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 The Emperor of Mankind has withdrawn from the Great Crusade, the grand mission of reunifying the disparate interplanetary civilisations of a long-separated humanity across the galaxy under a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.

Valdor

This book is a novel by Chris Wraight that serves as a prequel to the Horus Heresy series (and if that means nothing to you, watch this space, as I fully intend over the coming years to read the entire series detailing the pre-history of the Warhammer 40,000 universe). It follows Constantin Valdor, the leader of the Adeptus Custodes, the Emperor's closest guards, across the dark days when the reconquest and unification of Earth is very nearly complete, and the Emperor thus almost ready to set out to reconquer and unify the galaxy under human dominion. I've read this first as, as I said above, I fully intend to read the whole Horus Heresy series,* despite it being like a hundred separate novels or so, and this seemed like a handy kickstart to that process. I won't give away spoilers, as there are many in this book, but I will say that we get a glimpse of the Emperor's grand plan and unstated intent that completely reshuffled my understanding of much of the basic lore of the universe; also the detached brutality shown by the nascent Imperium is telling of what it will become. If you're not already a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 universe you probably won't get a lot out of this novel; it's well written, sure, but all the characters are such grand figures lore-wise that there really isn't all that much artistic license that can be taken with them and so it boils down to a handful of dazzling secret easter-eggs that only lore nerds will appreciate.

* I'm getting a Kindle for my birthday. Which is why. Had I meant to read the whole series in physical form I simply wouldn't have enough bookshelf space.

History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into three broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preamble-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to contend with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.

* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.

Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

the Dragon in the Library

This book by Louie Stowell is the first in a series of three novels following a ten-year old tomboy called Kit Spencer who gets peer-pressured into going to the library with her friends Josh and Alita, only to stumble upon magical secrets (of the variety that you can probably guess from the title) and commence training with head librarian Faith, who is also a wizard. Beyond that I won't spoil the plot, other than that the Evil Businessman Bad Guy is a very entertainingly Dahlesque villain. The prose is sharp and accessible, the story is well-paced and exciting, the arcane lore is actually quite well-explained and internally consistent, and the illustrations by Davide Ortu are pretty delightful and add a lot of character.

   Overall this is a cracking little children's novel - I bought it as a fifth-birthday present for my niece and pre-read it to make sure it was appropriate, but I reckon this would go down a bomb with any imaginative kids between the ages of five and nine or so. Would recommend.

the Concept of Anxiety

This book is "a simple psychologically oriented deliberation in view of the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin" (according to its official subtitle) by Søren Kierkegaard, the grandfather of existential philosophy. I can only say that the inclusion of "simple" in aforementioned subtitle is wholly undeserved; this was a very difficult book to read. You know those kinds of books where you know every word the author is using but have no idea how they seem to be fitting together to make the points they seem to think they are? For me, this was one of those. I would love to have some insights to make about this book but I have to admit I simply didn't understand most of it. The language is simple enough, enjoyable in places, but the trains of thought at the core of this text's argument are horribly tough knots to unravel. Maybe I will revisit this in a few years when I have more hard philosophy and theology under my belt and it might unveil something to me; but for now, unless my recitation of this book's subtitle grabbed your attention like nothing else ever has, I don't think I can recommend this book to anyone. Profound? Probably. Important? Almost certainly. Difficult? Most certainly.

Brutal Kunnin

This book is a Warhammer 40,000 novel by Mike Brooks about one of my favourite factions from that universe, the ever-hilarious orks. Ufthak Blackhawk and his war clan descend upon the Adeptus Mechanicus world Hephaesto to raid and pillage whatever cool tech they can get their grubby green mitts on, only the race is well and truly on because ork pirate Kaptin Badrukk has had the same idea (also there seems to be a Chaos Space Marine farting about on his own kind of mission, which messes things up for the defending Mechanicus no end). This book is pretty light on thought-provocation and complicated themes - it's simply a strong, comedic, grisly action blockbuster of a story. If you like the general energy of 40k orks, you'll love this book. And if you have a general affinity for science fiction where it happily veers into the extreme and the ludicrous in terms of creative violence, this could be a gateway 40k book for you.

One disconnected comment I will make is that this novel pretty much establishes as official lore that most Mechanicus agents and ALL orks are canonically non-binary and use they/them pronouns. At least from the narration's point of view. Which I thought was joyously unexpectedly woke of the Black Library, but makes perfect sense within the canon (as most Mechanicus personages are so technologically adapted in their physicality that concepts like gender were left behind several dozen upgrades ago; and orks? well, orks are literally fungus).

the Infinite and the Divine

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.

Poems on the Underground

This book, edited by Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, is a collection of the poems that have been being displayed on the London Underground for the last few years. It's a brilliant means of injecting enjoyable, brief spurts of accessible art to the public sphere and I am greatly in applause of it as an initiative.

    The range of poems are all quite short, as one would expect, as they are all selected to be readable by people who might merely be hopping onto the Tube for a stop or two, but they are all powerful pieces of poetic form and their diversity in theme is satisfyingly broad. Though I can't estimate how many actual poems have graced the walls of the Underground since this scheme came into being, the two hundred or so of them scraped together for this published collection are organised neatly into a sequence of categories: love, London, the wider world, exile and loss, seasons, the natural world, families, "out there", dreams, music, sense and nonsense, the darker side, war, the artist as "maker", the poet as prophet, and finally a defence of poetry itself. There is a rewarding diversity of names benefiting this collection too, from such Romantic stalwarts as Williams Blake and Wordsworth to more modern figures like Carol Ann Duffy or William Carlos Williams to four or five dozen artists I'd never heard of.

    While obviously the preferred mode of encountering these poems would have been when one is bleary-eyed, coffee-hazed, and lacklustrely dreading another drudging day of work in the grim smog of our capital, and thus in great need of a random poem to drag your mind into spaces more transcendent than it currently finds itself - reading them all together in a book like this was still a special experience. I liked imagining how my commute may have been transformed in profoundly different ways depending on whether I'd read Siegfried Sassoon's Everyone Sang or Judith Wright's Rainforest on a particular morning, and the subtle (or not!) impact that may have had on my mindset for the rest of the day. A daily injection of poetry, especially for those who might not consider themselves especially fans of the art form, can be something unpredictable and transformative, and so I am very excited that this is a thing that happens. I look forward to my next trip to London on the off-chance that I see one of these plastered in-between the Tube maps above the doors of the subway trains, in place of an inevitable advert for a department store sale or an insurance firm. Even in lieu of reading them in their intended habitat however I think this book is a worthwhile and well-selected collection of quality poetry. Recommended for enjoyers of the form.

the Damnation Document

This book is - well, it's actually a report from the organisation called thirty-one eight - who are specialized in investigating abuses within churches. I'm including it on this blog as it was at least as long as many books I've read and has far more content. As regular readers will know, I am a committed Christian - and as more attentive readers may know, my relationship with the church I grew up in deteriorated quite viciously toward my exit from that congregation.

   I'm not going to make a huge song-and-dance about everything in this post. I left The Crowded House for my own reasons, though I'm sure they were folded into manifold other factors going on within that church that made it spiritually unsustainable for me to stay. Anyway, the title of this post is simply what I've been thinking of this report as - I read the first quarter of it way back when it came out and broke down in tears, but I've finally psyched myself up to read the whole thing so I could have a coherent backwards opinion. And I am sure I made the right choice in leaving. This is a book review blog, not a church-dissection blog, so I'm going to eschew any personal commentary here; if you are interested in what was awry in my home church the link is right there above.

Dark Creed

This book is the third instalment in Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers trilogy.*

    Plot-wise I'll be more sparing this time than I was with the prior two as this is where the series culminates and I don't want to spoil the whole thing. Basically, having worked out how to use the necron artifact obtained in the first book, Marduk now has to side with other hosts of the Word Bearers legion amidst questionable political internal intrigue, in order to squash the White Consuls, a chapter of loyalist Space Marines, defending the target planet of Boros Prime - a task that seems to be largely going well, until the necrons themselves turn up to reinstate their claim upon their artifact.

    So, I've covered the plots - now for some reflections.

    Having recently completed a re-read of Dan Abnett's stellar Gaunt's Ghosts series (see the April posts from this year for most of these) I was in a real Warhammer 40,000 hype mood, and having spent so long with Imperial loyalists wanted a bit more of a taste of the bad guys. Hence the Word Bearers - whom I've always thought were the most interesting of the traitor legions. I mean, most of them just slash and kill and destroy, but the Word Bearers actively root themselves into places to set up religious cults in a very sustainable manner. It's grim-dark to the hilt still, but it's a tad more interesting. And Reynolds writes them this way - they are evil characters, sure, but there is a degree of genuine faith and fervour there that makes you as a reader genuinely come to appreciate how compelling it must be to exist as a nigh-immortal warrior in the service of empirically-demonstrable gods. Reynolds writes action well, if a bit repetitively - I suppose there are lexically only so many ways you can describe what happens to someone's skull when a bolt-round enters it without either becoming overtly floral or simply repeating yourself - and his dialogue is, I will say, serviceable. None of the characters are particularly likeable (except Burias - he's my dog in this fight) but that's to be expected of a series about a traitor legion; sadly though this often means there is a real lack of humour. The only real human moments come from the scenes that centre on the point-of-view of antagonists, i.e. Imperial soldiers and personnel, and I will say that Reynolds in these scenes does show a real versatility in conveying the scope and destructiveness of conquest in the 41st millennium in a way neutral enough to make you genuinely sympathise with both sides, even if one is defending humanity while another serves the powers of Chaos.

    To conclude - I really enjoyed re-reading** these. If you're a 40k fan you'd probably get a kick out of them, unless you're one of those weirdo closet fascists who genuinely sides with the Imperium out of an ethical prerogative and can't just appreciate the fictional satirical setting for what it is. This is an action packed, twisty and fun trilogy, and even if you know nothing about 40k I bet you could still enjoy it as a well-packaged anti-hero blockbuster.

* That said, I read all three as part of the omnibus edition, so technically it was all one book, but three separate novels, hence I hope you will appreciate the three separate posts. Also included in the omnibus is a bonus short story called Torment, which is a harrowing and grim walkthrough of the punishments Burias is forced to undergo following his betrayal of Marduk.

** Yes, re-reading - I'd read the whole trilogy in separate instalments borrowed from my local library back when I was but a youngling still several years away from starting this damn blog.

Dark Disciple

This book is the second of Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers trilogy. I'll continue in the same manner as the first post commenced.

    Having secured the artifact (which seems to be of necron origin, though this is still basically a mystery to the main characters it is obvious to the readers who are familiar with 40k lore), Marduk (now no longer First Acolyte but acting Dark Apostle, following the tragic death of Jarulek at the end of book one - sorry, spoilers) is now tasked with tracking down an elusive Imperial adept of the Mechanicus who might be able to help decode and thus make utilizable the artifact. This leads them to the planet Perdus Skylla - though things rarely go exactly according to neat little plans, and not only does this adept prove incredibly inconvenient to track down, but the planet in question is A) currently under seige from a cohort of Dark Eldar who are enslaving as much of the population as they can for torture farms & B) directly in the path of an encroaching tyranid hive-fleet which will annihilate and consume everything possible. Marduk has to find a way of masterminding this adept-retrieval mission in such a way that not too many Word Bearers get either kidnapped for endless torture or simply eaten, all while contending with his own army leader Kol Badar and possessed icon bearer Burias-Drak'shal, both of whom are starting to have their own questions as to the legitimacy of their new leader.

Dark Apostle

This book by Anthony Reynolds is the first in the Word Bearers trilogy - I'll do a full reflection in the final post but here will just give a very brief overview of what's going on.

    Basically, the Word Bearers, who were at founding the XVII Legion of Space Marines but have since turned heretic, are still fighting their endless war against the Imperium. If that all sounds like jargon-blabber then what are you doing reading my blog if a post or two hasn't made you need to google one or two Warhammer 40,000-related terms. Marduk, the First Acolyte of the 34th Host under Dark Apostle Jarulek, harbours secret ambitions, but is patiently biding his time for these to come to fruition, as the Host is undertaking some major actions: mainly the invasion and thus conquest of a planet called Tanakreg, where the Word Bearers plan on building a gehemahnet (essentially a giant tower built of rock and reconstituted corpses) to summon a huge build-up of warp energy and thus burst open the planet, concealed within which, according to legend, lies an artefact the likes of which could be an ultimate game changer for the Legion as a whole...

    And yeh, they basically manage it. But a few things go awry. I won't spoil it.

Hapworth 16, 1924

This book - well, it was never published as a book, rather as a Very Long Short Story in the New Yorker (the whole text is available from the link above) - by J.D. Salinger - is easily and without a doubt the worst thing he ever had properly published. I really wanted this to be good; you see, it's Buddy Glass copying word-for-word a very long letter his elder brother Seymour (who is, from this at least, though reading this has somewhat soured that, one of my favourite characters in all of fiction) sent from a summer camp in 1924, when Seymour was apparently seven years old.

   It already strains belief. The letter is well over sixty A4 pages long if you copy-paste the text from the link above and fart it into a Word document or similar. However clever or eccentric seven-year-old Seymour was, however injured his leg may have been, I simply do not believe that he would have devoted so much time to a single letter to his mother who he would have seen in a week or two anyway. Realism aside, the tone rankles. Seymour as the author of this letter is very obviously not a child and is very obviously Salinger himself attempting to pre-empt some bizarre precocious fantasy. There are extensive passages where this Literal Child at length objectifies the female camp warden's wife and thinks about what it would be like to pleasure her. Then there's the final forty percent of the letter, which is a "request for reading material" - deeply pedantically specific, unquantifiably esoteric, and of course far too much for even a very clever seven-year-old and his very clever five-year-old brother to get through in a handful of weeks at summer camp, where there are other activities, other children, etc. I really don't know what Salinger was trying to say with this piece. It really has forever soured my impression of the Glass family, who I always had prior found fascinating sources of curiosity as quasi-realistic character studies - but this letter and the portrait of the child supposed to be writing it paints, really just makes me sad. It's like J.D. had no clue what real people were like, were supposed to be like, were supposed to like, were supposed to do, say, write - and he just goes off on this nitrous tangent that's so ridiculous it would be comical if it weren't so long and taking itself so seriously. This letter did not make me laugh or even smile once in its fifty/sixty page length (once I'd copy-pasted it from that website and farted it into a .pdf so I could flip through it on my Kindle); and though Salinger is far from what I would consider a comic writer, everything else I've ever read by him has at least had a certain levity and humour to it that gives the impression that it was written by a human about humans. This doesn't. This is just sad. This is like some grand gesture of literary experiment that nobody asked for because everybody knows they wouldn't like it. And I didn't. Sorry, Seymour Glass. I hope your leg got better after all that - but I hope you got your sad arse out of bed and made friends with some other actual children at that summer camp instead of sitting around pretending that you can read French and Italian and German well enough to interpret those historical texts you requested to a degree that satisfies you. You know, Seymour - when I read this, I thought you were one of the most interesting characters I'd ever come across. But having read this letter to your mother, so devotedly re-typed by your brother Buddy, I feel nothing but sorrow for you. And not in the way that I would even want to comfort you. I can see myself watching you blow your brains out in that hotel room and I would feel nothing but relief that at least you weren't bothering the banana-fish anymore.

   That's almost certainly harsh. But he's not real, he's a character - and for Salinger to create a character of such complexity and mystery and depth in a handful of glimpses, only then to give us an extensive diarrhoea of a letter from this very same character that reveals him merely to be nothing but an imagined caricature of who I can only presume the author wished he had been somewhat like as a child so that he may have come closer to some kind of a spiritual fulfilment - I mean (oh man, don't even get started on Salinger and religion, he was Not to be Trusted with it in the slightest instance) - ugh. Jerome David, can you hear me? Nobody can know everything. Not even someone who did know everything could solve every problem just by knowing how. Calm down. Shut up. And in your grave if nothing else regret having made the New Yorker publish this total embarrassment of a "story". I mean - to have written the four books that you have, and then print this mess, is like performing an otherwise perfect decathlon and then halfway through the final 1000m sharting so badly that you slip over in your own excrement. If you enjoy Salinger's books, do not read this. It isn't one of them in the slightest.

the Book of Enoch

This book* - or probably more accurately collection of books - is typically referred to by scholars of ancient texts as 'the Book of Enoch', given the Judaic tradition that has followed them for centuries despite spurious archaeological evidence. Though most archaeological evidence referring to specific people is probably spurious going that far back.

   The claim is that this is a collection of texts recorded by Noah's (and therefore Abraham's, and therefore David's, and therefore Jesus's, etc) ancestor Enoch - during the period of post-exile-from-Eden but pre-Flood strangeness upon the Earth. And strange it is. I won't even try to give a close summary as there is a great deal happening in these chapters and if you're intrigued in the slightest I recommend going to the link above and reading the whole thing for free; but I will give a few flappy hints. Enoch is approached by renegade angels who have been teaching dark arts like astronomy and metalworking to humans; they ask him to help defend against the wrath of the Lord who wants to punish them for rebelling against him. Enoch sides with God. The rest of the (really quite longish) book is a series of spiralling visions where Enoch is shown both earthly and heavenly realms in a past and/or future sense; the metaphors are so dense it's hard to tell really what's going on. There is a section later in the book where several passages of metaphor do seem to prophecy events of the Hebrew Old Testament, using animals as stand-ins for the characters - but I don't know enough about Judaic tradition to confirm this.

   What I can say for certain is that the vast majority of Christians I know from my circles have never heard of this book, let alone would be able to interpret it properly. The text only survives because it was preserved in proto-semitic communities in Ethiopia well before 1000 BCE. So whatever else we might want to think, this is a very old text: and it warrants scholarly and prayerful interpretation. I'm still on the fence myself as to whether I consider it scripture - a big part of me keeps screaming "of course it can't be scripture, look how weird some of it is!" and then the other part of me keeps replying, "um, hello? Ezekiel? Revelation?"

   So.... yeh. This is an ancient text worth thinking about, for whatever it may turn out to be.

* There's a bunch of translations out there on the web and I want you to be on the same page as me reading-wise, so I've specifically linked the Andy McCracken translation above, stored in my own Google Drive as I know the sites that host these kinds of documents can often be somewhat temperamental.

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?