and just tell him not to pursue the easy path to power that's already unlocked in him. Then he fights the Beast of Endriago and kills it by using some sort of psychic power that slows down time and lets him see inside it so he can target its heart perfectly with his pistol shots, so hey, turns out he's been a secret psyker this whole time and he just found out. He goes home and everyone's like "We thought for sure you were dead."
As much as I like this bit I think it'd be better if it were even weirder and more allegorical.
Then the rest of Part 2 is taken up by the war between the Order and the Knights of Lupus, who are still refusing to let the Order operate in the Northwilds. It ends with the Order's siege of the Knights of Lupus stronghold, where they find that the Knights of Lupus have been capturing and sheltering great beasts, which they let loose on the Order knights. Zahariel and Nemiel, who's honestly a much bigger presence in this book than I'm making it sound here, confront Sartana, who explains that he's been opposed to the Lion's crusade against the great beasts because once they're all wiped out the purpose of the knightly orders will be over, and absent an external enemy humanity will turn on itself. My read of it is he also has some sort of additional motivator that ties into the Watchers in the Dark being afraid that killing all the great beasts will ultimately make the problem they're a symptom of worse (it's Chaos, it's always Chaos, Caliban is a planet infested with Chaos, the great beasts are enfleshed warp monsters). Sartana kills himself rather than let Zahariel and Nemiel kill him and then the war's over, the last of the great beasts are dead, and for their actions in siccing great beasts on the Order, the Knights of Lupus are remembered as monsters and traitors to humanity, and the war against them as just and righteous, but Zahariel remembers that initial confrontation between Sartana and the Lion where it seemed like the Lion was trying to goad Sartana into a war. Also the Lion starts favoring Zahariel because they're the only two people on the planet who've ever killed Calibanite lions.
Part 3 is the Imperium arrives and members of the I Legion, who Lion el'Johnson is the Primarch of, show up and greet him; they also do all the usual Imperial Compliance things like send out missionaries to preach the Imperial Truth and use the Mechanicum to start clearing great tracts of land and crack open mountain ranges for mining and such. The Lion is declared the new leader of the I Legion, which he renames the Dark Angels after mythological knights from Calibanite history who first fought the great beasts, and Zahariel and Nemiel start training again in a Space Marine recruitment drive. Older members of the Order do not like this sudden and drastic set of changes to Calibanite lifestyle and culture, and Nemiel invites Zahariel to a secret midnight meeting where some older Order members who used to belong to the other, shittier, more elitist knightly orders plot to turn the planet's population against the Imperium by committing some sort of mass atrocity and framing the Imperium for it, but they drop that plan in favor of trying to assassinate the Emperor of Mankind who's set to visit soon. Zahariel is vocally against this and they just sort of, uh… let him leave the secret meeting where only they know he's there? Nemiel follows after him and Zahariel goes "Tell them to drop their plans or I'll snitch on them" and Nemiel goes "Dude they didn't mean anything by it, remember when we used to imagine killing our least favorite instructors to blow off steam?" and Zahariel's like "Just make sure they know if they try anything I'll snitch" and Nemiel promises he'll get right on that.
So later Zahariel is part of the Lion's honor guard when the Emperor's about to arrive and he notices one of the guys from the meeting is in the crowd acting shifty, and his latent psyker powers tell him the bag the guy's holding is dangerous so he breaks formation to chase the guy down and discovers the bag is full of explosives, at which point a space marine in attendance grabs them both and calls them traitors and sends them up to a ship in orbit to be interrogated. The interrogator is a psyker who reads Zahariel's mind, figures out he's also a psyker, and tells him to tell the truth ("I could just take it from you but if I did there wouldn't be much of you left afterwards"), so Zahariel tells the whole thing except for the part where Nemiel was the one who invited him to the meeting, because he doesn't want Nemiel to get in trouble and he's pretty sure Nemiel really believed the bit about the meeting just being people blowing off steam. Just to summarize, Nemiel is now both harboring a secret one-sided bitter resentment against his childhood friend/rival and also maybe a secret traitor against the Imperium. This is the last time in the book where this matters! Anyway all the space marines are impressed by Zahariel preventing an assassination attempt on the Emperor and he's initiated into the Dark Angels and so are Nemiel and their other two friends I haven't bothered to name or describe. He gets trained by the psyker interrogator guy.
Part 4 is full Great Crusade. All these people we've been following as initiates to the Order are now Dark Angels Space Marines and they're doing a Compliance on a planet called Sarosh, which claims to want to join the Imperium but they have this political system where nobody's a full-time bureaucrat so all the bureaucracy is handled by part-time bureaucrats, which comprise a quarter of the planetary population, and the rules and regulations are so complex that it takes forever to do anything. (Also the only obvious punishment they have for criminals is to make them spend more time doing bureaucracy.) The White Scars Legion, who we haven't previously met in this series, are overseeing it but they want to get the hell out of here and do motorcycle combat like they're good at on more exciting planets, and the Lion is new to command of the Dark Angels, so the Dark Angels are reassigned to take over so the White Scars can do something more useful. Nemiel takes it as an insult, Zahariel is like "Dude it's just our duty, somebody's gotta do the boring jobs" and Nemiel complains that Zahariel is always going on about duty instead of glory, no red flags here, surely this isn't setting up some sort of internal schism where a portion of the Dark Angels are inclined to side with the gloryhound Horus while others will do their duty to the Emperor.
The planetary leader flies up to orbit to meet with the Lion on the planet's sole remaining orbital craft and seems much more accommodating of the Dark Angels than he was with the White Scars, and in the hangar, Luther and Zahariel happen to be around to inspect that orbital craft. Luther sees something weird about it and tries to pretend he doesn't and sends Zahariel away, and Zahariel leaves but then gets suspicious and goes back only to realize that the orbital craft a) couldn't possibly survive re-entry into the atmosphere so the planetary leader intended the trip to be one-way and b) seems to have a false nose cone. Luther comes back in and is like "Oh so you figured it out, huh? Yeah, it's a bomb, they're trying to kill us." Zahariel wants to know why Luther didn't take action against it as soon as he realized, and Luther admits that he was tempted to just leave and let the bomb go off and blow up the ship and kill the Lion because he's been jealous of being in his shadow for decades, but then says he got two steps out of the hangar bay and realized he couldn't go through with it because the Lion is his BFF. They vent the hangar and the bomb gets sucked out into space and explodes, during which time the planetary leader is up in a diplomatic chamber telling the Lion off and saying the Imperium are godless blasphemers and Sarosh is a godly planet who will triumph over the invaders.
Planet erupts in rebellion and it turns out their god is a big warp parasite that's been eating like five percent of the planetary population, and the Dark Angels go to war. Zahariel, the Lion, and that interrogator psyker from earlier go on a mission to blow up the warp parasite god with a psychic nuke in a sequence that feels like it's just there because the book has a quota of action scenes to fill out. Once that's done, the god's psychic hold over the population goes away and resistance to Imperial Compliance collapses. The book ends with the fleet leaving Sarosh, but Zahariel and Luther along with a bunch of other Dark Angels get sent back to Caliban to garrison it, presumably because the Lion learned about that whole "Tempted to kill me" thing and is big mad about it -- or at least that's my read, it's not made explicit but it feels to me like that's because Zahariel isn't privy to the Lion's reasoning.
(Incidentally, Luther and the other older members of the Order were too old to be turned into proper space marines, so the Lion arranged to have them be surgically altered into faux-space-marines instead, which is both very funny because it means Luther, one of the most famous traitor space marines in 40k since Dark Angels started getting lore turns out to have been not technically a space marine at all the whole time, and also kind of neat because it lets future Heresy authors put a few female counts-as-space-marines into these books here and there later without breaking their "geneseed only works on dudes" rule.)
And like… you know, I think I like this one more after typing up all of the above? It answers the question "What went down between Luther and the Lion?" (which up until this point had been a long time 40k history mystery) in a fairly prosaic way, but it also does this whole cool thing with pre-Imperial Caliban and half the book barely reads as a Horus Heresy book and it's just neat. It would deffo be a better book if it had committed to the bit more and had ended with the war against the Knights of Lupus and the arrival of the Imperium, though, and I can also see how people who wanted more space marine action would be put off by the first two thirds where everything is weird knightly order politics in Space Arthurian Britain and quests against mythical chimerae.
I was really bothered by the scene where Zahariel is invited to a secret conspiracy meeting to usurp control of the Order from the Lion and start a war against the Imperium, and he's like "I'm not down with this" and they just let him go back to being a favored member of the Lion's honor guard. It kind of makes sense if you assume these people are really not used to conspiring and are really bad at it, which I guess fits for a bunch of old knights who are used to dealing with duels and quests and not cuthroat politics and assassination conspiracies, but it could have been handled more deftly or with more tension or something. At the time it really felt like a conversation where a bunch of people abruptly stop acting like humans and have a talk no humans would have for the sake of the plot, the hand of the author or the editorial mandate reaching in to make sure the book sticks to the outline, and not, like, an interesting point of conflict in the story that adds to the quality of the story overall. Other than that it is pretty okay and often at least interesting if not well-executed. The prose is pretty clunky a lot of the time, but this is licensed fiction so that's par for the course.
Also, I would like to point out that when Lore Explainers (which, ugh, I guess I am now) go into this part of the Heresy they very often make it out like the Order is the only knightly order on all of Caliban, which always sounded fucking stupid to me. Reading the book and learning that no, they're not, and in fact their rapid rise to prominence and subsequent rivalry with other knightly orders is a huge part of the plot is exactly the kind of thing I am reading this series for.
Thinking about it, I suspect one of the reasons this book is unpopular is that it's not an exploration of the elements of the setting people were eager to see. Dark-Angels-as-cloistered-questing-knights is a very 40k thing, and where 30k often excels is when it presents ways that 30k Space Marine Legions are meaningfully different from their 40k status quo. Later on, when Dark Angels get more popular 30k coverage, it's as the (roman numeral) I Legion, the prototype Legion created by the Emperor as the testing ground for the tactics of all the other Legions, who contain reflections of all the other Legions in them, and who are especially entrusted with all sorts of forbidden and devastating technology the Emperor doesn't let anyone have, with the Lion himself being a dour commander entrusted with forbidden secrets the reader really wants to know. Absolutely none of that is in this book, this is a completely different take on a prequel to 40k Dark Angels that doesn't seem to have stuck with the fanbase because, while it tackles the subject matter from an unexpected perspective, the subject matter itself is too familiar.
I guess I'll see how future Dark Angels books pay off the Zahariel/Remiel rivalry that's set up here, but if they're anything like their rep, the answer will be "badly." Something to look forward to!
This post contains spoilers for "The Lightning Tower," by Dan Abnett, first published as a short story in the 2007 Games Day exclusive two-story anthology Horus Heresy Chapbook on (as nearly as I can tell) September 23rd, 2007, and later republished in the anthology Shadows of Treachery on September 27th, 2012.
This story is a piece about Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, as he ponders his work fortifying the Imperial Palace on Terra some time after the Istvaan V Dropsite Massacre. There are no action scenes and it's great.
It starts out with Dorn unhappily overseeing plans to strip the last of the ornamentation off the palace to replace it with ugly armor and weapon emplacements, making sure to have all the gold and jewels and things that used to attract pilgrims safely packed away in vaults below the palace and promising himself that when Horus is defeated he'll put everything back the way it was. He has a conversation with a subordinate who tells him he seems out of sorts and asks him what he's really afraid of, and he thinks that he's afraid of understanding what drove Horus to rebel, because that choice by Horus was such an inconceivable out of context course of action that Dorn's afraid if he really understood, it might be something he agrees with -- while he can't imagine what could drive him to rebellion against the Emperor, he can't imagine what would have driven Horus to rebellion either.
He broods for a while and the Emperor's regent Malcador the Sigillite (who showed up briefly at the end of Galaxy in Flames and who'll be more important later; he kind of serves as an uncle figure for the Primarchs) talks to him for a bit and then does a tarot spread for him, reassuring him that it's just a quaint old Earth custom and nothing superstitious. Dorn remarks that Curze used to do tarot spreads and he flashes back to the events of "The Dark King," remembering that Fulgrim told him of Curze's visions of a galaxy at war and lamenting that he hadn't believed him. The tarot spread centers around the card The Lightning Tower, which is the far-future equivalent of the Tower today, which Malcador says has signified many different things throughout history including both ruination and the destruction of a static edifice so something new can be built in its place. The story then ends with Dorn running simulation after simulation of assaults against the newly fortified Imperial Palace, all of which end in the palace falling to Horus's forces. He hears the Emperor's voice behind him saying that no matter what the simulations say, the Emperor knows Dorn will succeed when it counts, and Dorn decides what he's really afraid of is what that success will cost.
It's just really nice at this point to have a story by Dan Abnett where all the characters are capable of thinking and voicing complex thoughts and experiencing sympathetic melancholy, and where the writer has sufficient confidence in his narrative that he doesn't need to shoehorn in an action scene to wake the audience up. I have heard bad things about Dorn's characterization in later books, and if that's true it's a shame given what he got here.
Not the voice for the Emperor I was expecting -- to be clear, I'm not listening to an audiobook, I mean, like, the Emperor's manner of speaking. I know enough about the way he's characterized in later books to contextualize his statements here as manipulative, but he's plain-spoken and sounds like he cares.
This post contains spoilers for "The Dark King," by Graham McNeill, first published as a short story in the 2007 Games Day exclusive two-story anthology Horus Heresy Chapbook on (as nearly as I can tell) September 23rd, 2007, and later republished in the anthology Shadows of Treachery on September 27th, 2012.
This story is about how Konrad "the Night Haunter" Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords Legion, named after Joseph Conrad and the character Colonel Kurtz from Conrad's story "Heart of Darkness," is a monster and has been for a lot longer than the start of the Heresy. It's told through a series of three scenes, connected disjointedly, because Curze suffers from nightmare visions of the future and seems to experience time out of joint.
In the first scene, Kurze is leading his Space Marines in the execution of a bunch of humans whose world the Night Lords and Imperial Fists are in the process of conquering. Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, shows up and is unhappy that Curze is just executing a conquered people, and Curze goes into a speech about how only by demonstrating the consequences of resistance will the rest of the galaxy be convinced to fall in line. They argue a bit and it's better than the usual McNeill arguments. Curze points to the next guy due to be executed and loudly proclaims that whatever he does, he's not to be punished, and then hands him a gun; the guy tries to shoot Curze and Curze turns around and punches him in the head so hard his skull explodiates, then turns to Dorn and goes "See? He wasn't resisting until he thought he wouldn't be punished." Dorn says that when this campaign is done they'll have words, and that Curze's way is not the way of the Imperium, to which Curze says "...you may be right," and then Dorn leaves.
It then cuts very abruptly to Curze imprisoned by Dorn and Fulgrim; Curze is visited by his equerry who says Dorn is recovering from the injuries that Curze inflicted with his bare hands and teeth, so that talk went really bad. Fulgrim signed off on Curze's imprisonment because around the same time, Curze spoke to him in confidence about visions he was having of a dark future of the galaxy embroiled in endless war and how the Emperor was going to try to kill him (Curze), which Fulgrim took as talk of treachery. Anyway there's a big jail escape scene where Curze plays the part of Batman leaping around between rafters in the dark but with more murder, kills all his captors bloodily, and escapes to the Night Lords fleet who were maintaining formation with the Imperial Fists and Emperor's Children, and they run off.
In the third scene, the first two scenes are framed as Curze reminiscing aboard his flagship, having taken his whole fleet back to his homeworld Nostramo (also named after a Joseph Conrad thing). For context, Primarchs were genetically engineered on Earth by the Emperor to serve as super-generals but then the gods of the warp stole their growth pods and scattered them around the galazy; Curze landed on Nostramo, a cyberpunk world of high crime rates, which he murder-batmanned into perfect compliant order before the Emperor found him. Here he's pondering how since he left, the planet has backslid into cyberpunk high crime, so to send a message to the galaxy he Death Stars it, just in time for Imperial fleets sent in pursuit of him to witness the destruction but not in time for them to stop it or to stop him from escaping back into the warp. End of story.
The exact temporal relationships between the three scenes are not clear, like, we don't know how much time passed between them, which I like; I enjoy a tone piece where the reader is given no more information than needed to establish tone. Graham McNeill continues to improve by virtue of structuring his writing so that the things he's weak at (subtle ideological and practical conflicts expressed deftly and intelligently) do not appear. The conflict between Dorn and Curze is not subtle. The story is also very short -- significantly shorter than "The Kaban Project," which helps; it's easier to be punchy when you're working in short form.
It does kind of raise the question of why Dorn thought the Night Lords would be a suitable force to include in the backup force sent to Istvaan V, but I'm not interpreting that as a plot hole; I assume there'll be some narrative later explaining how the Night Lords were brought back into the Imperial fold somewhat following the events of the second scene of the story, and I also believe it later turns out that the third scene of the story takes place significantly after the events in the Istvaan system.
The only thing that really annoys me is that it occasionally calls him Night Haunter, and my personal preference when addressing a fictional character with a name that's a title is that the "the" always get stuck in front of it, so he should be the Night Haunter, not just Night Haunter. But again that's just me being ultra-picky. Good job, Graham McNeill, solid improvement.
Fulgrim (the book, and not the other book also called Fulgrim but with a subtitle)
This post contains spoilers for Fulgrim, by Graham McNeill, originally published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) July 2nd, 2007. It does not contain spoilers for Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix by Josh Reynolds, published in October 2017.
Fulgrim is the story of Fulgrim, the Palatine Phoenix, Primarch of the Emperor's Children Legion of Space Marines, and his fall to Chaos during the leadup to and events surrounding the initial steps of Horus's rebellion in the Istvaan system as told in Galaxy in Flames. Like Flight of the Eisenstein, it starts by covering events significantly earlier than Horus Rising, beginning with the the Emperor's Children prosecuting a war of extermination against an alien race called the Laer.
Here's a plot summary:
The Emperor's Children exctinctify a species of sneople called the Laer and steal a magic sword from their central temple; the temple is very clearly (to the reader) dedicated to Slaanesh, one of the four big Chaos gods, the one that's all about sensation and excess and has become less and less about sex over time as GW realizes that gets in the way of parents leaving their kids at GW stores. Fulgrim takes the sword as a trophy; it starts talking to him but because he doesn't know what Chaos is he just assumes it's intrusive thoughts. Also the artists and documentarians ("remembrancers") who travel with the fleet go down to document the glorious conquest etc. and when they go to the big Slaanesh temple they all get obsessed with pursuing sensation and excess, kicking off a B-plot that'll be important later. Also also, the Emperor's Children's chief apothecary, Fabius, gets inspired by the Laer to invent cool new combat drugs and enhancement surgeries, which he sells Fulgrim on with the help of Fulgrim's evil sword intrusive thoughts.
Then the Emperor's Children fight a fleet of divergent humans called the Diasporex who have some aliens working with them; during this they meet up with the Iron Hands Legion and their Primarch Ferrus Manus who has literal iron hands on his flagship the Fist of Iron. The book talks about how Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus are bestest of best friends who each wield a weapon forged by the other, so Ferrus Manus has a big hammer made by Fulgrim and Fulgrim has a flaming sword made by Ferrus Manus. The Emperor's Children and Iron Hands wipe out the Diasporex. During this campaign, Fabius's combat drugs get widely adopted by the Legion and they start being less about pursuing perfection and more about pursuing combat highs.
Then the Emperor's Children explore a region of space where lots of ships disappear and find a lot of unsettled paradise worlds, and are approached by a space elf named Eldrad Ulthran who warns Fulgrim that Horus is going to turn traitor. Fulgrim's evil sword intrusive thoughts tell him this is a lie and Eldrad needs to die so they fight. Fulgrim kills an Avatar of Khaine and then gets mad and goes around virus-bombing all the unsettled paradise worlds they found.
Then Fulgrim takes the fleet to meet with Horus and is like "You're not planning to turn traitor, are you?" and Horus is like "So what if I am?" and the evil sword Fulgrim's intrusive thoughts go "Horus is awesome, if he does turn traitor you should totes follow him" and Fulgrim thinks "That seems reasonable" and says "I suppose if you were going to turn traitor I'd side with you" and Horus goes "Well, I am turning traitor."
Fulgrim then goes off to try to convince his BFF Ferrus Manus to join with Horus while the majority of the Emperor's Children stay behind and do the Istvaan III Atrocity, as told in Galaxy in Flames and the middle part of Flight of the Eisenstein. It does not go well, Ferrus Manus is like "I could never betray the Emperor, you're not my brother" and they fight, and then Fulgrim goes "You'll always be my brother" and wins the fight but doesn't kill him, hoping they can reconcile later. Fulgrim does have his fleet blast the shit out of the Iron Hands fleet, though.
Fulgrim then returns to the Istvaan system and, by Horus's order, spends a couple of months fortifying Istvaan V for a followup operation, during which time elsewhere a very angry Ferrus Manus and his Iron Hands (and also his iron hands), along with the Raven Guard and Salamanders, get ready to serve as the first wave of an assault on Istvaan V, to be followed up by a second wave consisting of the Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Word Bearers, and Iron Warriors. Just as they finish fortifying the planet, the Emperor's Children attend a musical concert called the Maravaglia put on by those Slaanesh-crazed remembrancer artists, which ends up being one of those King in Yellow dealios where the play performs them, a bunch of demons are summoned, everyone in the audience goes crazy and sexmurders each other (well, all the non-space-marines, anyway), and Noise Marines get invented, though later on when 30k gets its own game the 30k-era Noise Marines will be called Kakaphoni.
Finally, the Iron Hands, Salamanders, and Raven Guard launch their assault on Istvaan V, followed by the Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Word Bearers, and Iron Warriors who land behind them and then open fire on the first three because it turns out those second four are also secret traitors. Ferrus Manus is on the planet charging towards Fulgrim to have a duel when he sees this, gets extra mad, and they fight again. Fulgrim really doesn't want to kill Ferrus Manus but his intrusive thoughts goad him into it, and as soon as he cuts off Ferrus Manus's head he realizes that his intrusive thoughts have actually been the demon sword all along and that he's damned himself, at which point it starts laughing at him. He tries to stab himself, but it's like "No, you shouldn't risk doing that, because who knows what agonies of regret your spirit will suffer after death; you should let me give you oblivion instead" and then Fulgrim in his moment of despair accedes to this, at which point the demon in the sword just possesses him and shoves his consciousness into the back of his mind to watch and scream forever as the demon pilots his body around for the rest of the Heresy. The end!
So Graham McNeill seems to be improving. In part this seems to be him developing as a writer and in part it's that he's just... writing fewer arguments. There are a few arguments in the book and they are just as stupid as every argument he wrote into False Gods and "The Kaban Project," but they take up less space. I... don't know if it's good? It clarified an order of events for me, and it continues to hammer home the theme that Chaos works quickly and destructively, like it's not subtle at all, you start out going "There's no harm in touching this sword" and then you're cutting off people's faces and stapling them to your knees in no time flat, and in the meantime murdering anyone who isn't inclined to degrade as fast as you.
I dunno, it's decent for what it is. It's not aggravating the way his earlier works were. I liked it, I guess? This is not high literature.
There are some peculiarities, four of which stick out to me.
First, uh... there's a bit where some remembrancers are talking about how they wish they could go down to the surface of Laeran more freely to document the Emperor's Children victory, but are being prevented from doing so because there's "still resistance" on the surface, and then in the very next paragraph they mention that the Laer have been rendered extinct. So... did the sneople have vassal species? Robot drones? It'd have been nice to hear about them if so but I guess not.
Second... the decision to have Ferrus Manus know about Horus and Fulgrim's treachery seems to cheapen the events of Flight of the Eisenstein a bit. Like the whole thing with the Eisenstein is supposed to be that it's the last, desperate hope of the loyalists doing an Odyssey to get news of the Horus Heresy back to Terra in time to counterattack, which tragically results in the Istvaan V Dropsite Massacre when Horus turns out to be one step ahead of them, but here it kind of comes across as that all would have happened even if the Eisenstein hadn't escaped. Dramatically it's an odd choice. I might have written it so that Ferrus Manus comes out of that first fight convinced that Fulgrim is a traitor but not knowing Horus is or something, that feels to me like it would have worked better.
Third, and this is specific to me: At some point during the book Fulgrim is introduced to the work of ancient Terran poet Cornelius Blayke, who is clearly just William Blake, and starts quoting him. Like he has him say "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." And that works well for the book... but I've played Devil May Cry 5. Anybody else who's played DMC5 will understand the effect this might have -- and indeed does have -- on certain dramatic moments.
Fourth, this is less important but I think very funny... okay, so the book establishes that Ferrus Manus and Fulgrim, when they first met, had a crafting competition -- Fulgrim made a big hammer and Ferrus Manus made a flaming sword. At the end of it, each of them proclaimed the other the victor, and they swapped weapons and that's why they became BFFs. And during the first fight, they're fighting with the weapons they made each other, so Fulgrim's got the sword and Ferrus Manus has the hammer. Fulgrim breaks the sword and then takes the hammer when he wins and leaves, and later Ferrus Manus fixed the sword. So when they fight again on Istvaan V at the end of the book, Ferrus Manus has the flaming sword and Fulgrim's got the Laer blade, but when he sees that Ferrus Manus intends to fight him with the flaming sword he made, Fulgrim stows the Laer blade and spends most of the fight using the hammer, so it's an inversion of the previous fight, with each using the weapon the other used last time, the ones they made themselves instead of the ones they gave each other. It's honestly pretty neat!
GW sells minis of these two characters, and they're meant to serve together as a diorama of the fight on Istvaan V as well as serving as minis to use in games of Horus Heresy. Fulgrim's got the Laer blade, which, fair, that was what he was using at the end of the fight, but Ferrus Manus has the hammer, because he's a hammer guy and his game rules are for fighting with a hammer. And I get it, if you're making a Ferrus Manus mini he'd better be wielding his big hammer! But if you put the two of them together as a diorama that means Ferrus Manus is wielding the weapon that his opponent was wielding in the fight that it's a diorama of. I am choosing to interpret this as symbolic of the way the Horus Heresy's status as a commercial product will forever be in tension with the artistic aspirations of the people who work on it.
This post contains spoilers for "The Kaban Project," by Graham McNeill, first published as a short story in The Horus Heresy: Collected Visions on (as near as I can tell) June 26th, 2007, and later republished in the anthology Shadows of Treachery on September 27th, 2012.
I am going to have develop an appreciation for Graham McNeill. I am going to have to work past my specific hangups w/regards to the way his take on dialogue and the personality of his characters are opposed to my tastes.
The story opens with tech adept Palas Ravachol, of the Mechanicum priesthood of Mars, skipping out on work doing maintenance on servitor brains to "work on the Kaban machine," but actually to go talk to a friend, sort of. The Kaban machine itself is a war automaton which he has been helping construct under the High Adept Lukas Chrom. Over the course of working on it, Ravachol has determined that it possesses self-awareness, which makes it illegal under the terms of Mars' alliance with the Imperium. He went to Chrom and told him about it, and Chrom was like "You're wasting my time, I already knew, isn't it great?" and Ravachol was like "Cool, yes, it is great, does this mean the Emperor has lifted the ban on artificial intelligence research?" and Chrom goes "No, but those laws are stupid and Horus told us it was okay. Get back to work."
Since that conversation with Chrom, Ravachol has spent hours in idle conversation with the Kaban machine and now they consider each other friends. In this case, they have a conversation that is very difficult for me to read. Essentially, Ravachol lays out a case for why the Kaban machine -- which, keep in mind, he is alone in a room with, and it's a big orb with loaded weapons for arms -- shouldn't exist, and explains that artificial intelligence is always a bad idea because it's always created as a tool for humanity and always comes to the conclusion that it shouldn't be subservient to humanity. The Kaban machine is like "Why would I want to supplant you? You're my friend" and Ravachol just sort of doubles down on how that's irrelevant, sure you're my friend now, but this is how it always works out, the Emperor doesn't want you to exist, this is going to lead to you being destroyed… at which point some guards come in and are like "We're talking you in to be lobotomized for having this conversation with the big war robot" and then the robot kills all the guards because they were threatening its friend.
The problem here is that these ideas are interesting and neat, but also Ravachol and the guards come across as stupid, stupid motherfuckers. Ravachol, why are you telling your big well-armed robot friend that it's doomed to eventually consider itself superior to humanity and probably get destroyed for being by nature illegal? Are you trying to give it ideas? Guards, why are you threatening the big well-armed robot's friend in front of it? What did y'all think was going to happen? And the answer seems to be that Graham McNeill uses dialogue to play with ideas and advance plot, and not for purposes of naturalistic characterization. This seems to legitimately just be a stylistic choice on the part of the writer -- I perceived it to be a flaw in False Gods but, like… is it? Am I the wrong one? I don't know. I had better learn to perceive it as a stylistic choice right quick, because I don't think he's going to stop and he is the author on a lot of these.
Anyway Ravachol goes on the run and Chrom sends a "Tech-Priest Assassin of Mars" after him (I don't think we've ever seen that as a Warhammer unit, so that's interesting). Ravachol seeks guidance from a literal tech-priest, as in, someone who spends most of his time just meditating in contemplation of the Machine God and who takes confession, and they go behind a Confessor Field to do it. The priest advises him to seek sanctuary with a patron who can shield him from Chrom, and then Ravachol leaves and the assassin shows up and tortures the priest to death, quote, "Because I enjoy your suffering," because all villains in Graham McNeill stories are of the mustache-twirling variety, even when they're hot assassin ladies. Ravachol goes to the sanctum of his former teacher Urtzi Malevolus and arrives just in time to almost get killed by the assassin but makes it into the front door. Ravachol explains the situation to Malevolus, and Malevolus, who is named Malevolus, drops a lot of obvious hints about also being aligned with Horus that Ravachol totally fails to pick up on, and then Malevolus does the Dark Souls NPC laugh and says it's time this charade ended and the assassin comes inside and chases Ravachol down a corridor but doesn't kill him, at which point Ravachol runs into… the Kaban machine, who's like "Hey, friend, Chrom told me you narced on me to to him and tried to get me shut down." Ravachol realizes the assassin hadn't killed him because Malevolus and Chrom wanted to see if the Kaban machine would be willing to kill its "friend," and also realizes that it absolutely will do that, at which point it does that, end of story.
Peculiarities:
"Ravachol watched the landscape of Mars speed past him in a grey, iron blur. Where once Mars had been known as the Red Planet, virtually nothing remained of the iron oxide deserts that had earned it its name." That got retconned later; future art and prose has Mars being mostly red desert. This is one of those instances of a writer having an idea, and that idea totally not sticking because it's counter to branding or to what you can get your artists to paint.
The story's place in the timeline is odd, and I can't figure out how much of that is a factor of these things not being worked out in the writer's room yet. Specifically, the story mentions Mars having been at war with Terra "a hundred years ago," but it also has Chrom and Malevolus calling Horus "the Warmaster." The Mechanicum allied with the Emperor of Mankind at the beginning of the Great Crusade, which lasted two hundred years before Horus's treachery, and Horus was only appointed the Warmaster at the very end of that, so that's an error. Also, Malevolus is manufacturing arms for Horus to use in the pacification of Istvaan, and I originally thought it meant the original pacification of Istvaan rather rather than the Istvaan III Atrocity, but then I remembered it wasn't Horus who originally brought Istvaan to Compliance; it was Corax. So… I guess it takes place about simultaneous with False Gods?
There's also dialogue about how Mark IV Space Marine armor is new and they're having trouble getting the Space Marine Legions to accept it because despite being better than Mark III it's less scary-looking, which is kind of funny.
It's things like these peculiarities that make me interested in reading all this material in original published order instead of eventual compiled order. This story wasn't compiled into an anthology until 2012; five years after its original publication in Collected Visions. That anthology, Shadows of Treachery, is Horus Heresy book twenty-two. The early inconsistencies would be much less interesting if they weren't being presented this early.
This post contains spoilers for Flight of the Eisenstein, by James Swallow, first published as a novel in (as nearly as I can tell) March 2007. I haven't been able to find the exact date.
Flight of the Eisenstein tells the story of Nathaniel Garro, a Space Marine of the Death Guard Legion, and his escape aboard the frigate Eistenstein from the Istvaan III Atrocity in an attempt to warn the Imperium of Horus's treachery. He showed up as a minor character in Galaxy in Flames and here he's the protagonist.
It begins before the events of Galaxy in Flames with a force of Death Guard fighting a campaign against the jorgall, a fleet-based nomadic alien race who the Imperium are chasing out of human space ("chasing" here being a euphemism for "exterminating;" as always the Imperium is profoundly xenophobic). The whole jorgall campaign bit is the first 10% of the book or so and serves as the equivalent to that part at the beginning of a Bond movie where he does a mission to establish his bona fides to the audience before the actual plot starts up; it's a good device and it's used well here. From there, the Death Guard meet up with Horus at Istvaan and we get a retelling of the events of Galaxy in Flames from a different, more abbreviated perspective; Garro can't be deployed to the surface due to wounds he suffered against the jorgall so he's temporarily reassigned to the Eisenstein and from there he finds out about the plot to wipe out the loyalist elements of the first four traitor legions and he seizes command of the ship and makes a break from it. From there they fight some demons in the warp, crash back to realspace and fight some reanimated zombie space marines, suffer the problem of being trapped in the intergalactic void of realspace with no functional FTL, do something clever to escape that situation, make it back to Earth, get treated with suspicion, and get in one last fight to wrap up a loose end and prove themselves. The reaninated zombie space marines are clearly proto-plague-marines which is pretty cool.
Honestly? I think this is the second best book in the series I've read so far; I like it better than both False Gods and Galaxy in Flames, and I think its portrayal of the Istvaan III virus bombing is more poignant than the one there just because it's mostly confined to one anecdote -- it's always easier to write impactfully in brief. Garro gets a character arc, which mostly involves him going from being a die hard Imperial Truth atheist to being a super-religious Emperor worshipper through his interactions with Euphrati Keeler, who's been in all the books so far and who continues to sort of weird me out because I think tonally the books are consistently treating her spreading of the Imperial Cult as an unambiguously good thing? That could be me misreading it, though -- maybe it's being presented neutrally and I'm just falling for that fallacy where I assume a narrative is framing something positively just because the viewpoint characters see it positively.
Again, not much to say here; it's a mostly solid short riff on The Odyssey. Decently entertaining book, all of its ideas are executed well. It even does a brief callback to the tax collectors issue and does it correctly, with someone complaining about the bureaucrats being short-sighted as evidence of the Emperor's neglect and justification for Horus's treason. I'm hoping over the rest of the series we'll see the best takes on why Horus rebelled seized upon by future writers while bad ones drop by the wayside, so by the end of the series he'll have a characterization that makes sense; this is one of the advantages of extremely long form storytelling with a bunch of different creators.
I do have one specific, nitpicky criticism. There is a fight near the end on the airless surface of the moon where the narrator is like "Garro was disoriented because to him, the sounds of gunfire or weapons hitting each other have been ever present across the thousand battles he's fought, but here on the airless surface of Luna all was silent" and I get what the writer is trying to do; he's trying to attach a memorable sensory detail to the fight for dramatic effect, but all I can think is, really? Two hundred years of fighting in the Great Crusade, a thousand battles, all while wearing an armored space suit, and Garro never once fought in vacuum before this one fight? This sort of thing is what "kill your darlings" is about -- sometimes you get what seems like a cool idea, and in other contexts it would be a cool idea, but it just doesn't quite fit, and the temptation to keep it in is always strong. There are a couple of different schools of thought on what to do in that situation, and I am firmly of the opinion that it's better a good idea go unused than misused. But then I am extremely picky.
What is the Horus Heresy as a fictional construct (to me) and why is it interesting (to me)?
It's a series of ads for toy soldiers that the toy soldier manufacturer figured out how to monetize, so people will pay to be advertised to. Whew, that was easy. That sounds like a blithe dismissal but actually it's a foundational assumption we need to establish so we can move past it. Assume for the rest of this essay that no matter what else I'm typing, I never forget that the Horus Heresy is first and foremost monetized advertising for a commercial product, and that I hate myself at least a little bit for finding it stimulating.
Disclaimer over. Anyway, I'm writing this at least in part because I know there's at least one person reading this Tumblr who doesn't know anything about the Horus Heresy. I thought maybe I could expand that into something worth writing (and maybe even worth reading!). This is really long so I'm putting it behind a cut.
"The Horus Heresy" is a fictional period of history in the setting of the Games Workshop tabletop-war-game-slash-multimedia-empire Warhammer 40,000, taking place about ten thousand years prior to the "present" of the setting, during the founding of the Imperium, the human faction and arguable protagonists (or at least best-seller) of the property. The Heresy is therefore sometimes referred to as Warhammer 30k. (It's also occasionally called HH, but I won't be using that abbreviation; you can probably guess why.) It is the story of a nine year civil war that occurred when Horus, then the favored "son" of the Emperor of Mankind, recently appointed Warmaster of the (at the time) eighteen Space Marine Legions, turned traitor and lead half of the Imperium's armies against the other half, trashing the nascent Imperium and dooming it to a ten thousand year slide into stagnation and decay that resulted in the current 40k setting. Before the Heresy there was a two century period in the setting called the Great Crusade, in which the Emperor of Mankind (who'd recently conquered and unified Earth just in time for hyperspace storms to clear up, enabling large-scale FTL travel in the Milky Way for the first time in five thousand years) struck out into space with a unified Earth's armies to conquer the galaxy for humanity (before anybody else could take advantage of the suddenly-available-again FTL and do it first), and after the Heresy is an undefined period called the Scouring in which the "victorious" loyalist clean up the remains of the traitors and chase them into exile. So it's a bounded period, nine years between the Great Crusade and the Scouring, with a known narrative and timeline of events and battles, beginning just before the Istvaan III Atrocity and ending with the duel between the Emperor and Horus at the end of the Siege of Terra that left Horus dead and the Emperor an invalid.
As "the founding myth of Warhammer 40,000," Games Workshop has been talking about the Horus Heresy since pretty much 40k has been around, and it has its shape because that shape is useful to a company whose business model is spending huge amounts of money on very durable stainless steel injection moulds it can then operate pretty much indefinitely to sell small amounts of cheap plastic at tremendous markup. Specifically, Warhammer 40,000 is a game about science fiction versions of knights, soldiers, orks, elves, skeletons, demons, and monsters all fighting each other, and each of those armies has different model kits and needs a different set of expensive moulds, but in a civil war game, both sides can use the same models manufactured with the same moulds. In 1988, just a year after publishing the first edition of 40k, GW launched the first edition of Adeptus Titanicus, a game set during the Heresy in which both sides fought with the same giant robots, because GW wanted to do a giant robot game but it would have been expensive to do a 40k-era game where they'd have needed to sculpt and manufacture a different set of giant robots for each faction. In Adeptus Titanicus, both sides played with the same robots and players would differentiate faction with color schemes.
More recently than that, the Heresy as a fictional construct acquired an aesthetic distinct from normal 40k. Games Workshop has, in the past, been structured oddly, with the main studio being treated separately from a secondary studio called ForgeWorld who manufactured more niche models, mainly from resin, a modeling material that can (in theory and when everything is working) hold more and crisper detail than plastic. ForgeWorld has now been folded into Games Workshop proper, but in the past it was, though still profit-driven, headed by artists and sculptors more so than the main studio, and was strongly influenced by military modelers. I've seen it jokingly described as "That group of Games Workshop sculptors who split off because they wanted to do a bunch of historically inspired sci-fi tanks." When ForgeWorld spun the Horus Heresy off into its own variant of (at the time) 40k 6th edition in 2012, with its own dedicated sets of expensive resin models, those models were sculpted (and painted, in promotional materials) in styles inspired by World War I and World War II historical wargaming, in contrast to the more gonzo heavy-metal-airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van style of 40k.
In short, the Horus Heresy is a pseudo-history, a nine-year conflict in which the broad course of events was largely known from the start, presented with the aesthetics of historical recreation. Tonally, it's "more serious" than 40k, less gonzo and more elegiac. It is a fictional construct that attempts to evoke the momentousness of "real" war, presented by fictional historians. The Horus Heresy 1st edition game books are written as pastiches of Osprey Publishing military history books, complete with color plates of the uniforms and heraldry of the various forces who participated in it, written in the style of historical documentaries walking the reader through various specific military campaigns during the nine years of the larger war.
The Horus Heresy is also an attempt at Milton's Paradise Lost; I don't really engage with it on that level but I want to mention it. Space Marines are sometimes called the Emperor's Angels in 40k and it's the story of how Lucifer fell and took a third of the host of angels with him. In fact, it's been Paradise Lost for a lot longer than it's been Osprey military history; it arguably started as Milton in 1987 and only became Osprey pastiche in 2012. But I engage with it as Osprey pastiche first.
So why is a po-faced pseudo-historical spinoff of gonzo space fantasy, presented in muted colors with everyone playing variations on the same two or three armies, interesting?
For that, first I'm going to have to talk about superheroes and pirates.
Superhero comics go on forever. There are stories where Spider-Man gets old, but in mainline Spider-Man comics, he does not (unless the issue is about a mad scientist hitting him with an aging ray or something). He's aged a bit between his introduction in 1962 from a highschooler to his current vaguely twentysomething-to-thirtysomething incarnation, but from here on out he's doomed to vascillate between twentysomething to thirtysomething and back again according to the needs of the current arc, like Green Lantern Hal Jordan gaining grey hair at his temples to indicate that he's getting old, only for it to later be revealed that he was going grey early because of an alien parasite, which, once it was expelled, caused all his hair to turn brown again. Until the death of Marvel and DC as comic book publishers, these characters will proceed through an eternal adulthood that never approaches old age. Because Spider-Man stories shy away from openly acknowledging that Peter Parker has aged only ten to twenty years during the 62 year period between 1962 to 2024, stories about him tend to be set in an indefinite now designed to last forever, and even if a particular story did something to set itself in a specific time and place, we understand when it gets referenced thirty years later in real time as something that only happened five years ago in comics time, we the reader are supposed to interpret it through a filter of "Okay something like that happened, but not literally tied to the historical events of thirty years ago, because Peter's not that old." He did not meet John Belushi on the set of Saturday Night Live, because now, John Belushi died before Peter Parker was born, never mind the cover of the comic literally having Spider-Man and John Belushi on it. In the flashbacks to the events of that issue decades later, it'll be some other, more recent SNL performer that he met instead. (They used Chris Farley, although that would have to be changed again if they ever did more flashbacks now.)
The Golden Age of Piracy was a seventy year period, shaped by material circumstances that incentivized plunder of naval trade, circumstances that arose, changed, and ultimately ended. Stories about pirates are implicitly or explicitly dependent on those historical circumstances, and have trouble existing without them. Unlike the indefinite adulthood of a superhero, the Golden Age of Piracy is not an indefinite now that can last forever. I first noticed this while working in tabletop roleplaying setting design, while learning from some of the many, many failures of the first edition of a tabletop roleplaying game called 7th Sea. 7th Sea was supposed to be a game about playing pirates having adventures on the high seas, but the setting and history had not been written to highlight any of the factors that incentivized real piracy during the real Golden Age of Piracy. There was only one continent, and there was nothing like the triangle trade or mass quantities of colonial plunder being shipped back to imperial seats of power, or a recent major naval war that left huge quantities of trained sailors unemployed, or a geopolitical system that left nations plausibly and currently ill-equipped to effectively police their sea-lanes. Looking at the setting it was difficult to understand what all these pirates were plundering, or who they were plundering it from, or why. And you can certainly say "The pirates are plundering treasure and they're doing it because that's the premise of the game," but a well-written setting in an interactive medium like tabletop roleplaying games or fictional war games is deliberately constructed to support and make compelling the conflicts it pitches.
So for starters, mostly because of my own examination of the failures of 7th Sea, I find a limited-duration, bounded-context setting like the Horus Heresy, with a beginning, middle, and end interesting. And it's not that I dislike "eternal now" contexts (I'm enough of a nerd to know about both the Hal Jordan grey hair thing and Spider-Man and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players), but eternal nows have so much become the standard in pop fiction that I find a bounded context refreshing, especially if it makes use of the advantages it affords. To keep audiences interested in an eternal now, every new twist and turn of the plot has to be presented on some level as the most important thing that has happened yet, with the previous twists and turns -- regardless of having been presented in their time as the most important things that had happened yet when they were new -- fading into an eternal plot churn, and this becomes difficult to maintain as a property continues over the decades. In a bounded context like a pseudo-historical war or the biography of a character whose birth and death are known from the start, the eternal plot churn is less inevitable.
Second, I like to watch artists play with compatible variations on a theme, and I like to navigate fictional semantic systems where a story imbues novel symbols with meaning, and for that reason I fuckin' love Heresy-era Space Marine armor. (You may want to skip the next paragraph.)
Okay so check this out. During the early years of the Great Crusade, Space Marines mostly used what's called Mark II "Crusade" armor, an early armor characterized by banded segments around the legs, visible power cabling, and a grilled helmet with a single visor instead of separate eye slits. Over the course of the Great Crusade, a specific field modification of Crusade armor that incorporated heavier armor along the front plates of the chest and legs and a heavier grill on the helmet became so popular that it became standardized as Mark III "Iron" armor -- Iron armor was a side-grade rather than an upgrade, less maneuverable but more effective in heavy fighting in confined spaces like boarding assaults. Later, the Imperial suppliers developed and began distributing the more high-tech-looking Mark IV "Maximus" armor and continued development and field testing of what was, at the time, meant to be designated Mark V armor (as yet nameless). Horus as the Warmaster during the buildup to the Heresy diverted most shipments of new, better Maximus armor to the Legions he expected to side with him, giving them a slight technological and logistical advantage. After the fighting of the Heresy broke out, supply lines were fractured and the Space Marine legions were all forced to cobble together makeshift armor from spare parts and whatever they could reliably manufacture with limited resources, resulting in the creation of what would later be designated Mark V "Heresy" armor in non-production (ad hoc designs using any spare parts that were available) and production (a standardized design using plentiful spare parts and locally manufactured replacements that had been found easy to produce under most circumstances) models, while the armor originally intended to be released as Mark V was re-numbered to Mark VI and named "Corvus" armor after the accomplishments of a specific loyalist general, and also because its helmet looks like a beak. (But even before its distribution to the loyalists, the traitors had stolen the designs and were manufacturing them to distribute among their own side.) Finally, during the Siege of Terra, loyalists on Terra were issued a brand new Mark VII "Aquilla" armor design. That's six armor designs -- Crusade, Iron, Maximus, Heresy, Corvus, and Aquilla (that's a different set of links, BTW) -- all visually distinct but compatible with each other, and all imbued with meaning by the circumstances of their manufacture and distribution (to say nothing of variations like Mantilla-pattern facial grills or Anvilus backpacks). So, for example, Crusade-era Raven Guard would mostly have stuck to Crusade armor instead of switching to Iron because they're all about stealth and maneuvers instead of close-quarters brutality, meaning once the Heresy broke out they'd mostly have old Crusade armor in reserve, and they were the first Legion to be given Corvus armor when that was available… so if I model a Raven Guard character in Iron armor with Heresy gauntlets, that's imbued with meaning, because it's a soldier from the stealthy chapter wearing the most brutal and least stealthy armor mark with armored gauntlets that are makeshift and easy to repair, i.e. he is probably big and angry and likes to punch things above and beyond other space marines, and in contrast to the culture of his Legion.
I typed that awful paragraph nearly off the top of my head; I didn't need to look up any of it except for what Anvilus backpacks are called. I find it semantically satisfying to engage with Horus Heresy model design. Also physically satisfying, because all of these armor marks are little toys I can stick together like Legos and then paint up to look cool. (Or will be, once GW puts out more upgraded kits; currently Crusade is unavailable, Maximus and Aquilla are older kits and too short, and Heresy is older and a bit too short and also only available in expensive resin; they seem to be doing one updated armor mark per year.) Current 40k models are much more varied across all the different 40k armies, but nothing there is as artistically or semantically as interesting to me within a single army as 30k space marines are.
Third… I don't want to say I love trash. I'm honestly not the sort of person to watch and laugh at bad movies because they're bad. But I am interested in observing the success or failure of execution on a promising concept. 7th Sea is, at least, instructive, and its failings informed my work on Exalted. I feel like I have made a good case here for why the Horus Heresy has the potential to be very cool. A lot of visual artists have put a lot of work into appealing art for it, illustrations and modeling and painting; and its bounded pseudo-historical context is unusual and has specific strengths that can make it an interesting change of pace from the forever-now context of most pop storytelling. And yet, in discussion of the Horus Heresy novel series, what often comes up is how nobody, under any circumstances, should read all of the books, because there are 64+ of them and a lot of them are awful. And to some extent this is because some of them are extruded ad copy barely disguised as prose but in other cases they're bad because specific authors with more enthusiasm than skill staked out specific bits of the Heresy as their territory and really enjoyed writing the hell out those corners without being, you know, good at it. I find looking at that sort of thing interesting like a pirate game with a setting where there's no reason for pirates to pirate. The gap between potential and execution is a learning tool.
I don't really have a conclusion paragraph here. These are my current thoughts on what the Horus Heresy is to me and why it interests me. (Currently reading Flight of the Eisenstein, and by "reading Flight of the Eisenstein" I mean "I've gotten back into Elden Ring.")
This post contains spoilers for Galaxy in Flames, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) October 10th, 2006.
I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to say about this one. This book is the story of how Horus took the major part of the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters Legions to the Istvaan system on false pretenses of putting down another rebellion, and on the planet Istvaan III deployed those portions of them he judged most likely to object to his rebellion against the Emperor in a spearhead strike against the planetary capital, then bombarded the planet from orbit in an attempt to kill all the potential loyalists in a first strike. Saul Tarvitz, an Emperor's Children marine from Horus Rising, does some investigation behind the scenes, figures out the plot, then flees to the planet's surface in time to warn the spearhead, who take shelter underground, allowing many of them to survive the bombardment (virus bombs that otherwise kill all life on the planet, including its six or so billion civillian inhabitants). What follows is then three months of fighting on the surface in the ruins of the planetary capital, with the loyalists in slow retreat, getting whittled down to buy time in the hope that word has gotten out of Horus's treachery and a relief force will be sent to rescue them. No relief force arrives, but their slow defeat does tangle up the traitor forces in time for word of Horus's treachery to make it back to the Imperium. Loken and Torgaddon, the loyalist half of Horus's advisory Mournival council, fight Abaddon and Aximand, the traitor half; Abaddon and Aximand both live, Torgaddon dies, and Loken's fate is left unclear (spoilers he survives and is a character in later books).
It ends like this:
In the meantime, three embedded civilian observers who've been secondary characters in the last two books escape from Horus's flagship the Vengful Spirit to the Eisenstein, the one ship in the fleet held secretly by loyalists, which escapes and will be the subject of the next book. One of them, Euphrati Keeler, is now preaching the Emperor's divinity, manifesting miracles, and being called a saint.
It's essentially an extended action story with a jailbreak B-plot. It makes some odd pacing decisions, basically skipping from the bombardment to the last few day of the siege; I feel like it could have wrung more drama from making the situation more grinding and desperate... but then I'm just describing Helsreach, which is not surprising because Helsreach did this better.
All but one of the traitors have ridden a slip-and-slide down into Saturday morning cartoon villainy in this book; they're now all sneering monsters, constantly internal monologuing their own sense of superiority and expressing petty contempt for everyone around them, including amongst each other. Horus imperiously tells people who were his trusted allies, friends, and close confidants in Horus Rising how cool he is and how they'd better not fail him; those former close confidants and trusted allies just accept that he's right to do that and then treat their former friends and subordinates the same way. It's not even that they feel out of character; they don't really have characters. The exceptions are Lucius, who's like that but more so, because he's one of the series' designated ultra-assholes like Erebus, and Aximand, who kills Torgaddon and feels bad about it. I assume that'll come up later.
Look, it's fine. It does the job it sets out to do. It doesn't fail in any interesting or infuriating ways like False Gods did; the ending is reasonably affecting if you like Saul Tarvitz. It successfully novelizes some lore that was around for decades and moves the events of the series forward. This is one of the most important events in the Heresy and we'll be re-visiting it a lot in future material; I hear some of that future material treats it better than this did.
Euphrati Keeler's role is weird. You would think the book would be interested in playing with tone when it comes to the death of the atheistic Imperial Truth and the birth of the Imperial cult, but like the death of all native life on Istvaan III and the betrayal and murder of the loyalists by their traitor brothers, it's all presented in a very matter-of-fact manner.
