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."

Legion

This book by Dan Abnett is the seventh Horus Heresy novel, and the strangest yet by a mile. The Adeptus Astartes are barely in it! For the majority of the narrative we're following regular human soldiers through a largely uneventful* conflict where despite the overall lack of significant threat there is a significant aura of uncertainty due to the secrecy and shadiness of the Alpha Legion, the Astartes supporting them in this arena - secrecy and shadiness only compounded by the Alpha Legion's primarch Alpharius never quite seeming to be exactly the same person twice, though nobody can ever quite exactly tell as all of the Alpha Legion look so similar. The chief secondary plotline follows a mysterious immortal human called John Grammaticus, who is on a mission all his own to manipulate the Alpha Legion into contacting and collaborating with The Cabal, an inter-species collective of concerned parties working for the future cohesion of galactic order. Without giving away too much about what Alpharius and company make of the Cabal, or Grammaticus's role in things, there is a serious bombshell in here about how an Astartes Legion may choose to throw their weight behind the forces of heresy not out of disloyalty to the Imperium but out of sheer, cold, calculated pragmatism for the greater good. This is a disarmingly gripping instalment in the series - no major epic battles, but a deeper, sharper war over trust and truth.

* So much so that there is a solid six-page passage devoted to describing a weird little game that the troops play amongst themselves wherein they have to find a rock head only just smaller than the next biggest rock head someone else has. I found this bit thoroughly entertaining.

Horus Rising

This book by Dan Abnett is the first* in The Horus Heresy series.** I got a Kindle for my birthday for the express purpose of being able to read my way through the entire series of these novels, there being well over fifty of them (not counting short stories, anthologies, and audio dramas) so I simply wouldn't have the bookshelf space to read them physically. I have read this and the following six books of the series before, but that was way back when they were coming out originally and thus long before this blog was even conceived of. Also - just a warning note, since there are so many books in this series and the story is so epic, in the interest of not spoiling the overarching plot's many twists and turns as well as keeping myself sane by not having to spend too long on each of what will be several dozen posts by the time I'm done, I will be keeping all posts about the books in this series as short as reasonably possible.

   So, what happens in this one? The Emperor of Mankind has withdrawn from the Great Crusade, the grand mission of reunifying the disparate interplanetary civilisations of a long-separated humanity across the galaxy under a single banner, and having done so has left his favourite son, Horus Lupercal, in charge as Warmaster of the continuing crusade. Horus is one of the twenty Primarchs (superhumans bio-engineered from the Emperor's own genes) and his legion of Astartes (aka Space Marines, superhumans [albeit not as superhuman as the Primarchs] bio-engineered from the genes of the Primarchs), the Luna Wolves, has been absolutely crushing it all Crusade so far, and in this novel, they continue to do so. We spend most of the narrative's time following a captain called Garviel Loken, who is a pretty stand-up dude. The narration also devotes a fair amount of attention to regular humans who have been sent to join the Crusade as remembrancers, that is, to use their artistic and such skills to create cultural records of the grand events of the latter days of the great war. But despite everything seemingly going so swimmingly, an undercurrent of resentment that the Astartes are likely to be discarded once the Crusade is won and their winnings turned over to civilian control is brewing among the legions, and secret gatherings are starting to take shape. Is this the seeds of outright insubordination against the Emperor planting themselves? We'll see as the series progresses...

   I know this is quite a long post despite my saying that I was going to keep all the posts about this series as short as possible, but there was a lot of pre-emptive exposition to throw at you to place the whole series into context. The next fifty-plus posts will be a lot shorter.

   Oh yeah - and fuck Erebus.

* Okay, I know I've read this one already and it's a prequel, so it technically comes before this one, but this one was released first and is formally the initial instalment of the series as a whole.

** A quick note on the post labelling - I've created a separate label for this series because there are so many books in it, and it would otherwise completely dominate the sci-fi label, but obviously given the Warhammer 40,000 (well, 30,000 technically) setting all the books under this label are sci-fi with hints of fantasy.

Anarch

This book is the fifteenth, and most recent instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. I have read this one before since I started doing this blog so there is a post about it already, but I didn't really put much effort into overviewing the story there, and besides I promised that on this new read-through of the whole series the final post would give more of my honest personal reflections rather than mere summations and hints. So, I may have said that previous books in the series were the most harrowing or the most intense - and I stand by those assertions - but this one is the most truly traumatic. This one picks up mere moments after the last book closes: Gaunt is both in his element and floundering about trying to make his element work in his new role with the war council, and most of the Tanith First are still defending a hopeless scrap of almost-indefensible land of very little tactical value. Things are a mess: Rawne has abandoned post to go and defend the traitor Blood Pact general who, everyone's pretty sure, Sek is trying to have killed again; Major Pasha has been sent to defend a Mechanicum research outpost where a significant Chaos artefact is being held; scout-sergeant Mkoll is nowhere to be seen. What's worse, Yoncy keeps talking to her big brother Dalin about woe machines (remember them? from Verghast?) as they're hiding in the cellars of the city palaces where all Imperial command forces are currently stationed. What ensues in the rest of the book I will not say outright, except for that there are four main strands - 1. with Pasha's group, trying to defend (and then retrieve) the artefacts from Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 2. with Rawne's mob, trying to keep the traitor general safe from other Very-Hard-To-Kill daemon troops sent directly from Sek; 3. with Mkoll, who is off doing his own thing trying to infiltrate Sek's base of operations as best as he can; 4. with a bunch of civilians and a handful of Guard looking after them in the palace cellars (and trust me, this is the subplot that gets traumatic. I'm fucking thirty years old and I had to sleep with the lights on for two nights (of course it didn't help that there is building work going on next door and a lot of their tools sound like bonesaws)). There are a lot of major losses in this book, and all of them hurt. Except for one. I won't say anything about the context - but when Gaunt's daughter gets her first canonically-confirmed kill, I cheered. Also, it should be said - this is the first time in a Gaunt's Ghosts novel that an Inquisitor has been actually helpful and not just a deceptive political shithead. Made a nice change.

   Okay, so that's a summary of that one.

   But I said I'd give some reflections on the series as a whole. Well, I think what's so great about the Gaunt's Ghosts saga can be broken down into three primary factors:

1. Honouring the grimdark: Warhammer 40,000 is the franchise archetype of a 'grimdark' setting. That means there are not meant to be places in this fictional universe where you can go to find hope, or peace, or joy, or even rest. It is total horror and war and carnage. And I think Dan grasps that with both hands; by making the Crusade that is the backdrop of this whole series one against Chaos specifically, it means that there isn't some mindless alien threat of dumb orks or hungry tyranids, or mindful alien threat of hopeful t'au or hope-deprived eldar, or wherever on this spectrum necrons would go; it's Chaos, and they're primarily human. Though, rather than being recognisable as human, they have given themselves to dark daemonic powers - and so there is an uncanny horror to all the conflicts that our protagonists find themselves in. It's one thing to shoot a greenskin in the head because it was about to chop you to bits for nothing but fun; it's one thing to fire a plasma rifle at a kroot because it was about to dismember you for 'the greater good'; it's another thing entirely to have to defend yourself any way you can against a slavering, mutated beast that you know full well was less than a month ago a perfectly normal citizen of the neighbouring hive-city. Dan has stared into the grimdark and concluded that Chaos is the worst enemy, and the way he writes it, you have to agree.
2. Humanising the Imperium: in his prologue to the first omnibus collection of these novels, Dan stated that he didn't want to start with Space Marines, because they're so super-human he wouldn't know how to characterise them. So he started with the Guard; the humble, unaugmented grunts of all Imperial combat. And I wholeheartedly think this was the right choice. I mean, obviously since, he's written many of the stories in the Horus Heresy series, as well as several standalone books, about Space Marines - and he manages to characterise them while retaining their superhumanity - but as a starting point, the Guard is where you go. I mean, First and Only kickstarted the entire Black Library. It was his, and their, first novel. And the series remains going strong to this day nearly two-and-a-half decades later. Don't get me wrong - the dystopian horrors of the Imperium and its necessity of constant war still shine through in gut-wrenching ways. But despite it all, Dan's characters still manage to make each other - and you, the reader - smile, or even laugh, when there is a respite from the bullets and shells.
3. Taking liberties with both the above, and whatever the feth else Dan wants to: what kind of writer follows rules to a T exactly? No kind of writer, exactly. If he wants a story that's a bit safer and a bit sillier, while still being a grimdark war story, he'll give you Blood Pact. If he wants to include superhuman characters to show their contrast against the rank-and-file guardsmen, he dumps three Space Marines into Salvation's Reach, or five Chaos Marines into Traitor General, to show off the sheer disparities in capability of these kinds of being; or he'll give you a powerful psyker as in the Inquisitors from several different stories or the tragic [redacted] being from Only in Death. Warhammer 40,000 is a very big very messy universe lore-wise, and I am sure that if Dan wanted to finish the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade on a triumphal note but then have the Tanith First go off and fight a wholly different enemy - he could pull that off as well.

   That's all you're getting for now. If I ever feel the urge to re-read these again, and I'm still running this ridiculous blog, they will probably be much shorter posts. Although, I don't know - Dan may well still have a dozen or more books in this series up his sleeve. And who knows where they will go. I mean, they still need to win the Crusade, right? Or then there was the Warmaster's promise that when the Tanith liberate a world and the moment is right, they could settle on it in exchange for their home planet, and that's gotta happen at some point, right? RIGHT?

The Warmaster

This book is the fourteenth in the Gaunt's Ghosts series by Dan Abnett - I have read this one since I started this blog, so there is a pre-existing post about it if you wanna check that out, but I probably have some new stuff to say since when I last read this one it had been nearly a decade since I'd read the previous instalment, whereas this time I've read the whole series (nearly, so far) in about a year. In this one, the Tanith First - though having been presumed long-dead by Imperial Command since their warp-drive went slightly skew-whiff and they lost ten years during retranslation into real-space - arrive on the forge-world of Urdesh, where both Saint Beatti herself and Anakwanar Sek himself are present, so you can imagine there's a fairly major number of intense skirmishes going on. While the Tanith First-and-Only (newly reinforced with an influx of volunteer troops from both Verghast and Belladon) are caught in the thick of the fighting, having been tasked with defending a wide-open area between a residential scrub and the docks, where their only support is artillery that's useless once the enemy gets too close - the chief driving conflicts of this book are political. Gaunt's old friend Lord General Van Voytz is pleased to see the Colonel-Commissar back from Salvation's Reach after a decade of doubt - but there are deeper machinations at play. The war council is growing tired of the unpredictability and reclusiveness of Warmaster Macaroth, the man who has been in charge of the whole Sabbat Worlds Crusade since (well, just) before the start of this series of novels. And they're hungry for a replacement. And they've nominated Gaunt, given his war record and reputation for no-nonsense behaviour. Without giving too much away about how it all goes down, Gaunt goes to find Macaroth to try and have a frank conversation, which is apparently quite successful* in achieving - something. The book ends on a cliff-hanger - well, two - with the First in a perilously pinned combat situation with Blood Pact forces in the south side of the city, and Gaunt in a curious new roles amongst the ever-political war council.

* Abnett's characterisation of Macaroth, even given just a scene-and-a-half in which to be actually present in the story, is masterful and hilarious and exhilarating and humbling, I have to say.

(also, I don't want to give spoilers for the next one yet, which I will have to do in the post for that one for the sake of catharsis, but - if you've not by the end of this book figured out that there is something Very Very Wrong with Yoncy - then your grasp of subtext is such that I'm amazed you bother to finish reading any fictional works at all.)

Salvation's Reach

This book is the thirteenth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. In this one, the Tanith First are tasked with a top-secret mission from Crusade Command itself - they are to infiltrate a place* and retrieve as much useful data as they can from it and destroy as much of the rest of it as they can. Obviously, this is an extremely hard mission, so the Tanith even have three Space Marines tagging along with them.** With no spoilers, the mission doesn't go to the exact plan, but it goes to plan well enough to be considered a success - even if a stow-away spy gave away their ship's location early on and there was a resultant space battle*** that could have risked the lives of many senior Imperial commanders - and they get away largely intact. There are a handful of upsetting character losses, but one of these was a long time coming and is couched by the fact that it's defended by a heroic sacrifice; and really the only major takeaway from Tanith losses in this one is "absolutely feth Meryn."

* I couldn't think of a better word and didn't want to fatten that sentence up too much by describing what it actually is. Salvation's Reach is an area of remote space where the wreckage and junk leftover from millennia-worth of void-battles has aggregated together under its own gravity, collided, fused, and become a misshapen small-planet-sized Thing floating about far away from anything else. The reason it's of interest is that Anakwanar Sek, the chief lieutenant to the Chaos commander Gaur, in this current Crusade, has been using the place as a secret lab and testing ground for all manner of warp-craft, war machines, and new terrible means of killing and traumatising Imperial forces. So there you go.

** It's a minor point, but one of my favourite things in this book is the fact that Nahum Ludd manages to assert authority over these three Space Marines even when they're in the thick of combat-readiness. Pretty badass for a junior commissar.

*** This is also one of my favourite bits - the Chaos ships that follow them out of the warp all shout their own names over and over through the vox, like giant evil metal Pokémon. The best of which has to be TORMAGEDDON MONSTRUM REX! - I mean, if that isn't one of the silliest most extreme names for an evil spaceship you've ever heard I don't know what to say to you.

Blood Pact

This book is the twelfth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series - and while still harrowing and full of threat in many places, I think this is probably one of the most entertaining of the bunch. It reads like a bloody Guy Ritchie film, with all the various players faffing about and colliding and trying to second-guess each other against a backdrop of apathetic violence. This story is, with very little stretch of exaggeration, Traitor General in reverse: that is to say, Imperial forces are holding a traitorous general from the Blood Pact (an elite Chaos force) prisoner - and a crack-team of Chaos infiltrators have come to Balhaut (where as it happens the Tanith First are on a well-earned break after the horrors of Jago) to come and assassinate him. I know I'd read this before but for some reason remembered hardly anything of what happens in it - sure, there are moments of extreme violence and horror - but it's also a very funny book. The meddling of the Inquisition again rears its head with interesting consequences, and the band of outlaw Tanith who contribute heavily to saving the day are probably my favourite subplot. I also really appreciate Gaunt's commandeering of an agoraphobic coroner to help them win out over the loyalist Blood Pact infiltrators. A lot of fun. And no serious losses on the Good Guy front! I know that's a spoiler but it's very rare to have a Ghosts novel where you can genuinely relax in knowledge of that. One final thing - I know in his Inquisitor novels (see Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Bequin etc) Abnett has shown us intriguing glimpses of the non-frontline "normal life" of Imperial worlds before, but it's cool to see how the Tanith First adapt (or in Rawne & co.'s case, refuse to) to life among such relatively safe normality.

Only in Death

This book is the eleventh in Dan Abnett's increasingly-stomach-wrenching Gaunt's Ghosts series, and in my opinion it's probably the best of the lot. I mean, it's so intense, that I started it out of why-not-ness immediately after finishing the previous instalment - and then, feth sleep, I read the whole damn thing in one sitting, only getting up to pee or refill my canteen.* Sent to the arse-end of the dusty planet Jago, the First end up tasked with guarding a mountain fortress called Hinzerhaus - which deserves special mention, as it's No Joke the main character in this book. Hinzerhaus is creepy as all fuck**. This book is incredibly atmospheric and 97% of that comes from Hinzerhaus. (Well, okay, quite a lot of it comes from an old friend who has been sent off to become incorporated into the Imperial psyker forces as well, but I won't spoil that.***) It may feel like something of a slow-burn, this one - but when things get going, they Get Going, and I genuinely felt "they all might actually die" with a seriousness I'd not felt since Vervunhive in book three. Anyway, I'll stop rambling here for want of not giving spoilers - except to say 1. I hope Maggs got therapy, 2. Baskevyl was the MVP of this book by a long shot and everyone would've died if it wasn't for him, love it (one of my favourite characters), and 3. the chapters with Mkoll and Ezsrah on their little quests is just - ah, chef's kiss. Yes, this is the best Gaunt's Ghosts novel. So far, anyway.

* Which I only did once. Having drank half a litre of water over about two hours, I then spent the next eight hours carefully rationing my next half a litre, out of solidarity with the regiment. If you know, you know. I did get a little dehydrated but I think it added to the experience.

** An atmosphere intensified perfectly straight from the opening line of the book - "There was a rumour circulating through the troops, nobody knew who had started it - that scouts from another force had discovered a huge valley full to the brim of dry and dusty human skulls, all with their tops sawn off." (slight paraphrase there, I've already reshelved the book and can't be bothered to get it back off just to ensure accurate wording. that's the vibe)

*** Although I wish I could. You deserve a warning. The fate of that character made me openly weep it was so sad and touching and just fethed-up in the way only something in 40k could be.

The Armour of Contempt

This book is the tenth Gaunt's Ghosts instalment from Dan Abnett, and it's probably the most horrific - not the most upsetting, merely totally grim & dark in its portrayal of war in the grim darkness of the far future. Here we get to see the Tanith First-and-Only (with newly-incorporated Belladon troops) return to Gereon to finally liberate it from Chaos forces. The narrative is kind of split in two - one stream follows the main regiment as they try to make contact with whatever remains of the resistance, so they can help them overthrow the incumbent Chaos leadership; the second (and far more intense) follows those members of the regiment who have been on RIP (retraining, indoctrination and punishment) protocols and are therefore assigned to be - eh, yeh, essentially cannon fodder in the worst front of the whole planetary assault. This book more than any other Ghosts novel is full of sucker-punches: you'll think something awful is about to happen and then it hasn't, or you'll think safety has been achieved and then BAM-feth. Witnessing what has become of Gereon after so many years of Chaos occupation is tremendously disturbing. And again there is another heart-breaking loss at the end which I won't spoil. One uplifting thing I will say about this book is the reintroduction of Merrt as a major character - he quickly went on to become one of my favourites. Oh, and there's meddling by the Inquisition, which Gaunt's lot haven't had to deal with for a while, but it's entertaining to see how they handle it.

His Last Command

This book, number nine in Dan Abnett's increasingly-upsetting Gaunt's Ghosts series, takes place about a year-and-a-half after the Gereon mission. Despite an extremely rocky path getting back into Imperial safe-space, Gaunt and his team find yet another major problem to deal with: in their commander's absence, the Tanith First-and-Only have been subsumed into a Belladon regiment under the control of one Colonel Wilder. Which would be enough to contend with, if it weren't also for the fact that the Sparshad Mons antique "city" thing the Guard are trying to clear Chaos forces out of is a completely insane place, and terrifying monsters keep appearing out of nowhere. Gaunt and his team's reappearance disturbs things not only for Wilder and the Belladon but also for the Tanith and Verghastite troops who had assumed them all long-dead. This vein of doubt and discomfort runs throughout the book, as does the increasing apparency that - having survived on a Chaos-held world for fifteen months, these prodigal comrades are on another level of proficient in dealing death and destruction (not to mention, quite seriously-questionably corrupted from their long exposure to Chaos). The Guard win the day, but it's a close call, and one only made possible by the heightened specialisation of the Gereon team and their return into the Imperial intelligence networks. The ending of this book is heart-breaking, even if it's characters you barely know.* Is that a spoiler? Probably. Sorry.

* True fact - this was the first Gaunt's Ghosts book I ever read. I found it in my local library, a fourteen-year-old who had been painting and playing Warhammer 40k for about four years, but had never read one of its books - and even with no familiarity with the characters or context, the sheer scale and depravity of war I was exposed to in these pages blew my tiny young mind. Needless to say, I read it twice, took it back, paid my late fee, and as soon as I could afford it started buying up the whole series from the start. And part of me still wishes I hadn't, because however good they are, Dan keeps stabbing me in the feel-bone.

Traitor General

This book is the eighth in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts saga, and let me tell you it's the most harrowing yet. Not by a long shot the most upsetting, but the most consistently intense and unnerving throughout. Gaunt and a small crack-team of elites from the regiment* are tasked with a top-secret mission to infiltrate Chaos-held world Gereon, meet up with the local resistance, and then find and eliminate - oh, you guessed it from the title? - an Imperial Guard general who has turned traitor. This is a hard swallow, this book. The portrayal of a human life under the Imperial regime is often bad enough but under Chaos - it's fething insane. Anyway, I won't tell you how the team get on with their mission, but I will say that this book contains some of the most outrageously badass scenes** in the entire series, and also introduces one of the coolest characters, Ezsrah ap Niht, into the regimental fold. So there's that.

* I won't say who, but you wouldn't be at all surprised, if you're familiar with the series so far, that it includes Criid, Varl, Larkin, Mkoll, Bonin, Brostin, Rawne, and Mkvenner.

** I mean, Mkvenner could probably have done this whole book on his own. He is ridiculous.

Sabbat Martyr

This book is the seventh of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Fuck me. I can't do this. Yes I can. So. The Ghosts are sent to the tactically-insignificant world Herodor - where, to everyone's surprise, the reincarnation of Saint Beatti herself is present to lead the crusade into glorious victory. Except Gaunt doesn't believe it's really her. Regardless of whether it is her or not, the Tanith and Verghastite troops have to contend not only with a typical Chaos assault of the main hive-city, but also with a subversive ploy by the archenemy to assassinate the Saint using a small coterie of incredibly-dangerous specialists. And while the ensuing fights that the Ghosts and these specialists get into are incredibly cool and punchily well-prosed, again, this book ends with a loss that puts George R.R. Martin to shame for its sheer misery and meaningless wastefulness.

Straight Silver

This book is the sixth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series. Yes, I've finally calmed down from the fuckeries at the end of the last one to come back to re-reading my way through. I may regret this. Alternatively, I may just force myself to get through them all as fast as possible so then I can just sit back and let the trauma fade for several years before I feel the need to revisit the series. Anyway, here the Tanith First are sent to Aexe Cardinal, where a horrifically-overblown trench war has been raging for decades. Aristocrats are in charge, which makes for a delightfully Sharpe-ish* butting of heads over tactics, priorities, and whatnot; aristocrats also make up a hefty proportion of the non-Guard troops involved in the war, which largely explains why it has been going on so long. Incompetence and cowardice are on full display, and Ibram Gaunt is in full swing as a leadership-empowered Commissar - which doesn't make him or the regiment very popular. I have to say that the depictions of a trench war in this book are absolutely heart-rendingly gross; they made me feel the realities of what an absolute shitshow that kind of thing must be like far worse than any World War 1 film ever has.

* Dan always has said that the inspiration for doing the Ghosts was "Sharpe in space".

The Guns of Tanith

This book is the fifth instalment of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts, and sees our beloved scouting regiment take on an aerial assault of a cloud city called Ouranberg, which doesn't sound too dangerous, right? I mean, it's not like the enemy isn't dug in with anti-air batteries or anything, or it's not like the fleet of dropships tasked with delivering the troops to the assault sites can't see where they're going through the pollution fog-banks or anything, is it? Ugh. This is one of the most sickening novels in the series so far, with an injustice at the end that will leave your screaming at the page. I think I'm going to take a break from re-reading these, and come back to the series when I feel a bit better about the phrase "expected losses".

Honour Guard

This book is the fourth Gaunt's Ghosts story by Dan Abnett. Buckle in. The Tanith First-and-Only, with their new Verghastite cohort making up the numbers after the regiment sustained heavy losses in the last book, are sent to the shrine-world of Hagia, which was home planet to Saint Beatti, who was the key player in an ancient Imperial crusade against Chaos centuries prior to this current crusade we're following the Ghosts through. Anyway, the regiment is tasked with escorting a bunch of pilgrims from the dangerous population centres to the holy sites up in the mountains, and as you'd probably expect already, this doesn't go as smoothly as any of them would've hoped. I must say though it's fun to see the culture-clashes between Tanith and Verghastite start to play out, some for better, some certainly not...

Necropolis

This book is the third Gaunt's Ghosts instalment by Dan Abnett, and it's a doozy. The Tanith First are sent to the hive-world Verghast, where what had been thought prior to be a local war between competing aristocratic heritages has metastasized into a full-blown Chaos uprising. A number of Verghastite locals are introduced - Captain Ban Daur, mine-worker Gol Kolea, hab-ganger Tona Criid, smeltery-worker Agun Soric, to name a few - gee, I wonder if any of them will join any of the Imperial Guard regiments should Vervunhive prevail in defending itself against the onslaught of cultists and woe machines? No spoilers. This is the grimmest book yet. Death wipes its arse on every page, and you find yourself genuinely thinking everyone might die. I've thought before that Abnett has a slightly-irritating habit of ending his books too quickly - they build to a massive climax about two-thirds through, then that climax sustains its intensity until there's literally only like five pages of novel left, and you're wondering "what the feth is going to happen?" and then it happens and you're like "oh." Which is probably true to war. Victory is always unforeseeable until it occurs, and once it's occurred, you've won, so there's no need for the chroniclers of war to keep the cameras rolling.

Ghostmaker

This book is the second book in Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series, and it's a little different to all the rest. Instead of a singular self-contained novel, this contains one big novella at the end (which I won't spoil as it's devastatingly fun) set on Monthax - and then seven or eight shortish stories, each focusing on a particularly interesting character from the regiment. Major Rawne, sniper Larkin, sergeant Varl, colonel Corbec, heavy-weapons operator Bragg, trooper Caffran, regimental mascot & piper Milo, scout-sergeant Mkoll... oh man, I love these feth-heads like they were people I know. Abnett as an author has a horrible habit of sketching people so realistically that you get to anticipate them, empathise wise them, and then see them die in ghastly, unpredictable ways. But more on that as the series progresses.

First and Only

This book is the first novel in Dan Abnett's ground-breaking Warhammer 40,000 series, Gaunt's Ghosts. I absolutely love this series, and much like I did with several other series last year I fully intend to reread all of them. Which means I'll be doing very short, blunt posts merely overviewing the plot and then in my post about the last one I can let myself breathe enough to give a bit more reflection.

   So, in a nutshell: the forest-world Tanith has been called to muster three regiments as a draft into the Imperial Guard, which is both an honour and something to pretty much expect of any world. Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, hot off the back of a major victory, is given command of these regiments - but as soon as the Guard's ships arrive at Tanith, a major Chaos attack ensues. Gaunt does everything he can to save the men, and ends up escaping with only the First regiment (aye, hence the title). The Tanith, thanks to their forested home-world's habit of having trees move over time thus making navigation very tricky, have an innately acute sense of direction, and are also great stealthers thanks to their hunting lifestyle: this makes the Tanith First-and-Only a perfect scouting regiment. However, as soon as they arrive at their first major testing ground, Gaunt realises that not only do they have the ferocious Chaos foes to deal with - their main problem might simply be the snobbery and idiocy of other Guard regiments...

Embedded

This is another non-40k novel by Dan Abnett - though this one feels a lot more like his usual wheelhouse than the prior. That said, it's still sparklingly original, and doesn't feel like it's drawing on his typical IP-universe at all: the politics and culture of the future setting, the general vibes of the characters, the technologies used and how - it all seems very fresh.

   In a nutshell, veteran war correspondent Lex Falk is finding it hard to get close enough to a current war to cover it to his satisfaction. So he gets his consciousness embedded in the brain of a soldier on frontline duty. When said soldier is nearly killed in combat - it falls to Falk to steer them both, and the troops with them, back to safety. Bonkers premise, right? It is chock-full of extremely intense action, interspersed with moments of nail-biting suspense, several brilliantly clever tactical workarounds, more funny bits than you'd expect, and a completely unexpectable ending that throws an epic light back on the story as a whole.

   As with Triumff I had read this back when I was a teenager but had forgotten just how gripping of a tale it is. With Abnett being as good of a war writer he is, it's really refreshing to see him doing what he does best with complete freedom of world-building (not that he isn't still great when beholden to Games Workshop, but you know what I mean). Strongly recommended for any fans of science-fiction action thrillers.

Triumff

This book, a novel (and one NOT set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe!) by Dan Abnett, is an absolute riot. It's set in an alternate-history present where magic was rediscovered in the Elizabethan era, which led to the stagnation of society to never technologically progress past that age. And so we reach the year 2010, and famed swashbuckling adventurer Sir Rupert Triumff is returned proudly from his discoveries of an alien new continent on the opposite side of the world. However - once returned home to England, he almost immediately find himself thoroughly embroiled in a series of plots and schemes which he neither wants to be part of nor understands; involving evil necromancer churchmen, rival explorers, a series of actors and stagehands, his own loyal staff, a man with a cat's head, a foreign scientist, and a rural witch, to name but a few. This book is absolutely hilarious while also being a thoroughly compelling story - it reads like Guy Ritchie adapting a film script from a Terry Pratchett novel based on Blackadder... or something else entirely. This novel is so original, it's unlike any other fantasy story I've come across. I had read it before when I was about seventeen, but had forgotten how funny and exciting it was. A strong recommendation.