#inquisition war

[clevermird]

The abhuman dabbed a stubby finger in the spiced milk and sucked on it as if it were a teat. "Huh, the sauce is getting cold." - Chaos Child

Why are you like this, Ian?

[clevermird]

I finished Draco last night

I was expecting it to not be as bad as the fandom reputation it had. Turns out it is exactly as bad as the fandom reputation it has. Review incoming next week, but I gotta think about this train wreck first

[clevermird]

Review: Draco (Inquisition War 1) by Ian Watson

Hoooooo boy.  So, recently I undertook a project to read every single Warhammer 40k novel in release order. The first of these was a book called Inquisitor, which was later renamed to Draco when it was re-released. It has developed a bit of a reputation among 40k fans as being bizarre (and not in a good way). I thought going in that surely it couldn’t be that bad – fans do tend to exaggerate these kinds of things, after all. I was wrong. Draco tells the story of Inquisitor Jaq Draco and his retinue, who have been dispatched to a hive world to covertly oversee the cleansing of a genestealer infestation. But just when he thinks that everything is safe, he discovers a mysterious alien threat and a man who seems to be able to subvert the sacred divinations of the Emperor’s Tarot. This book was bonkers. The “alien threat” turns out to be a semi-ethereal tentacle monster that can give you orgasms. There is a point where one of the inquisitor’s retinue is tied up by some bad guys and for some reason, the narration thinks it’s important to note that he was tied up for so long that he crapped himself. A bit character wears “alien fetus earrings” for no apparent reason. At one point, they travel to a planet that has been corrupted by Slaanesh and we are treated to descriptions of pulsing, genital-shaped buildings and a giant, bloated woman who slowly deflates when her nipple piercings are removed. Sure, the last ones can be explained by “planet corrupted by the prince of excess”, but the whole thing together gives off a grimy, gross, horny-and-not-in-a-fun-way vibe. Furthermore, the writing itself isn’t that good. Draco is stiff and emotionless, his shapeshifting assassin companion is interesting but underdeveloped, and the navagator and the squat that fill out his retinue seem intended as comic relief, but fail to do much of anything funny. The story lurches from plot point to plot point based on revelations that often aren’t sufficiently explained and while I wasn’t expecting the ending to the first book in a trilogy to wrap everything up perfectly, the last chapter rendered the entire last several chapters pointless. Even as a 40k novel, it’s of limited use – there’s only a few direct contradictions with later lore, but there’s enough things that are weird or just really unlikely that you’re not gonna get much info about the setting from it. The prose is incredibly overwrought in places as well, making it a bit of a slog to read even beyond the content. And to top it all off, there was a sexual assault included that really rubbed me the wrong way with how it was handled and how cavalierly it was treated by the narrative.  The only saving grace the story has is that the base premise with the alien creature and the mysterious harlequin-man is actually not a bad idea and there was some moments where the overly-flowery description managed to hit the right note and suck me in, capturing the baroque nature of the setting quite well on its best days. I’d say that Draco is really more useful as an interesting bit of 40k fandom history than it is as an actual book in its own right. Might be fun to read drunk with a friend, but other than that, I’d skip it. 

Warnings: As previously discussed, one of the characters is raped in the book, although it takes place off-screen and is not discussed in graphic detail. There’s also plenty of 40k’s typical over-the-top violence and light body horror.

Rating: 3/10

[magnetictapedatastorage]

whats truly annoying about inquisition war is that a story about an inquisitor slowly cracking from stress, while running around with a d&d adventuring crew worth of people at gunpoint... is kind of awesome. there's potential there for really exploring authority and politics and justifications but it never quite gets there.

it dips a toe here and there, the lying, the drug use, and the finale of course, but someone in the story could have, for example, called him out and jaq could have shot them on the spot, or his motley crew of misfits could have tried to stage an intervention and he could have had a volatile reaction, something to show he's clearly a loose cannon. he already is one, in the story, and its already said, but but it really needed to be shown. there needed to be an intermediate step between mutilating an astropath for want of anything else to write on, and attempting actual necromancy because he missed his girlfriend.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

i am trying to re-read inquisition war. and. my fucking god. how did this get me INTO warhammer, its so fucking bad. the dialogue is 90% "wow meh'lindi sure is a sex object!" meanwhile meh'lindi Literally acts like a pet dog with tits. i got excited because the 2004 edition added a new first chapter* that's just her alone without the rest of the crew, and in it she actually has interiority and motives and thoughts of her own but then it just jumps back into the original first chapter where she has neither???

*it turns out this cool new "first chapter" was actually and very confusingly a short story that takes place before the novel, called The Alien Beast Within. believe me, its not made clear at all in the book.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

I wrote the trilogy of novels and the two short stories in this omnibus volume in the early 1990s, when Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 fiction were just beginning. I believe I was the first writer to tackle Warhammer 40,000 fiction. Other early scribes fled in consternation from the Encyclopaedia Psychotica of 40K rulebooks into the more familiarly medieval Old World or into the post-apocalypse America of Dark Future. The then-owner of Games Workshop yearned for real novels by real novelists set in his beloved games domains – yet how could one possibly imagine that those little Citadel Miniatures of Space Marines were real human characters? Or even real superhuman characters? Never mind the array of abhumans, inquisitors, assassins and aliens as sketched in the rulebooks of those bygone days? (The aliens, of course, being unhuman characters!) How could these possibly come alive? Some voices muttered darkly that the task was impossible. Here was a challenge. So I attacked the mountain of information, and I climbed it. Or ate it. And then I hallucinated myself into a strange state of mind whereby I could believe in such an insane future 40,000 years ahead. I only needed to remind myself that during the course of human history to date huge numbers of people have entertained delusionary belief systems which often lead to ultra violence. Need I mention the Crusades, the massacre of the Albigensians, the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, the horrors inflicted on suspected witches? Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century provided a bit of a model for the Warhammer 40,000 universe. However, the daemonic presence in the universe of 40K is real and actual – so to survive in such a future era you need to be psychotic, from our point of view. For me the secret of writing Warhammer 40,000 fiction, and making it believable, was to go completely over the top in style and also in content – to be lurid and brooding and hyperbolic and generally crazy, although in an elegant, ornate way where a dark beauty pervades the atmosphere as in a painting by Gustave Moreau.

part of the preface to the 2004 edition of Ian Watson's Inquisition War, originally released in 1990 as Inquisitor, the very first warhammer novel.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

ngl it pisses me off when people claim jaq fucked a genestealer or is into them or whatever. the novel goes on and on about mehlindi's Painful Surgery To Make Her Look Like A Genestealer and her Painful Surgery To Stop Looking Like A Genestealer and jaq's Revulsion And Pity The Entire Time That She Looked Like A Genestealer. its as blatant as it could possibly be that (1) she's not one, (2) he's not into them in any way. it would be funny and weird and vaguely on brand for ian watson if jaq was, but he isn't.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

best psyker character in all of warhammer imo. in most cases the life of an astropath is barely ever mentioned in passing, except for this one that decided to murder an entire planet in revenge for blinding her and locking her in a basement for over a hundred years. legendarily lethal levels of spite at being used as a tool. the IWs could never.