Book Review: The Horus Heresy - Nemesis

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I looked back and realised with something of a shock the other day that the Horus Heresy series has now more a dozen titles to its name and the saga seems to be in no hurry to reach the duel between the Emperor and his errant son high above Terra. For me the series has been the usual mixed bag of fantastic highs and plodding lows I would expect from such a large undertaking by the Black Library and it's coterie of regulars. As usual Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill stand out head and shoulders above the rest, but some of the other titles in the series were worthy of praise in their own right as well. On the other hand titles such as Descent of Angels and Battle for the Abyss seemed like nothing more than throwaway titles to keep the series rolling along.

So where does Nemesis fall in that spread? Well, somewhere inbetween is the only answer that I can give to that one as it's as much a mixed bag as I just claimed the series was itself. My previous experience of James Swallow was the first omnibus of his pretty awful Blood Angels novels and that set me off worrying about Nemesis from the start. But after a few dozen pages I was pleasently suprised by the novel and found that the combination of the assembling of the Imperial team of assasins juxtaposed with the lawmen hunting their daemonic counterpart worked quite well.

Swallow appears able to give life far better to the human characters that he creates than the superhuman staples of the Heresy setting that I suppose he has no choice but to include in a title from this series. Here the characters of Malcador the Sigillite, Rogal Dorn, Constantin Valdor and others come across as little more than parts of the scenery that have lines in the script. But the assassins and the people they interact with are an interesting lot and more than make up for it.

The gathering of the assassins from across Terra introduces a disparate and interesting collection of killers and at the same time takes the reader to some nice locations on the homeworld. Each of the assassins has an interesting bundle of murderous personality and back story and the interaction between the supposedly professional killers is suitably catty and vindictive enough to add an air of reality to the whole thing.

Perhaps the one thing that lets the book down as a whole is the daemonic assassin known as "Spear" in whom Swallow creates something that comes close to the first "Mary Sue" characater to appear in the Heresy series. Staring out from a pretty tame few random kills, the complexity of these pretty much lost due to Swallow's inability to describe them, Spear soon becomes and all singing and all dancing killing machine that grows new powers and abilities as he needs them. By the end of the book the character is killing everything in his path and offs the assassins one by one in a way that makes his inevitable death seem very improbable.

All in all Nemesis is not the worst of the Heresy series, but not the best either.

Read as something to keep you going until Prospero Burns is released.

Book Review: Space Marine Battles - Rynn's World

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Rynn's World is one of those terms that has hung around the 40k setting like a misasmal memory of the earliest days when squats roamed the universe and marines were no taller than the average burly man down the pub. Perhaps the most iconic of the covers that ever graced the Warhammer 40k rulebook, the image of the Crimson Fists in their heroic last stand against the full weight of an orc Waaargh (typing that feels so stupid) should have made for one of those marine titles that makes a fan eager with anticipation.

So perhaps I shouldn't have been suprised to find that this one would suffer from the cardboard marine syndrome that seems to affect most of the Black Library novels on the subject not handled by the more reliable authors in their stable. When done well, a marine novel excellently juxtaposes the mythic nature of the astartes in the eyes of common men and the reality of the god-like but often flawed beings inside the powered armour. When done badly you have a plodding tome in which the humans are either fawning or pathetic and the marines either rabid killers or indecicive types more given to self-doubt and contenplation than heroics.

Allessio Cortez and Pedro Cantor fall into each of these roles respectively as the orcs make amazingly short work of their homeworld and chapter; the former champs at the bit and the latter worries about what will become of them all. The reader is left wondering at the idea that these two are such close friends when they seem so starkly different and opposed. Meanwhile the pitiful humans dash around at their feet and generally get in the way while the orcs just want to have a laugh and kill everything twice over.

The shame is that the opening parts of the novel detailling the splendor of the Fists' fortress stronghold and the politics of the captains vying for glory started things out quite well. But then everything goes boom and the reader is left with a small band of marines trailing after Cantor and Cortez through the wilderness and wrestling with the problem of getting the job done or messing about with puny mortal survivors along the way. This resembeld far too closely the terrible tradition in modern fantasy for long and boring treks through the wilds to fill the space and pad out the book.

Even when reuinted with the remnants of the chapter, Cantor and his band still fail to really come alive as they track down the nasty orc warlord responsible for the whole mess. The baffling climax of the story comes when the showdown between Cantor and the orc Boss, who seems awfully keen on proving that he's tougher and nastier than the marine Chapter Master, ends when the orc cuts and runs by jumping into a waiting helecopter in front of his own troops. Great way to show you're the hardest greenskin in the galaxy: by basically turning tail and admitting defeat!

By the standards of the average Black Library novel, Rynn's World is just that: average. While I was not impressed by the standard of the writing, there's nothing to stop someone else with less exacting standards getting a kick out of the generous amounts of greenskin blood shed here. But it seemed to me that this title was pretty lightweight, printed in very large type and hyped up to be more than it was. Even the maps included to show the locationn of the events in the text were pretty bland and lacking in detail.

Not the worst book I ever read, but far from the best the Black Library has to offer.