So… non novel releases.
There were a LOT of things like this to write about in 2016. And I’m a bit more
positive about this side of the Black Library line.
The HH Primarchs:
Roboute Guilliman, Lord of Ultramar:
Like a lot of the HH developments of this
year, I’m conflicted about the announcement of the ‘Horus Heresy:
Primarchs’ series. If these all end up being Crusade-era with frequent foreboding
reference to post-Heresy events, then that’s kind of boring. I don’t love
Ultramarines stories, and Annandale is thus far a slightly uneven writer (can
end up a little too grimdark). However, this ended up being one of the
most enjoyable Heresy stories of the year – maybe, as with ‘Angels of Caliban’,
because my expectations were low. Trust David Annandale to show us a dark side
of the XIII Legion, of all things (if not a dark side of their Primarch, who
still, despite everything, is one of the most likeable Loyalists). It helped
that central to the plot were the mysterious Nemesis chapter, the
Ultramarines Destroyer cadre I’d been dying to find out more about since I read
about them in ‘Tempest’. And hell, in the year of ‘The Beast Arises’ when at
times I prayed I’d never have to read another orks v space marines battle,
David made that scenario pretty fucking tolerable, even great at times. Kind of
brilliant!
The HH Primarchs: Leman Russ,
The Great Wolf:
I need to restate here how much I fucking love Chris Wraight as
a writer and as a cool guy who’s nice to fans, since it sort of feels like I’m
kicking him around a bit in this entry… but I’m sort of done with Chris writing
about Heresy-era Space Wolves. I mean, I liked Russ’ role in ‘Scars’ (and he
sure as hell can write about ‘modern’ Space Wolves – I loved ‘Blood of
Asaheim’) but I found ‘Wolf King’ overall pretty dull. Chris has picked up the
baton from Dan Abnett about as well as you could reasonably expect, and I’m not
sure if there are any writers on the bench right now who could do a better job.
That doesn’t stop ‘The Great Wolf’ from being a bit of a missed opportunity.
This story weaves
together a few different strands: the Wolves’ attitude and warmaking style in
the Great Crusade, the 13th Company’s struggle with the Canis
Helix/'curse of the Wulfen', the rivalry between the Lion and Leman Russ, and
(similar to in the Roboute story) the post-Scouring dourness of Russ and the
Space Wolves, now forced into the restrictive box of being a ‘Chapter’. It’s an
interesting group of concepts, but it at once seems too short and too languid:
the first two-thirds are a bit of a slog, the pieces slowly being manoeuvred
into place, while the last reel seems incredibly rushed.
If I had my way, I would
have liked to have seen this book be a little longer and to have solely focused
on the Russ/Lion plot; the Lion sadly isn’t developed much being a nasty/posh
foil to Russ’ likeable barbarity, but flashes of an interesting character can
be seen beneath it all. (There’s also a scene here that completely contradicts
what I’d always understood as the post-Siege timeline for the First Legion,
but, well, fuck it.) Chris is a gifted writer and I think he’d definitely smash
an in-depth character study of Lion ‘El Johnson, but… not this time.
Short Fiction:
This
year, short stories are one area that I can unreservedly say was a success for
Horus Heresy fiction. Perhaps that’s because so few were published? Part of me
hopes they don’t do many more HH short stories because focusing on novels seems
smarter – but there are some really good short story writers in BL and the
economy of form here suits them down to the ground. I’ll skip over my least
favourite story, ADB’s ‘Into Exile’ – a ‘Memento’-style backwards story about
Arkhan Land’s escape from Mars that seemed pretty dang unnecessary – and
instead talk about my most favourite, ‘Blackshield’, written by Chris
Wraight. The Blackshields (a catch-all term for Heresy-era Marines who have
allegiance neither to the Imperium or Horus) of course make an appearance, as
does Crysos Morturg, the improbably named Loyalist Death Guard Isstvan III
survivor who has featured heavily in the Forge World material. Chris was
absolutely the right choice to integrate this FW material into the ‘mainline’
series, and I hope he gets the chance to pick up this story as part of a longer
work. On top of this, Chris is carrying on his quest of retroactively making
Graham’s hit-or-miss Mortarion scenes in ‘Vengeful Spirit’ look way better by giving
them more context and emotional weight. What a nice guy to help out Graham like
this! Chris Wraight also wrote the quickie ‘Last Son of Prospero’, which potentially
closes down the most irritating things about the Arvida storyline, and opens
the door for that character to potentially do some interesting (unique??) stuff
going forward.
‘Myriad’ was another
awesome ‘fight for Mars’ story, but at this point I’m already convinced that
Rob Sanders is the guy to tackle the climactic Martian Civil War book
– any further stories like this will seem like throat-clearing. And ‘The
Painted Count’ sees Guy Haley get back to doing (arguably) what he does best:
writing really good ‘Prince of Crows’ fanfic. Once upon a time, a story like
this would make me say Guy should be doing ‘Nightfall’ rather than ADB, but
after ‘Pharos’… well, maybe a third option is the best choice.
Jim Swallow’s
‘Exocytosis’, a follow-up to the epilogue of ‘Angels of Caliban’, left me
conflicted. On the one hand, it feels like Jim completely wasted the cool setup
of Fallen Angels and Traitor Death Guard teaming up, instead making both
factions mistrust each other and barely interacting. He also reused the ‘zombie
Nurgle cultists’ antagonists from ‘Garro: Legion of One’, and I felt like his
Dark Angel characters were a little one-dimensional. Despite all these
complaints, I loved Jim’s portrayal of Typhon here and how it dealt with his
supercharged slide into corruption without seeming rushed. If he is the one who
has to write a Fall of Mortarion novel, then on this evidence I am good with it
(though of course Wraight would be my first choice).
Audio:
It was less of a
marquee year for audio stuff, though maybe ‘Thirteenth Wolf’ will change my
mind when I get to listening to it. Lowlight for sure was ‘Red-Marked’, an overlong trudge
that saw Nick Kyme burning the last remaining goodwill I had from ‘Censure’ – I
really don’t care about Aeonid Thiel anymore, that’s for sure. This was also
structured very poorly; opening with a flashback that you re-tell in full over
the course of the story is maybe OK in print, but in a ‘time is precious’
format like audio? Fuck that. Lastly, I think it’s fucked up that this was a
full-price MP3 in January and within a few months it was available in print as
part of ‘Eye of Terra’. If I’d known I wouldn’t have fucking bothered!
Laurie Goulding’s ‘The
Dark Between the Stars’ (AKA ‘The Heart of the Pharos’) was certainly better;
Laurie has the Guy Haley-like ability to imbue his stories with a really
winning enthusiasm for the material, but this storyline isn’t done much justice
in its tie-in novel, ‘Pharos’. Hovering midway between disappointment and
reassurance is ‘Valerius’, a short audio picking up the badly botched Therion
Cohort story after ‘Corax’ / ‘Weregeld’; Beta-Garmon will hopefully get a full
novel soon, but this isn’t a great appetiser. Marcus Valerius’ story continuing
is at least a positive; Marcus Valerius’ story continuing thanks to a literal
deus ex machina is something I’m much less keen on.
Recent surprise
‘Children of Sicarus’ feels like it should have been my favourite this
year, with so many parts falling into place (the return of Anthony Reynolds to the
Heresy! A follow-up to Dan Abnett’s ‘Macragge’s Honour’ letting us know what
Kor Phaeron did next! A Traitor Legion adapting to a daemon world! A cool
‘female’ daemon antagonist!) but I can’t 100 percent back it, because I think
Anthony Reynolds can do much better. This will hopefully be the foundation for
a really cool Scouring-era Kor Phaeron novel, I guess. Slightly more cogent to
the HH narrative as a whole was the Eidolon drama ‘The Soul, Severed’, which
did skip over the Mortarion/Eidolon shipping I had hoped to get more of after
‘Path of Heaven’ (but my guess is we’ll see Morty and Eido’s sweet goodbye at the
beginning of the next Death Guard book). If there’s a criticism I can make of
‘The Soul, Severed’ it’s that it felt like a re-tread of a few of the year’s
‘best bits’ done better elsewhere: Eidolon being a shit, lethal Legion
infighting, the moment of “And so, onward to Terra” that it feels like we’ve
had five or six times now, the portrayal of the last slide from ‘real bad
traitors’ to ‘actual Chaos Space Marines’. Still, Wraight owns this character:
Abnett sketched him, McNeill painted over that first in broad strokes, then slightly more
subtly, but Wraight has put the finishing touches on Eidolon.
I think in the end my
favourite audio in 2016 has been ‘Perpetual’. It was a short Abnett-penned sequel to
‘Unmarked’, which I’ve been anticipating for a while. It feels like it needs at
least one more short story before it ‘gets anywhere’, but I’m really hoping that
(as rumoured) there’s at least one more Abnett novel in the Heresy series
before it dies. The Alpha Legion apparently now working with warp-entities is a
plot point that annoyed me a bit, but unlike with the other Alpha Legion
bullshit this year, I near-instantly went from annoyance to thinking “Hmm, I
want to know more about how we get to this point and where we go from here.”
I want to give a special
not-quite-Horus-Heresy ‘participation award’ to The Beast Arises series. The series was seriously, seriously flawed in a lot of ways.
Whole storylines were dropped or (worse) had their resolutions botched. The
midsection of the series was extremely flabby (three assaults on the enemy
stronghold using pretty much the same approach?). Gav Thorpe ruined my hopes
for the #GavThorpeWinning2016 hashtag by contributing one of the worst, most
boring pieces of 40K fiction I’ve ever read (‘The Beast Must Die’). The
concluding volume was two or three novels’ worth of plot resolution jammed into
one novella; it made a valiant effort, but it was doomed to miss a lot of its
swings. I have to put this in the positives, though. The sheer balls-out
insanity/improbability of Black Library saying they would do a novel-a-month
full series in the space of one year and actually hitting that target
is an achievement in itself. But the fact that a good amount of the series
ended up being really solid – maybe I’d even say fantastic -
makes TBA something I have to applaud.
In particular, David Guymer and Rob
Sanders made a potentially goofy/dumb ‘Imperial Fists descendants team up with
Iron Warriors’ storyline something haunting and elegant. And, hey, it’s cool
that we got a little snapshot of the post-Scouring Imperium. I’m hoping this
means we’ll get some more miniseries in the time between 30K and 40K.
Lastly, let’s look at
what’s allegedly coming out in 2017. (Shout out to ‘Track of Words’ for the
info on what they said about this at the recent Weekender; you can read their rundown here. https://trackofwords.wordpress.com/2016/11/24/black-library-live-coming-soon-the-horus-heresy/ ) I am saving my ‘Garro’ ebook as a treat, and
I haven’t cracked open my Forge Word ‘Inferno’ book yet, but I’m looking
forward to getting to grips with both of them.
As for new novel material, at
last, ‘The Crimson King’ looks like it’s finally coming out; sure, I remain one
of the few who doesn’t love Graham’s ‘A Thousand Sons’, but I’m certainly
interested in reading another (final?) Heresy book from the man who gave us
‘Angel Exterminatus’ and ‘Vengeful Spirit’. David Annandale has ‘Ruinstorm’ in
the pipeline, which should finally put the capper on the Imperium Secundus
storyline; I’m not sure that’s a scenario that will allow Annandale to put his
best skills to use, but I have faith that will be a strong novel. I’m less
excited about ‘Old Earth’, Nick Kyme’s final chapter in his Vulkan series.
There was a time when I thought maybe Nick wasn’t as bad as the more negative
fans insisted… but honestly, I can’t really say a single nice thing about
anything he’s done over the last few years. Unfortunately, this is apparently
also going to finish off the Meduson / Marr storyline… Fuck, I really had hoped
Graham or Dan would wrap that up.
The HH Primarchs stories will continue, with Perturabo (Guy Haley), Lorgar (Gav Thorpe) and Fulgrim (Josh Reynolds) up next. I'm certainly interested in reading more about all those guys - no complaints here... though I am worried about that Lorgar book. He's a character that can all too easily fall into one-note 'evil priest' pantomime, and Gav's characterisations don't really tend towards the subtle...
Word is on the street
that the mainline Horus Heresy series may stretch beyond 50 books after all. We still have some information
to come to us about the last few books leading up to the siege, but Dan Abnett
is rumoured to be penciled in for the last book. That makes me oddly optimistic. And there
are some other interesting projects on the horizon; Chris Wraight and John
French have Inquisition-centred series starting this year (could this mean BL
may acknowledge that a certain long-dormant Inquisitor-themed novel series might be worth finishing?).
Aaron’s new Black Legion book will doubtless be a self indulgent mess but at the same time, I’m
sure it’ll be worth reading. And perhaps most intriguingly, after a
looooooooong hiatus the Gaunt’s Ghosts series is getting another installment
courtesy of Dan Abnett aka The Man Who Wasn’t There.
It's not 2015. There are things to be
excited about in the Black Library upcoming release schedule again. I just
don’t know if I have it in me anymore to be excited enough. I don't have the commitment and energy to
read and re-read those books, scribbling notes down on the bus, turning them
into long messy reviews and posting them.
I’m not sure
PurpleHeresy has a future. If not…. Well, it was fun while it lasted. If it does have one... I'll see you for that 'Damnation of Pythos' review one day!
Love and kisses
IndieFaceKillah
PS: Formatting is fucked up on this post! I'm sorry, I'm trying to remove i
PS: Formatting is fucked up on this post! I'm sorry, I'm trying to remove i