This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Robert Rath, and I have to say it's hands-down the funniest book from within that fictional universe that I've read.
Without wanting to give too much away... Trazyn "the Infinite" is a collector of things. He has entire planets that are basically his own private museums. Any nifty or esoteric new artefact that he can acquire is highly desirable. Meanwhile Orikan "the Diviner" is a fore-seer of futures. He has honed skills in temporal manipulation to the point that the line between him predicting a prophetic truth and him making it happen is - well, blurry. Both of the characters are necrons, and though in their original organic forms they were fairly close friends, over the millions of years of soulless existence their relationship has turned into a bitter and spiky rivalry. When the promise of a new treasure emerges, one that Trazyn craves for his own collection as deeply as Orikan suspects he can wangle to be instrumental in the future of the race, the pair enter a series of calamitous and frankly hilarious clashes of one-upmanship in trying to get their hands on this mysterious object, and while as you probably expect from a 40k novel about beings who are literally millions of years old the story does build to a shocking and epic climax, the meat of this novel is in the games Trazyn and Orikan play in outwitting and outmanoeuvring each other over literal millennia. The lives of lesser beings such as humans are used as far as they can be and then discarded without a century's thought. I'm not joking when I say how funny this book is - some of the dialogue is solid gold. I'd always thought of the necrons as characterless ancient-Egypt-wannabe robot whatevers but Rath in this novel really drives home how crazy eccentric you can get as an immortal stick kicking about in the Milky Way when they last time you had actual flesh stegosaurus was still doing its thing on Earth, and here you are, still just building a museum full of cool stuff you can find, or devising algorithms to see a few millennia into the future. There is a particularly funny moment when Trazyn, in one of his historic visits to a human world, was mistaken for a Space Marine and so had a statue to him built by the grateful locals; Orikan is unimpressed and the pair have a very silly argument about ego. There is an even funnier moment when Orikan has set up a convoluted ritual and Trazyn sabotages him by using a Pokéball* to unleash a genestealer on him for a prank, which not only ruins Orikan's ritual but means that they next time the pair visit that planet a few decades later the genestealer has successfully planted a tyranid cult and doomed the world. Sorry if these are spoilers but I felt like I needed to give a couple of examples of exactly what these guys get up to. They're essentially just a very elderly pair of close friends who have been through enough dumb stuff alongside each other over the years that they kind of hate each other but love to do so because they find the rest of the galaxy dumb enough in comparison to themselves that, both always ending up generally on top of it, they can bear each others' interference in their own inclinations. They kind of remind me of that duo of old men in The Muppets who are just constantly heckling from the balcony. They're the equivalent of those guys for the 40k universe.
Anyway - even if you have zero familiarity with Warhammer 40,000 if you're halfway able to dive into unfamiliar science fiction and let it just wash over you, I reckon you'd probably really enjoy this. You'd probably enjoy it more if you are familiar with the universe - it doesn't have a great deal of wider lore implications but there are a bunch of easter eggs in there, but whatevs if that's not what draws you to it and you just want a funny story about a petty feud between a pair of ancient robots having dramatic unforeseen consequences.
* Necron tech is so ridiculously advanced. Yeh basically Trazyn has these tiny little cubes of matter-condensing meta-space that do function more or less exactly like Pokéballs - mind you, Pokéballs that can capture entire armies to be stored at Trazyn's behest until he's in a tight spot and needs to fart out six random enemy cohorts to distract whatever's inconveniencing him. Dude doesn't give the slightest of shits.
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