Some time ago, back thru' the mists of time, I was a big-time Warhammer freak.
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| Did a something search for Warhammer Memes. This seemed the most appropriate. |
Every month I would get the new White Dwarf and pore over it for the new releases and army books. Ahh, I had hopes of collecting just about every single Warhammer Fantasy and 40K army at one point. (Except for Dwarfs. Never liked those little dudes.) Finances and a short attention span meant I rarely bought more than a few units per army. That didn't stop me from planning 2,000 point forces in excruciating detail. It wasn't just the models that captured my imagination. White Dwarf was full of fiction and 'faction' expanding the grim darkness of the 40K universe. It tended to be just a page, involving an Imperial Guardsman being horrendously murdered by whatever new unit WD was puffing, but it was effective, and usually passably well-written (despite frequent overuse of the words 'routed' and 'chitinous'). I'm pretty sure reading these had a lasting effect, not just on my vocabulary (I throw 'routed' out there whenever I can) but on my tastes in fiction. Along with Michael Moorcock's 'Hawkmoon' series and Tolkein's 'The Hobbit' (though
not 'The Lord Of The Rings'), I think 40K's universe-building laid the foundations for my lifetime fondness for epic fantasy/sci-fi/sci-fantasy sagas.
Sure, as I got older, I realised Games Workshop rips off most of its ideas from easily identifiable sources or fantasy tropes. Eldar, Orks and the unlamented Squats are just Tolkein's races transposed into space. The Tyranids are heavily influenced by the dripping, fanged monsters of the Alien movies (and later models seem equally indebted to Starship Troopers). The Tau are perhaps the most brazen "we're out of ideas" moment in the studio's history - just a collection of barely-disguised idea-snatches from any 'mech suit anime' you could care to name.
The Imperium, though - that always seemed like a less blatant stew of rip-offs. "Catholic Space Nazis" is how one meme describes the Imperium and boy, does it ever fit. Colossal, terrifying
ubermenschen who can kill a dude with a finger, countless legions of willingly-expended dog soldiers, huge cathedrals flying through space, everyone flying banners with ever-so-slightly fascistic iconography of fists and eagles. And skulls, skulls, everywhere skulls - it seemed sometimes that was the one original thing GW contributed. Some space somewhere? Put a skull on it! A flying skull, an animal skull, a skull 40 feet tall that shot fire - whatever.
You may have noticed an omission on the above list. I've said before I was kind of fickle about army loyalties. However, I definitely reserved a special place in my heart for the legions of Chaos. Dudes had SO many skulls.
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| Took me years to see the giant mushroom cloud on this cover. |
It was the above book that cemented my love for these legions of psychopaths, their dark gods, and their fondness for putting spikes on everything. When the switch to 3rd Edition 40K happened, I managed to snake my gaming club's copy. My gaming club was run by a local church, so the last third of the book - which dealt with daemon allies for your Chaos armies - had been torn out so as to not corrupt young gamers. (The same fate, for some reason, had befell [or befallen?] all the stuff about Huron Blackheart, noted Satanist.) Still, daemons were never really what interested me about the armies of Chaos. It was the backstory of the Horus Heresy I loved. I devoured the fluff about the Chaos Chapters (they were still Chapters, back then) who turned against their brothers during the Heresy and remained a thorn in the Imperium's side. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea that these refugees from an event ten thousand years ago were still out their, nurturing their grudge, becoming bitterer and, let's face it,
crazier as time went by.
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| Ralph Fiennes - The Wilderness Years |
Third edition - and oh, man, that's when then shit got real. Motherfuckers had tubes coming right out of their heads - and for what? And what is going on with dude's chin??? This is where I started SERIOUSLY planning my Chaos horde; it was going to have a little conclave of worshippers for each of the Pantheon, united by a cynical, black-hearted Aspiring Champion who had hopes of carving out his own pirate kingdom. Wish I could remember what I was going to name him. "It's even better, because the third edition rules let you play with armies twice the size in half the time!" I probably thought to myself. In retrospect, this was exactly what 3E wanted us to think.
But then what happened? Puberty happened. I started noticing that girls had become a new, interesting type of person who I wanted to impress, and studies seemed to show very few were impressed by 28mm scale armies. Not even Sisters of Battle armies... and so the Ravening Horde of Chaos Undivided was put on hold indefinitely. As time went on it also became apparent that girls wouldn't be much impressed with me anyway, toy armies or no, but by then I'd come too far and going back to gaming would have felt like a defeat, so I got interested in music instead.
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| Girls. +3 invulnerable save on 2d6. |
Fast forward to around 2006, and I (surreptitiously) pick up a couple of Black Library books at the non-Black (local) Library by mercenary writer-dude Dan Abnett. One is 'Traitor General', which was then probably one of the most recent books in the Gaunt's Ghosts series. The series was already well-established so I had a bit of a struggle getting up to speed with the chracter arcs - but it led to me reading every Gaunt's Ghosts book, and 'Traitor General' remains one of my all-time favourite military sci-fi novels.
The other book is 'Horus Rising', which kicked off the Horus Heresy series.
This shit blew me the fuck away.
How can I really describe the Horus Heresy to people who aren't familiar with it? For a contemporary audience, I feel comfortable saying it's "Game Of Thrones, in space, without the sex." If the labyrinthine allegiances and power plays and ancient vendettas and double-crosses of the warring Great Houses are your favourite element to those chronicles of Westeros, and you don't feel a compulsive need for your fantasy epics to include armies of whores and rapists, then mayhaps The Horus Heresy is for you. Sex is almost completely off the table (the vast majority of the characters are not human but 'posthuman' warriors known as Astartes, who have no discernible sex drive) as is bad language, since this is tie-in fiction with a gaming system popular with kids under 12 as well as adults. There are some authors who are given a little more leeway with the sex-and-bad-language ban, but mostly your heroes won't say much more that 'damn!', or do anything more lewd than "mildly lustful thoughts". Some see that as a problem, some as a bonus. Myself, I kind of like a LOT of swearing, and I like my heroes to act like they possess genitals, even if they don't use them, so it's a thumbs down from me on that aspect, but it's a fairly minor point that doesn't affect my enjoyment of the series as a whole.
Oh, and despite the conscientiousness in other areas, these books are incredibly violent. It's not quite American Psycho level, but these guys don't shy away from depicting the horrors of war and the effects on the human or non-human body. Boltguns are always exploding people, skulls are frequently split by gauntleted fists, and the standard sword that people carry in this universe
is actually a fucking chainsaw.
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| It's a sword, plus a chainsaw. It's a chainsword. I don't think it could be clearer. |
Also in common with Game Of Thrones is the huge cast of this series. The main characters are the eighteen Primarchs, and their 'father' the Emperor: larger than life characters, each with their own flaws, strengths and secret agendas. Between them, though, they command thousands upon thousands of Space Marines, many of which are major characters in their own right. And that's not even taking into account the non-genetically-modified human military, who outnumber the Space Marines by a huge amount. Or the strange, sinister bureaucracy of the Imperium's central government. Or the daemonic entities that use mortals as puppets. Or the non-human races boppin' around the galaxy, sometimes taking an interest in this upstart species called 'humans', sometimes not. It can be incredibly hard to keep track of who serves who, who hates who, and who is helping (or blocking) who's agenda.
Despite my love of 'Horus Rising', I was still quite wary of actually getting into the series, as it would have been necessary to accept to myself that I was still fascinated by the 40K universe. I grew up knowing the 'history' of the Horus Heresy, and this book series promised to delve into far greater detail than a few pages before the 'army list' in a Chaos Codex, but surely I would be better off reading more worthy, serious books? And for a while, that (shaky) logic held. But a year or so ago, I started getting as many of the books as I could out of the library (I'm still not that interested if they're only library loans, right? It's not like I'm buying them), only to find there's, what, 20 of these books? Crazy. "I'll just read the ones I can get from the library; buying them would be a step too far." But the library doesn't have a copy of 'Know No Fear'. Or 'Flight Of The Eisenstein'. Or 'Legion'. People say good things about those, so maybe, y'know, I'll buy 'em... second-hand, or something.
Soon enough, I've got copies of every HH book.
And I love the series. Oh sure, there are some events I'm unhappy about, and some entire books I'd rather forget about, but I've rarely had more fun, or been as invested, in a series this massive. And as I've been going, I've been inspired to jot down notes about each book - sometimes facetious jokes about lame stuff I don't like, but more frequently theories, or enthusiastic burbling about how gay I am for Dan Abnett. All this shite has been saved on a (initially little) WordPad document on my computer. This document has grown and grown, full of reviews. Some are half-baked nonsense, some read like arguments with myself, and some are pure shit, but I've had a lot of fun writing them. And so I figured, why not start a HH review blog? I'm planning on writing about some other fiction - both Black Library and non-Black Library - but HH will be the main focus.
Above all, I'm a fan of the series, so please keep that in mind even if I'm sarcastic, flip or critical about elements of it, or even the publishing practices of BL, I'm coming at you from a place of love... just like the glorious Emprah in his ever-benevolent wisdom.
And with that, I'm gonna get this shit started...
