Oh. Hi, friend! I didn’t see you waiting there. It’s been quiet around these parts for some time. In keeping with what passes for tradition on this blog, we’re acknowledging that with an awkward and self-aware intro. It doesn’t at all connect to the post’s subject matter, but that’s also a tradition here. We call it “rolling with the first draft”.
In seriousness, it’s been a long while since I wrote anything for the public – assuming anyone other than myself and bots ever consumes these words – and that’s been on my mind lately. I’m on holiday so chose to write the simplest of simple posts: a personal listicle.
Here’s what I’ve been reading in the past week…
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Redemption’s Blade. I’m a fan of Tchaikovsky’s work. That undersells it, really: I’ve read almost everything he’s written once and a bunch of it twice. Last year I trawled for anything published that I’d not read and bought it. This is one of those books. I didn’t touch this for some time as it looked like the first instalment in an unfinished trilogy. In fact, it’s the opening book in a series penned by multiple authors, although I didn’t find any central site or single publisher who owns the series. As best I can tell it now includes three novels and a book of short stories.
The background concept is that a great war for survival against a terrible, existential threat is over. A narrow victory was won, essentially by throwing every army into gigantic assaults to provide a distraction, so that a hit squad could gank the evil overlord while he had an evil nap. The band of heroes who accomplished this were assisted by a few turncoats from the enemy’s ranks; a crucial detail.
What unfolds subsequently is driven by the protagonist – a wielder of one of those impossibly sharp blades that can cut anything – who does not see herself as a hero, but rather someone who failed others repeatedly until she happened to survive the war. Driven by a sense of guilt and responsibility, she and a few companions set out on an improbable quest to undo one of the many terrible things done during the war. Along the way we witness different responses to the war’s end: from those who do not see the war as over, those who are trying to rebuild in the ashes, those seeking new paths, those seeking to dissolve enmities, and from those who do not want the war to be over. It’s this, and the protagonist’s attitude towards how she and other ‘heroes’ are seen, that give the novel an appealing moral depth.
There’s plenty more besides, including Tchaikovsky staples like horrible and tragic monsters, plenty of wit and humour – this book mostly doesn’t get too quippy but there is an element of that – enticing mysteries and great pacing. It works as a self-contained book though I might also look into what else exists in the setting.
I have a copy of Babylon’s Burning by Rick Blackman to read, a history of British musical subcultures and their anti-fascist and anti-racist organising, but I decided that I’d rather stick with lighter material. And so I turned to a book I started and stalled back in April: Knights of Macragge by Nick Kymes. Yes, I chose to read a Space Marine book, and one starring the boys in blue, no less; the Smurfs, the Poster Boys, the always-modest Ultramarines. It opens with the chapter’s second company trapped aboard a starship that has stalled in the warp and is under assault from warp and cultist boarders. Where do all the cultists come from? Don’t worry about it.
The book opens with a succession of action sequences that involve too many named characters to keep track of, a problem compounded by the fact that more than half of them die in the following pages. Compounding this, the Ultramarine characters have names like Sicarius, Praxor, Prabius, Pillium, Tirian, Scipio, Dacius, Secutius, Helicos, Haephestus (techmarine, obv)… if you’re thinking “gosh, it sounds hard to remember which generically-engineered superhuman soldier is which”, you would be right. We do at least follow some action from a more relatable perspective: several of the ship’s armsmen (naval ratings with defensive and security duties) and an elderly remembrancer (basically a 40k embedded journalist).
It’s a book of two halves, and the first half didn’t start strong. Or at least, took a while to hook me. We begin with the ship becalmed in the warp, and then jump forward five years to where the ship is still stuck in the warp. That seemed odd to me; to be trapped in hell inside a soap bubble of sanity, but in half a decade nothing notable happens. Getting stuck or lost in the warp and popping out months, years, decades, centuries or even millennia later is not uncommon in 40k, but I had always figured that time relativity was a big thing in such circumstances. Anyway, I guess it’s intended to convey just how long they’ve been stuck there, to justify the ship starting to struggle with supplies and essential systems.
Things did pick up as the story focused more on the degradation of the ship and its crew, the deceptive plans of heretics and the machinations of daemons, all of which culminated in more impactful action. Then there’s a second half of the book, which without spoiling too much, focuses on a much smaller cast away from the ship, and is stronger for it. It also involves some of humanity’s other enemies. It was fun!
It’s a common opinion among 40k readers that Space Marines are just no fun to read about, and while I will forever disagree with that – Ian Watson’s Space Marine was a formative 40k reading experience for me even though it’s long moved outside canon – I can see where it comes from. I felt this novel did a good job of investing some of these big blue lunks with personality, whether that is tied to their closer bonds of friendship falling away through attrition, the conflict in Primaris arrogance vs Firstborn experience, the way marines interact with baseline humans, or the ways in which they choose to sacrifice themselves. I did, ultimately, enjoy it.
Also, if you’re counting, this is both a novel where Space Marines die in droves – there’s one bit in particular where they’re just getting absolutely reamed and chopped up in little bits – and the solo supermen who can single-handedly annihilate an assault force. There’s also plenty of questionable tactics and strategy. That’s 40k, baby!
My next read was It Wants us Alive by Rebecca Cantrell. This was part of a recent Storybundle package, and I fancied some demon-hunting schlock whilst sat on a coach for two hours. The protagonist is getting on in her years – somewhere in her fifties, I think – so there’s some physicality to her aches and pains, some payments to be made for any ass-kicking that plays out. She’s also haunted by the death of her partner to a particularly powerful “Wisp”, one of the entities that possesses humans that she’s dedicated her life to hunting down and exorcising/dissolving. After some back and forth, she’s attached to a hoo-rah combat team with a silly macho name and sent into a base that has dropped out of contact after reports of Wisps. We get a round of introductions from the soldiers and get to speculate on who dies first and fastest. There are lots of ways to win!
What I will say in favour of the book is that I liked the main character, a few of the other soldiers slightly transcend the broad stereotypes they’re introduced as, and the book’s climax did involve a strong twist that worked narratively and was thematically and conceptually appealing. For a quick, light read this can be all you need.
What I was less impressed by were the frequently sloppy copy-editing and the weaknesses in sense of place. On the former, the main character’s name is mis-spelled multiple times, and one character in particular oscillates between Marge and Madge constantly, sometimes on the same page. On the latter, all the action takes place in a relatively small base with a fairly clearly articulated layout, and yet much of what takes place in these spaces feels loose and inconsistent. The most egregious example is when the team are moving and fighting through a laboratory. There’s a central atrium and two floors of rooms shooting off from it, with gantry walkways and stairs around the side. There’s rarely any sense of these spaces having been used for their stated purpose, and at one point – with the area doused in impenetrable mist – the main character runs through the mist. Meanwhile I’m thinking, were these labs entirely devoid of furniture and equipment? It’s quite baffling. She almost trips on a corpse and then starts to move more slowly, so I assume the lab was basically like that forest full of dead bodies the FBI uses for training agents, except indoors and much, much more fragrant.
The last holiday read was Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Cadian Blood. One of a number of available books in the Cadian possessive noun series. This one I had a lot of fun with. It’s short and pacey, and follows the ordinary (well, relatively) humans of a Cadian regiment as they embark on a typically doomed enterprise at the behest of arrogant high commanders. In this tale, an Imperial shrineworld has been overrun by a chaotic contagion that has turned hundreds of millions of imperial citizens into, basically, poxwalker zombies. Our Cadians are part of the spearhead of a ‘reclamation’ force sent in to purge the heretics, ideally without damaging the furniture. It is an Ecclesiatical world, after all, and building all that baroque shit costs a lot more than, I don’t know, more soldiers.
As you might expect there’s more to the situation than it initially appears, and things go very badly wrong. As events unfold we get to enjoy a decent spot of fleet engagement action (no one has ever written this convincingly for 40k in my opinion but so far as smashing gargantuan war cathedrals together goes, this was fun), meet a sympathetic sanctioned psyker character – bereft of the bonds that tie Cadians together yet still, well, bound – and unpick the mystery of just why all this happened on this shrine world. We also meet a proper named character, quite a big player, who doesn’t really achieve much but is significant to the story. There’s a great deal of shooting and dying and at one point a commissar, a pack of Sentinels, a guard captain and a few other troopers and Kasrkin take down a Death Guard Dreadnought of the Long War. I’m not the first to observe that you have to question how these veterans of over ten thousand years of warfare ever survived that long. Apparently none of these supposed veterans are familiar with concepts like “mutual support” or “over-extension”. Oh well, we got a cool fight out of it! So, yes, thumbs up for this one, it’s another solid and fun Guard story.
And that’s that! Do drop a hello in the comments if you happen to read this. It would be interesting to know who might be out there, and to gauge any interest in simpler blogging like this. I write for myself these days, mostly in a journal, so the extrinsic motivation of having at least one reader would encourage me to invest more precious time into public rather than private writing. If you’re reading this one year after publication and there are no comments, enjoy the cringe!
