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Descent of Angels

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!

#horus heresy #Descent of Angels #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

“The Lightning Tower”

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.

#horus heresy #The Lightning Tower #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

“The Dark King”

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.

#horus heresy #The Dark King #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

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.

#horus heresy #Fulgrim #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

“The Kaban Project”

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.

#horus heresy #The Kaban Project #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

Flight of the Eisenstein

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.

#horus herey #Flight of the Eisenstein #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

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.")

#horus heresy #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy

[leareadsheresy]

Galaxy in Flames

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.

#horus heresy #Galaxy in Flames #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers #YouTube

[leareadsheresy]

Yeah, okay.

something that doesn't come up very often in the How Bad Is Emps discussion is that he's. he's really old. millennia old. there's no way his sense of time isn't flagrantly broken. i mean look at him! every time we get an immediate perspective on him the dude is making plans with thousand-year timeframes. all of his buddies (well, ex-buddies) are perpetuals. emps has more in common with the eldar or the necrons when it comes to sense of time than he does with literally any non-perpetual, and that includes the primarchs.

just think about it. the primarchs are, what, three centuries old at Ullanor? they're BABIES. ok, maybe they're not babies, they're clearly old enough for simple tasks like systematic genocide and aggressive expansion, but c'mon, they haven't even reached their first millennium. of course emps isn't going to burden them with adult concerns like the encroaching threat of Chaos, or the potential dangers as humans evolve into a psyker species, or the existential challenges imposed by their warp-entity-wearing-flesh natures. they're kids! let them be kids! their brains are still growing, probably.

so yeah, emps holds off on some big conversations. and yeah, he ducks out of the crusade to go work on the webway by himself, what's wrong with that? it's just a few decades! he's spent more than a thousand years uniting humanity, surely he deserves a little time to himself. from emps's perspective, he's just spending an afternoon building a treehouse in his workshop. the kids are old enough to know better than to stick forks into electrical outlets, they'll be okay for an evening. horus you're a responsible guy, you're in charge.

but then like five minutes later magnus fucking bursts through the wall like the kool aid man screaming bloody hell about horus and then the hole he made starts puking daemons everywhere and yeah emps loses his temper and yells but he was gone for FIVE MINUTES. and now there's daemons all over his workshop! magnus what the fuck! only magnus fled as soon as emps started yelling without explaining a damn thing. also the hole is still puking daemons. ok, ok, emps will stay in the workshop and try to fix the hole before everything is covered in daemons, but he still needs to figure out what the hell is going on. leman, you're an obedient kid, hell you're always boasting about it, surely YOU'LL listen. go get magnus--yeah, i know you don't get along, this isn't the time--go get magnus and bring him here so he can explain himself.

emps goes back to the hole and--leman did WHAT? magnus did WHAT? HOW DID THEY FUCK UP BASIC INSTRUCTIONS. hang on, what's this about an isstvan. horus is rebelling? fucking HORUS??? nine legions????? HALF THE ARMY????? wtf wtf wtf oh shit it's chaos isn't it. emps looked away for five minutes and chaos got its claws in his boys. it's been six years. that's like a bathroom break. how did the boys break everything in SIX YEARS???

[leareadsheresy]

False Gods

This post contains spoilers for False Gods by Graham McNeill, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) June 1st, 2006.

This is a weird book.

The progression of events is fine. If you wrote this book as a list of scenes, and a description of what happens in each scene, and each character's motivation at the start of each scene and each character's motivation at the end, it'd hold together well. But the specifics are bad. Any time any two characters have an argument, they have a dumb version of that argument, with dumb points made badly. Every character in this book, almost all the time, is a louder, dumber, more caricatured pantomime of who they were in Horus Rising. The exception is when someone -- usually Kyril Sindermann -- is delivering exposition, in which case the dialogue is merely workmanlike. I suspect this was worked out as a very solid outline and then filled in quickly and that Graham McNeill -- at this point in his career, remember this was decades ago and maybe he improves over the course of the series -- just doesn't have the chops to write smart people having smart conversations at this point. (I sure hope he improves; he's written a lot of these books.)

It is so consistent that I'm able to imagine a better version of this book just by looking at the dialog we see, picturing it as placeholder dialogue, and extrapolating a better version of each conversation based on the more subtle, more intelligent, more learned versions of these characters visible in the previous book.

I need to give at least one example.

Here's a five page excerpt from the ebook in which Erebus of the Word Bearers is attempting to manipulate Horus into attacking the fortress of the dude he set to rule Davin, this planet he conquered years or decades ago, who's now rebelled. Erebus stole a magic sword in the previous book and has given it to the rebel, and his plan is to have Horus lead the vanguard of the attack so the magic sword can injure him, at which point Erebus will step in and take Horus to a magic healing spot where the Chaos gods will offer him power in exchange for healing, stoke his ambition, show him misleading visions, and get him to rebel against the Emperor.

(You are going to have to pardon my highlights; I was taking notes as I read and I'm too lazy to remove them while taking the screenshots.)

Notice how Horus and his entourage are all stupid fucking meatheads and Erebus is the most obvious manipulator who ever lived? In the previous book, Horus and his entourage weren't stupid fucking meatheads, and they wouldn't have fallen for that -- but if Erebus had been in the previous book, he wouldn't have been that obvious. You can easily imagine a better version of this entire exchange, with more subtle points being made all around and more subtle manipulation happening, coming to the same outcome. You can extrapolate a better, smarter version of Erebus just by imagining a reversal of the character degradation from the previous book to this one. Every single argument in the book is like this, and this is a book about people having arguments.

Horus complains in this book about how he doesn't like being at the behest of bureaucrats and tax collectors and it comes off as petty, like his objection is he's too great to deal with that sort of trifle. Horus complained about the tax collectors in the previous book but it wasn't petty! Horus's whole point in the previous book was "The Emperor is locked in his basement and he's letting this new civilian government he's set up do whatever they want, and they're claiming his authority to enact taxation on conquered worlds but it's too soon, those conquered worlds haven't seen enough of the benefits of Imperial rule yet and if we start heavily taxing them now they're going to rebel and then we'll be stuck putting down rebellions until the end of time and it'll tear the Imperium apart, which I don't want to do! And my evidence for this is dad's smart enough to know it's too early to impose taxes; he's capable of predicting the same shit I'm predicting now, so it's gotta be the bureaucrats acting on their own. Why is my father letting the bureaucrats take his name in vain while destroying my work?" And given that Horus is a) explicitly described as a tactical and strategic supergenius and b) explicitly described as the Primarch closest to his dad, I… kinda buy that argument? Or at least I buy that Horus believes it wholeheartedly; I don't know, the Emperor is great at making bad decisions, maybe he did back the tax initiative, but Horus there is demonstrably smart and cautious and protective of his accomplishments and the Imperium's holdings and his father's honor and the pedestal he's put his father on. Also, interestingly, he accepts rebellion as inevitable and even sympathetic under certain circumstances. Meanwhile in the above excerpt Horus is acting like rebellion is an unthinkable affront to his honor, which is the most important thing in the universe.

(There's a more favorable reading of the excerpt where he just finds it unthinkable that a commander he appointed would rebel, but I'm not inclined toward favorable readings of the excerpted exchange.)

Those things I said in my discussion about Horus Rising Part 1: The Deceived and how noticing the title of the section might have made me like False Gods more? I take it back, there's nothing here that indicates Horus was already planning rebellion. Quite the reverse. We get his interior monologue and he spends a lot of time exclaiming how unthinkable rebellion is while talking himself into it.

That said! Once we get into the Chaos Vision Quest part of the book with Erebus pretending to be a dead guy from the first book and giving Horus a tour of the past and future -- and I appreciate the ambiguity as to whether it's actually the past and future or just warp reflections of it -- I kinda buy Horus's reasons for rebellion, once I picked up something the book doesn't draw attention to. The Imperial war apparatus places a great emphasis on leading from the front and how a leader earns the respect of their (well, let's face it, his; not a lot of women in military authority roles in these books yet) troops by leading from the front, because this is based on a wargame where your leader is a guy on a tactical rock with a lot of strong attacks and a buffing aura, and that's been the case for not just the entire two hundred years of the Great Crusade but however many centuries before that the Unification Wars took. Horus is super-primed to see the Emperor retiring to Terra as an insult and as a move that warrants he, Horus, ought to start disrespecting the Emperor.

There's also a kind of interesting bit where Horus worries that his appointment to Warmaster to finish the Great Crusade is just in time for the Great Crusade itself to turn into a gloryless mopup effort, robbing him of the fame he expected the title to earn him, especially interesting in the context of having just botched his attempt at a novel peace with the interex, where he really tried to get out there and be his own man and accomplish something the Emperor never did. It does come across as a prideful man realizing he may have been spurned, and that he may need to do something drastic to get the reputation he wants. I don't really buy the idea that Horus would be shocked and appalled to learn that he was grown in a lab, because, like… I assumed he knew that? But I do buy that he'd be primed to believe that the 40k future with a God-Emperor and only the nine loyalist Primarchs recognized as such by a pathetic population of wretched worshipers might be the Emperor's plan in the context of how Horus would be inclined to view someone who quits the field of battle. He also claims explicitly that each of the Primarchs embodies part of the Emperor's personality and he, Horus, embodies the Emperor's ambition specifically, which both fits with what we've seen of him and explains why he'd react so badly to feeling like his ambitions are about to be foiled.

Also, the previous book made an effort to establish that once you invite Chaos into your heart, the trend towards malevolence and corruption is quick and aggressive, so once Horus goes "Yeah, sure, I'll accept your healing, Ruinous Powers that I don't know are called Ruinous Powers" he might immediately become a huge asshole. But, again, that's all well after the excerpted bit. So to the extent that this book sets out to answer the question "How did Horus fall?" it does so reasonably well albeit clumsily.

There are a couple more scenes where Loken is investigating what happened with Samus and Xayver Jubal and people are like "Trust me, there's no intelligences in the warp; it's just energy" and Loken is "Not sure I believe that but okay" or people go "Hmm this ancient text suggests that there might be intelligences in the warp who can possess people" and Loken reacts with doubt and shock, and again I find myself looking at the page and going "Horus told you about Warp intelligences in the first book in so many words and you accepted it!" Like, that scene from Horus Rising that I hated is now an actual plot hole. Sigh.

There's a point where someone says "My mouth's as dry as a Tallarn's sandal"; that's an anachronism, later books in this series will deal with Tallarn being turned from a verdant paradise into a scorched desert. I'm calling this one out for two reasons. The first is because I'm trying to notice anachronisms as I go because I think it's interesting how the writer pool's common understanding of the timeline of the Heresy evolves as the series progresses, and in that context it's just a curiosity. It's fine. They had no way of knowing there'd be a series of short stories compiled into a book called Tallarn a decade later. But on another level... I really hate this sort of SF/F Brand Aphorism, like when someone in a Star Wars book says "This place is as smelly as a Rancor's armpit." Stop it, it always comes across as clumsy. It's like watching a Funko! Pop emerge from the page as I read. "Hey, customer, you like [BRAND], right? Would you like to be reminded of [BRAND]?" Dude I am reading a tie-in novel, obviously I like [BRAND], you don't need to pile it on so heavily. Just say no to these, I beg you.

#horus heresy #False Gods #warhammer 30k #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

Horus Rising Parts 2 and 3: Brotherhood in Spiderland and The Dreadful Sagittary

This post contains spoilers for Brotherhood in Spiderland and the Dreadful Sagittary, the second and third parts (together comprising roughly the second half) of Horus Rising by Dan Abnett, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) April 6th, 2006.

Unlike the first half of the book, where I have reservations, I pretty much don't have anything negative to say about the second half. I think it's deft storytelling that does what it intends to do and effectively sets up a tragedy that False Gods will, if I recall correctly, fail to deliver on. There's one specific part that's a bit on the nose; I'll get to that.

Basically four things happen in the second half of the book. The 63rd Expeditionary Fleet go to (ultimately embarassingly pointless) war against a planet of giant spider-aliens to rescue a group of Emperor's Children who are themselves there to rescue a group of Blood Angels; Loken is introduced to the Davinite Lodge secret societies; Loken is introduced to the horrors of the Warp; and Horus meets and fails to make peace with a much more enlightened integrated human/alien society called the interex, testing out a tragic could-have-been version of rebellion against the Emperor, which also, I feel, clarifies his urge to rebel somewhat.

So! I really, really like Brotherhood in Spiderland, and not just because it's called Brotherhood in Spiderland. It's well-written bolter porn that serves as a critique of bolter porn. Blood Angels throw themselves at a death planet, which is so hostile that you can only get there by drop pod and then can't leave because of weaponized weather, botch it so badly they name the planet Murder, ask for help. Emperor's Children, who are largely arrogant assholes, show up and decide to help by throwing themselves into the exact same blender. We meet Eidolon, Lucius, and Saul Tarvitz, who accidentally clears a hole in the weaponized weather, then our 63rd Expeditionary Fleet shows up to save the day, Tarik Torgaddon arrives, and then Tarik, Saul, and Lucius get up some Big Soldierly Brotherhood Feels bits that would be familiar to anyone who's a fan of the Clone Wars series, with even notorious future villain Lucius getting a humanizing moment. We're then told they wage a pure glorious war of extermination against the spider aliens for six months, performing many awesome feats of glory and heroism… and then an interex ship shows up and goes "Hey, why are you attacking our nature preserve? Didn't you see the beacons we set up that clearly say not to go down to the planet we moved the spider-monsters to after taking away their space flight tech so we and they could co-exist peacefully?" The whole glorious six month war full of brotherly feels and tragic deaths and heroic accomplishments was all just the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet attacking a lion habitat at the space zoo because they couldn't read the sign, just stickin' a series of hands in a series of wild animal mouths because Imperial doctrine demands it no matter how pointless it is. Womp womp. This makes it sound silly but it's great and it serves the themes of the book, I don't really have critique here, it's all well-enough executed that I'm satisfied just kinda describing the events as they happen. Whatever the hell glorification of the Imperium would look like, this isn't that, no matter what YouTube lore shorts that describe the Megarachnids as terrifyingly deadly alien threats would have you believe. They're big spiders that want to eat you because they're big spiders, you can just not go down there and you'll be fine.

Meanwhile, Loken is inducted into one of the Luna Wolves' secret warrior lodges, which is… cool and chill and doesn't seem to be a cult. Maybe it's a bit love-bomb-y but giving these strictly regimented emotionally stunted child soldiers a place to just be people does seem like a good idea, even as Loken points out that their secrecy could make them problems even if they're fine right now. Again, this is set up as an effective tragedy -- we, the audience, know that the Davinite lodges will ultimately be the cancer that rots the traitor legions from within through secret chaos cult infiltraton, so the book sells them as something fulfilling a genuine social and emotional need as the buildup to that tragedy and as an implicit critique of how official Space Marine social organization fails them as people and forces their emotional lives into the closet where they can be victims of manipulation. Good section! Smart writing! Even here it's clear that the Heresy is going to go down not just because of the ambition of Horus and the machinations of the Ruinous Powers, but because the Emperor opened the way for them by refusing to recognize the Astartes as people. The only reason the secret warrior lodges are secret is because the Emperor doesn't like them, because they don't involve his soldiers spending all their time lining up in neat rows.

Also Loken gets pointed to an epic Unification-era war poem where he finds references to daemonic possession that match his experence with Samus and Xayver Jubal, and all I can think is, this is great, I wish the bit in Part 1 where Horus just explains what went down had been written not to make this superfluous. In the better version of the book where Loken is figuring out what happened on his own and Horus didn't just hand him the answer and tell him to keep it a secret, this bit is unchanged!

So, the interex. My read on how the interex situation goes down is that Horus, who has been given license to prosecute the Great Crusade as he sees fit via the Emperor bestowing him the mantle of Warmaster, wants to do it right and wants to do it his own way. He's out from the Emperor's shadow and wants to spread his own wings -- he wants to rebel. But… he doesn't actually want to kill the Emperor and take control of the Imperium by force, he just wants to prove that he has wisdom and authority to make his own decisions. And so we see him try to fix his mistake from 63-19 by making peace with this peaceful, functional human society, who he has no reason to war against despite the fact that they exist in a multi-species civilization, which is itself an abomination in the eyes of Imperial doctrine. Horus is like "I'll show my dad and not do a xenocide." That's a good idea! It also probably never would have worked, because the Emperor wouldn't have accepted that outcome, so there's that inevitable tragedy raising its head again. The interex themselves -- and this is not an original observation -- serve as a critique of the Imperium, proving that it's a lie to say the fascism of the Imperium is the only way to survive in the 30k galaxy. They visibly coexist with multiple alien races, from the peaceful to the openly hostile, and they deal with the threat of Chaos by educating everyone about how much of a threat it is so people don't mess with it. They were doing fine.

The bit where Horus screams at the sky "Father, why have you forsaken me?" is a bit much, but part of that is me being a bit allergic to Christian allegory in fantasy and science fiction. It's fine, I'll move past it.

Interesting anachronisms: There's brief mention of a massive Space Marine "in gold Custodes armour." Didn't know they ever wore that.

Also, not an anachronism, but there's a delightful bit that stuck with me where Loken and Torgaddon are walking down a hallway and Torgaddon runs ahead and jumps to slap some pipe work on the ceiling, just for the joy of it, and then brags about being able to do the same in another part of the ship where the piping is twice as high. Space Marines are just people.

#horus heresy #warhammer 30k #Horus Rising #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

Horus Rising Part 1: The Deceived

This post contains spoilers for the The Deceived, the first part (and approximately the first half) of Horus Rising by Dan Abnett, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) April 6th, 2006. This is all material I've read years ago, so I can't provide fresh eyes on it. However, that also means I've been thinking about it for a while.

I considered doing a plot summary but I'm not going to; it was taking too long to type. So. It's immediately obvious what Abnett is doing here with the dramatic irony -- the first line of the book is "I was there when Horus slew the Emperor" and the book remarks of the Justaerin lead by Ezekyle Abaddon that they seem to be of a different, black Legion, etc. -- but I have to remember that this was published in April 2006, during Warhammer 40k 4th Edition. The Horus Heresy wouldn't be its own game until October 2012, six and a half years later. He is laying it on thick because doing a pseudo-historical book series where the whole point is you know where things will end up and the drama and tension stem from how it'll get there still feels novel; it doesn't yet feel assumed.

I do want to call to attention one specific passage, though, early in the book, that is significant to me:

"Except that for all its martial technologies, the enemy lacked one essential quality, and that quality was locked within each and every case of Mark IV power armour: the genetically enhanced flesh and blood of the Imperial Astartes. Modified, refined, post-human, the Astartes were superior to anything they had met or would ever meet."

Around the same time I first read this book I also read Guy Haley's Dark Imperium, the first version before the rewrite to bring it into line with the revised 9th edition 40k timeline. There is a similar passage early in the first edition of that book introducing Primaris Space Marines, which says clearly that the first generation Space Marines are hopelessly outclassed and made obsolete by the Primaris. Reading those two passages in close proximity made it viscerally clear that Black Library, GW's publishing arm, is ultimately all just ads for whatever miniatures they're trying to sell at the moment. This is something I'd been aware of before then, but the juxtaposition of those two passages really drove it home. (The Dark Imperium rewrite removed that passage in favor of something that says there's effectively no difference between Firstborn and Primaris anymore.)

Anyway, I'd also like to draw attention to the way Loken's squad seems to have a dedicated plasma gunner; since Heresy isn't its own game yet, Dan Abnett seems to be writing the Luna Wolves as fighting with M.41-era tactical squads. Though given that Loken is First Captain of the Tenth, you could read that as just being a command squad thing. The book also talks about Devastator Squads instead of heavy support. This isn't important but it's kind of funny, in an "Oh, of course they hadn't figured that out yet" way.

I think the book handles reasonably well that the Imperium of Man are implicitly villainous, while stepping back a bit from fully addressing it. The setup is that the 63rd expeditionary fleet arrives at 63-19 to discover a flourishing human civilization and send a peace envoy to negotiate Compliance, who the emperor of the planet has executed out of turn for saying something offensive. The fleet then sends a force of Space Marines to attack the planetary capital and decapitate the civilization's government. The locals bring up the issue of "Why couldn't you just leave us alone?" but, like, dudes you killed their diplomatic envoy out of hand; what did you think would happen? On the other hand, it's made clear that leaving them alone really wasn't an option -- even if the locals hadn't executed the visiting diplomat and had merely politely requested that the fleet leave, the options were always surrender or war, and this is being presented as A Problem… but the execution of the envoy provides moral justification of the invasion so the audience isn't forced to confront the Imperium being fully villainous right away.

Something I didn't notice when I read this the first time, but which stands out now, is that this part of the book is literally called The Deceived. I think my eyes just skimmed over that title page years ago. The subject of this part of the book is the way everyone relates to Horus, a character who does not get a point-of-view section and who's clearly flattering everyone around him at all times; everyone loves him because he seems to love and value everyone. One of the common complaints about False Gods and definitely one I felt when reading it was that it has Horus slide into treachery too quickly, but in light of specifically this section's title, I think that maybe makes me like what I remember of False Gods more? Horus is already deceiving everyone. One influence on me here is Arbiter Ian's videos where he makes the argument that the Heresy couldn't have worked if the Warmaster hadn't been at least planning for something like it as a possibility for long before the events of this book -- he was clearly moving people and materiel around for a scenario like this for decades. On my first read I think I assumed the book was being coy about it but was leaning towards Horus still being loyal at this time so his treachery would be more tragic later; on my second read, it seems like Horus is already a secret traitor and is playing everyone, which might make False Gods less jarring… but I do think makes this one somewhat less interesting. I would much rather read a book about a mostly-loyal Horus turning traitor than an already-traitor Horus setting his plan in motion. The book is trying to eat its cake and have it, too.

(I said some mean things about Horus Heresy YouTube Lore Explainers earlier, but Arbiter Ian's great, and his historiographic approach to Warhammer fiction is consistently interesting.)

I do not like the way Samus and warp daemons and Space Marine possession are handled, I think for two reasons, one substantial and one petty.

Here's the petty reason: Samus has a series of catchphrases he whispers in peoples' ears before possessing someone and murdering their friends, and some of those catchphrases are effective while others are fuckin' weaksauce. "Look out! Samus is here" is not a scary catch phrase for a daemon. "Samus will gnaw on your bones" is also pretty blunt. "Samus is the man beside you" is great understated horror, but the way his creepy whisper is structured, it starts strong and gets weaker and ends on its weakest point. It really, really diffuses the tension Abnett is trying to set up.

Here's the substantial reason: If you're going to do a book series where one of the plot points is Space Marines and Imperial civilians raised in the radical atheism of the Imperial Truth, totally convinced there's no such thing as gods or spirits or supernatural forces, first encountering daemons and warp possession and having their view of the universe shattered, it is no good to set it when someone higher up can immediately show up and go "Oh yeah we totally know about those already but it's a secret; don't tell anyone daemons are real, also, this is just like those other times you fought possessed people who just happened not to be space marines, remember?" And granted it's Horus who provides that explanation but it's too obvious -- if he's jerking Loken around, he should have been able to present an alternate take on things that both left Loken more reassured while leaving the audience wondering whether Horus knows more than he's saying or not, instead of just immediately telling the truth in a way that reassures us the Astartes aren't actually facing an outside context problem, don't worry, we've totes got context for this. Like, the book sets up a really interesting source of drama and immediately diffuses it, like Samus's whispered chat in macrocosm. And that kinda relates to what I said above about Horus already being a secret traitor: This is the wrong point in the Heresy to start the Heresy novel series. A better version of this story would have had Samus's possession of Xayver Jubal be a more jarring, less explicable event, with Samus himself being creepier, and set Horus himself earlier along on his development towards treason.

That said, the Horus Heresy wasn't originally planned to be a 64-volume series. GW originally greenlit three books: Horus Rising, False Gods, and Galaxy in Flames. In light of that it's clear why they jumped right into Horus's, uh, heresy. But the book is shooting for two different goals and falling just short of each.

(There's also the arguable issue that it's hard for warp fuckery to be a truly outside-context problem for the Astartes, given how much warp fuckery they had to face up against during the Unification Wars, but you could even use that -- if the Unification Wars were two hundred plus years ago and knowledge of warp fuckery had been suppressed in the name of the Imperial Truth, then ancient stories of Astartes fighting things like this coming up in the wake of Samus's massacre could be a way to establish the horror of the situation. Later on the book goes into the warrior lodges, secret societies where Space Marines are encourated to speak freely to each other outside the boundaries of rank and regulation -- the book could have had old stories of daemonic possession come out there, while being suppressed outside of the lodge meetings.)

Anyway those are my thoughts on Horus Rising Part 1: The Deceived. Subsequent entries to this blog will probably be shorter than this. This took a long time to compose.

#horus heresy #warhammer 30k #Horus Rising #lea reads heresy #read along #spoilers

[leareadsheresy]

Mission Statement: Committing to a Mistake

I'm going to read all the Horus Heresy stories. I'm going to do it in publication order.

To be clear, I'm not going to read all the books in publication order; I'm going to read all the stories in publication order. There are a lot of stories that were initially published in, like, Horus Heresy Weekender pamphlets or as web fiction years before they saw print in later anthology volumes. I've made a list. Making it took an evening that would have been better spent on almost any other activity, up to and including just going to bed early, but now I've got it. All I need to do is go back and refine it from publication month to publication day for specifically those stories that were published daily as part of one-story-per-day monthly events, but those don't start to become a factor until much later so no hurry on that.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll listen to audio dramas in cases where a story was first released as an audio drama and later re-released in text. I'm not really a fan of audio books. Also, this includes the Heresy 1st edition Black Books, Primarch novels, and character series novels like Valdor: Birth of the Imperium. All told there are eighty-five books in this list, and if you break it out by individual short stories there's about 253 items, though that does include both short stories and the anthology volumes that compile them, as many anthology volumes that compile previously-published short stories add a framing narrative. If I read one novel's worth of text a week, which to be clear I am absolutely not committing to doing, it'll take me a year and a half.

Why am I doing this? Well, there's a number of reasons.

The first is it's absurd to sink this much energy into being an… enthusiast, I guess you could say, under protest… for a setting while absorbing most of it second-hand, and as a wise man once said, the time will pass regardless. But the second reason, the real reason, is I need to know. I cannot take my understanding of this work being filtered through YouTube Lore Explainers anymore, or worse, overly verbose fan wikis, people who themselves only understand it from watching YouTube Lore Explainers, or people who have read the books but have no critical faculties and read them through the lens of their memories of If the Emperor had a Text to Speech Device. I have to see it for myself. I need to be able to filter the words of the text from the memes.

The third reason is I hope having a long-term project like this will distract me from other stupid projects that might be expensive, like adopting new hobbies.

Why publication order by story instead of publication order by compiled volume or chronology? Well, I'm interested in how the narrative develops over time, not just from an in-universe perspective but from the real-life one as well. I'm interested in, for example, reading Book I: Betrayal in the context of being the first proper Horus Heresy game book published six years into the novel series, and how what it says about the traitor legions on Istvaan III reflects what the novels have said about them up until that point. Also, it ought to help me get through the allegedly terrible Salamanders stories by reading them one at a time in between other works, instead of all at once when I reach Born of Flames.

To amuse myself, I will proceed on the assumption that the Horus Heresy 1st Edition Black Books are flawed in-universe history texts, and the novels are flawed dramatizations, both referring to a hypothetical "real" set of events that cannot be perceived directly. This should insulate me from the worst of the critical whiplash stemming from when an important character from better books shows up and has important character development done awfully in a book that's awful.

Here's my history with the works: Years ago, I read Horus Rising and thought it was pretty decent, if clumsy in its introduction of Samus during the first part of the book. I then read halfway through False Gods and thought it was God damn awful, just taking the character work from the first book out behind the chemical sheds and shooting it in the back of the skull, and I quit the series. Later, I read Book I: Betrayal, about halfway through Book II: Massacre, and skipped ahead to Book III: Extermination because I'm a giant Raven Guard goober for some damn reason. I've also read Deliverance Lost, the Corax anthology, the Corax: Lord of Shadows Primarch novel, and parts of Book VI: Retribution and Book VIII: Malevolence. I will be re-reading all of these as I get to them in the reading order list.

My original plan was to pick up where I left off, but upon realizing that I'd left off halfway through False Gods and not like ten pages into it the way I remembered, I went back to the start of that book, then realized it had been so long since I read it and Horus Rising that I didn't remember which events had happened in which book. So I've started from the beginning again. I am currently about a third of the way through my second read of Horus Rising and have just started Part 2: Brotherhood in Spiderland, which I mention by name here because it's named Part 2: Brotherhood in Spiderland. I expect my next entry in this blog will be thoughts on Horus Rising Part 1: The Deceived, and I'll get around to renovating the appearance of the blog itself thereafter.

If I should fail in this endeavor, lose interest or drift away, good. This is a terrible idea.

And for the record, Lea is pronounced "Lee" and I've read all of Homestuck.

#lea reads heresy #horus heresy #read along #warhammer 30k