Titanicus

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Dan Abnett - yes, I know, another one. He's my fave, what can I say. Only this one doesn't revolve around the plucky Imperial Guard or morally-questionable Inquisitors; this one is about the Titan Legions themselves. The god-machines - walking cathedrals of destruction.* I'd been aware of this novel when it came out seventeen years ago, but simply wasn't that excited about it - I mean, Titans are so ridiculously big and overpowered that how can you have any serious stakes in a story about them? Turns out I was wrong. The way you have serious stakes in a story about Titans is by A) making the enemy have even more Titans than the good guys and B) throwing in a healthy spattering of ground-level ordinary troopers and even a civilian or two so you can skip between perspectives and view the ridiculously big overpowered explosions from behind void shields 150 metres in the air or from a terrifying Normal Person's-Eye View - and Dan does both of these brilliantly. There are at least five or six separate plot threads going off within this book, and while only overlapping intermittently, they all wind up contributing somewhat to the overall resolution, and all get wrapped up largely satisfactorily. While for me this is nowhere near the re-read value of Gaunt's Ghosts, it was still a thumping good read; and it's always fun to see the Adeptus Mechanicus up close, they're so weird as a faction that I find them disturbing and fascinating and hilarious and tragic all at once, and Dan captures new angles of them in exciting and surprisingly relatable ways.

* The simplest way to explain them to non-40k initiates is to ask "have you seen Pacific Rim? well yeh, basically that, but moreso, and fighting entire armies instead of the odd kaiju or two."