Let's start talking about Galaxy in Flames by nipping back to the two books we've already covered. After all, this is a trilogy; there's just no way the final instalment isn't going to end up being compared with its predecessors.
I mentioned last time around that Graham McNeill had a tough job on his hands with False Gods, but of course the truth is each of these books brought with them unique problems. The first installment had to be a belter to ensure the series had any real chance of surviving over the long term, hence why it was given to Abnett, the safest pair of hands Black Library can boast. The second book, as I've noted, required pulling off the genuinely difficult trick of starting out with a depressed but still loyal Horus, and ending with a Warmaster baying for his father's blood. And whilst I've never spoken to anyone who's said they were glad McNeill got this job rather than Abnett, it's hardly like it was an indefensible move. In the years before False Gods was released McNeill had already published seven novels for the Black Library, including books set both in the 40K universe and the Warhammer Fantasy Setting, and he had proved by the solid sales figures of his Ultramarines books (the first omnibus is currently on its second printing, I believe).
Ben Counter, in contrast, was a comparative newcomer. Before Galaxy In Flames, he had published just four books, and three of them focussed on a Space Marine chapter of his own invention. There was then rather less reason to be certain of Counter's ability to adapt to the brief required here. In other words, it seems someone in charge at Black Library decided that the concluding instalment in this opening trilogy was the book least in need of a proven hand at the tiller. Perhaps this decision
was made on the assumption that with the story of Horus' fall already mapped out, Counter's contribution need not involve much beyond connecting the dots. Certainly, dot-joining is essentially all that's in evidence here.
Galaxy In Flames is not a tale well-told. Indeed, large sections of it don't particularly feel told at all, so much as noted. When I initially read the book, I thought the prose poor. But that's not quite it. It isn't poor, it's just achieved a level of functionality almost unattainable by authors permitted to tell their own tales. The events are laid out on paper and linked with brief sketches of the motivations for those involved, but the overall impression is less of a novel and more of a dry history text which happens to be covering a period with more explosions than usual. But even for a history book, this does quite feel right. It's more like one of those awful summaries of historical battles you find dotted around the internet written by those far more interested in warfare than can be considered healthy; the kind of writers for whom detailing the exact weapon used to murder a man is of greater importance than the choices that led that man to his death in the first place. A blog dedicated to a military sci-fi franchise might seem an odd place to make such complaints, but there's enjoying fictional violence, and then there's fetishising it. Not that I think this novel is trying to fetishise violence. I don't think it's really trying to do much of anything.
Still, if Black Library believed the tale to be all but author-proof, they weren't completely wrong. The Battle of Istvaan III and the last stand of the Luna Wolves - along with Lucius' vile betrayal - provides ample opportunity for adrenaline-aimed pulp entertainment. There may be nothing even approaching a subtext, but the all-surface story offers plenty of resolute heroes and hissable villains, all set against a death toll galloping upwards. This is hardly a disaster. Still, the impression left is very much that works here does so despite Counter's efforts, or at best independently of them. This is a story easy to avoid screwing up, but also easy to spin into something truly remarkable. That Counter was only able to achieve the former can hardly be considered much of a triumph. This is a book without even the ambition to fail in a way we might find interesting.
5/10
Showing posts with label Last Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Last Words. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
The Betrayal Pathogen (Last Words On False Gods)
Before we consider anything else, we should state the obvious: this was always the nightmare brief. Dan Abnett's job was to take the noble and certain Horus and take him places where his self-doubt would blossom to the point where it was a real problem. Ben Counter got to pick up a Warmaster already fully devoted to overthrowing his father and explore the Faustian deal Horus makes as part of his upcoming campaign of destruction. Graham McNeill, on the other hand, had to start off with a shaken and uncertain but still resolutely loyal Horus, and conclude with a Primarch not only committed to betraying every principle he once held dear, but willing to kill his own men and his own brothers to do it.
That is not an easy ask, especially in the frame of four hundred or so pages which are also supposed to contain a healthy dollop of the military action expected of the Black Library. It was always pretty much inevitable that McNeill would fail, which makes picking at the reasons why the book did indeed fail to deliver feel a little unfair. The chasm between Abnett-Horus and Counter-Horus was always going to be simply too wide to jump in a single book.
Nevertheless, it's worth sifting through the rubble here, if only to determine which strands of the story brought the book closest to succeeding. There is certainly at least a partial defence that can be mounted. One of the major criticisms of Horus in the book is just how stupidly he seems to be acting. He falls completely for Erebus' routine on Davin, despite it being so transparent that even a man more interested in ogling women and dreaming of fermented yak's milk can work out something is amiss. He charges into the ruin of Temba's flagship despite it being an obvious act of tactical idiocy. He completely swallows Erebus' claims of the Emperor's desire for godhood based on two visions granted to him by "Sejanus", even after it's revealed that his dead friend is really Erebus, a man who goaded Horus into the duel that almost killed him, that has now been revealed as a sorcerer in direct defiance of Imperial Law, and who most pertinently has demonstrated he can make Horus see things which are not real.
Given all this is is tempting to write the story off as being of the kind where the protagonists are required to be utterly stupid at key moments so that the plot can unfold with less effort from the writer. And whilst it's true that this is not a curse the book escapes entirely - not just regarding Horus; Loken and Torgaddon begin here their campaign of ridiculous passive idiocy which will grow to unbearable levels as Galaxy in Flames progresses - there is an underlying logic to Horus' foolishness. Loken views it as a desperate fury borne of the insult Temba has laid against him, but as an explanation this starts off unconvincing, and collapses into complete irrelevance by the time Temba is killed. Far more likely than this being a case of wounded pride is that the problem stems from Horus trying to outrun the avalanche of doubts set in motion by his failure with the interex. The Warmaster comes across as a man desperately afraid of reflection (it's surely a coincidence that the repeated theme of reflections from the previous book has completely disappeared here, but it's a happy one), barrelling through life specifically to stop himself pondering just how badly things seem to have ended up. And of course when you treat life that way, you end up making new and greater mistakes, which means you have to run even harder to leave them behind.
Viewed this way, we see Horus not as a petulant man taking any opportunity to lash out at those he deems to have wronged him - or at least, we see him as not entirely that. From this angle, the decision to believe Erebus' ridiculous claims makes a certain kind of sense; if the Emperor's goals were always vainglorious and self-centered, there is no reason for Horus to feel bad about anything he has done wrong. This possibility offers him the opportunity to short-circuit the building crisis that has been pressing at his back for months now; of course he takes it. The shouting match between Magnus and Erebus over Horus' responsibilities is therefore spectacularly beside the point. The true choice for the guy actually caught in the middle isn't about his loyalties, it's whether he can admit he's allowed himself to fail so completely at living up to the standards he set himself.
And as it turns out, he isn't. He transfers wholesale the blame for his catastrophes (as he sees them) to the Emperor, and history is written. But if that sounds like a way to offer False Gods a blanket pardon for its problems, then believe me it isn't. Because the real flaw in the book was never the logic that led to Horus turning from the Emperor. It was the secondary decision to enact that turn through sorcery, assassination and planning massacres of his former friends. There's just no way to square that circle, not inside four chapters.
Which means that the final section of False Gods is a difficult to swallow. Add in a first section that's rather understated, and the novel demonstrates deep structural problems. We can, as seen above, construct a redemptionist reading of part three, but said reading requires a pushing of a subtext that at least partially reduces the rest of the section essentially meaningless; three men discussing a decision already made for reasons none of them have grasped. Really, if anything can be said to be the book's saving grace, it's its second section, "Plague Moon". Here, at least, McNeill brings his A-game. The problem of the headstrong Horus is still evident, but with his ardour up and battle at hand we need no potentially tendentious reading to understand his carelessness. Moreover, the actual battle of the swamp is well-realised; the stinking, foetid waters of Davin's moon and the horrors that dwell within being both nicely described and contrasting well with the freshly-painted austerity of the Sons of Horus and the crumbling majesty of the Glory of Terra.
But it's not just the crafting of these scenes of struggle that make the section relevant. The choice of Nurgle as the corrupter of Temba is clever one. It links together the image of the rusting hull of Temba's flagship, the pathogen that begins to eat Horus from the inside once unleashed by the anathame, but more importantly it reminds us of the metaphor of heresy and betrayal as diseases spreading from mind to mind. This is a metaphor used frequently both in general and by Games Workshop specifically, so the association here makes complete sense. It also provides us with what it possibly the only way to view the events of the novel's final chapters as a logical development from earlier chapters. If heresy really is a sickness, then is it at all a wonder that the virus Horus has contracted has damaged his mind somehow, causing him to see horrifically violent solutions as obvious approaches, where once he saw them only as admissions of failure.
Well, maybe. But such a solution does far more harm than good. On the sheer level of plot mechanics the idea that Horus becomes the crazed dictator shown in Galaxy in Flames because he's been infected is rather narratively uninteresting; once we remove Horus free will in such a way we reduce the flawed but noble warrior of Horus Rising into little more than sneering MacGuffin. Writing off "Crusade's End" as a brief but significant misstep might actually be preferable in terms of salvaging the trilogy as a whole. More importantly, though, the disease metaphor carries with it some exceptionally unpleasant connotations. It simultaneously robs Horus of moral responsibility for the decion on which the entire series is based, and equates disagreement with authority with a form of sickness. There's nothing wrong with presenting the Imperium as viewing heresy that way (so long as it doesn't appear the author is buying into that idea), but as far as actual real-life people are concerned, this idea should be rejected with all possible force. New ideas and principles can spread like a disease, but there we must abandon the metaphor, or else commit ourselves to a form of authoritarianism no less unpleasant than that of the Imperium.
What all this amounts to is simple; we can all choose for ourselves how close McNeill's novel comes to performing it's nigh-impossible task. But in doing so we should be aware that a balance is in play. The closer we come to signing off on Horus' betrayal as plausibly tumbling from the seismic shifts of earlier events, the harder we have to push theories that either lessen the impact of those events, or which come altogether too close to embracing the kind of thinking which makes the background of this fictional world as dark and oppressive as it is.
So a strong effort doomed to failure? Or a coherent tale of treachery underpinned by worryingly retrograde politics? Either way, False Gods gets the same score.
6/10
That is not an easy ask, especially in the frame of four hundred or so pages which are also supposed to contain a healthy dollop of the military action expected of the Black Library. It was always pretty much inevitable that McNeill would fail, which makes picking at the reasons why the book did indeed fail to deliver feel a little unfair. The chasm between Abnett-Horus and Counter-Horus was always going to be simply too wide to jump in a single book.
Nevertheless, it's worth sifting through the rubble here, if only to determine which strands of the story brought the book closest to succeeding. There is certainly at least a partial defence that can be mounted. One of the major criticisms of Horus in the book is just how stupidly he seems to be acting. He falls completely for Erebus' routine on Davin, despite it being so transparent that even a man more interested in ogling women and dreaming of fermented yak's milk can work out something is amiss. He charges into the ruin of Temba's flagship despite it being an obvious act of tactical idiocy. He completely swallows Erebus' claims of the Emperor's desire for godhood based on two visions granted to him by "Sejanus", even after it's revealed that his dead friend is really Erebus, a man who goaded Horus into the duel that almost killed him, that has now been revealed as a sorcerer in direct defiance of Imperial Law, and who most pertinently has demonstrated he can make Horus see things which are not real.
Given all this is is tempting to write the story off as being of the kind where the protagonists are required to be utterly stupid at key moments so that the plot can unfold with less effort from the writer. And whilst it's true that this is not a curse the book escapes entirely - not just regarding Horus; Loken and Torgaddon begin here their campaign of ridiculous passive idiocy which will grow to unbearable levels as Galaxy in Flames progresses - there is an underlying logic to Horus' foolishness. Loken views it as a desperate fury borne of the insult Temba has laid against him, but as an explanation this starts off unconvincing, and collapses into complete irrelevance by the time Temba is killed. Far more likely than this being a case of wounded pride is that the problem stems from Horus trying to outrun the avalanche of doubts set in motion by his failure with the interex. The Warmaster comes across as a man desperately afraid of reflection (it's surely a coincidence that the repeated theme of reflections from the previous book has completely disappeared here, but it's a happy one), barrelling through life specifically to stop himself pondering just how badly things seem to have ended up. And of course when you treat life that way, you end up making new and greater mistakes, which means you have to run even harder to leave them behind.
Viewed this way, we see Horus not as a petulant man taking any opportunity to lash out at those he deems to have wronged him - or at least, we see him as not entirely that. From this angle, the decision to believe Erebus' ridiculous claims makes a certain kind of sense; if the Emperor's goals were always vainglorious and self-centered, there is no reason for Horus to feel bad about anything he has done wrong. This possibility offers him the opportunity to short-circuit the building crisis that has been pressing at his back for months now; of course he takes it. The shouting match between Magnus and Erebus over Horus' responsibilities is therefore spectacularly beside the point. The true choice for the guy actually caught in the middle isn't about his loyalties, it's whether he can admit he's allowed himself to fail so completely at living up to the standards he set himself.
And as it turns out, he isn't. He transfers wholesale the blame for his catastrophes (as he sees them) to the Emperor, and history is written. But if that sounds like a way to offer False Gods a blanket pardon for its problems, then believe me it isn't. Because the real flaw in the book was never the logic that led to Horus turning from the Emperor. It was the secondary decision to enact that turn through sorcery, assassination and planning massacres of his former friends. There's just no way to square that circle, not inside four chapters.
Which means that the final section of False Gods is a difficult to swallow. Add in a first section that's rather understated, and the novel demonstrates deep structural problems. We can, as seen above, construct a redemptionist reading of part three, but said reading requires a pushing of a subtext that at least partially reduces the rest of the section essentially meaningless; three men discussing a decision already made for reasons none of them have grasped. Really, if anything can be said to be the book's saving grace, it's its second section, "Plague Moon". Here, at least, McNeill brings his A-game. The problem of the headstrong Horus is still evident, but with his ardour up and battle at hand we need no potentially tendentious reading to understand his carelessness. Moreover, the actual battle of the swamp is well-realised; the stinking, foetid waters of Davin's moon and the horrors that dwell within being both nicely described and contrasting well with the freshly-painted austerity of the Sons of Horus and the crumbling majesty of the Glory of Terra.
But it's not just the crafting of these scenes of struggle that make the section relevant. The choice of Nurgle as the corrupter of Temba is clever one. It links together the image of the rusting hull of Temba's flagship, the pathogen that begins to eat Horus from the inside once unleashed by the anathame, but more importantly it reminds us of the metaphor of heresy and betrayal as diseases spreading from mind to mind. This is a metaphor used frequently both in general and by Games Workshop specifically, so the association here makes complete sense. It also provides us with what it possibly the only way to view the events of the novel's final chapters as a logical development from earlier chapters. If heresy really is a sickness, then is it at all a wonder that the virus Horus has contracted has damaged his mind somehow, causing him to see horrifically violent solutions as obvious approaches, where once he saw them only as admissions of failure.
Well, maybe. But such a solution does far more harm than good. On the sheer level of plot mechanics the idea that Horus becomes the crazed dictator shown in Galaxy in Flames because he's been infected is rather narratively uninteresting; once we remove Horus free will in such a way we reduce the flawed but noble warrior of Horus Rising into little more than sneering MacGuffin. Writing off "Crusade's End" as a brief but significant misstep might actually be preferable in terms of salvaging the trilogy as a whole. More importantly, though, the disease metaphor carries with it some exceptionally unpleasant connotations. It simultaneously robs Horus of moral responsibility for the decion on which the entire series is based, and equates disagreement with authority with a form of sickness. There's nothing wrong with presenting the Imperium as viewing heresy that way (so long as it doesn't appear the author is buying into that idea), but as far as actual real-life people are concerned, this idea should be rejected with all possible force. New ideas and principles can spread like a disease, but there we must abandon the metaphor, or else commit ourselves to a form of authoritarianism no less unpleasant than that of the Imperium.
What all this amounts to is simple; we can all choose for ourselves how close McNeill's novel comes to performing it's nigh-impossible task. But in doing so we should be aware that a balance is in play. The closer we come to signing off on Horus' betrayal as plausibly tumbling from the seismic shifts of earlier events, the harder we have to push theories that either lessen the impact of those events, or which come altogether too close to embracing the kind of thinking which makes the background of this fictional world as dark and oppressive as it is.
So a strong effort doomed to failure? Or a coherent tale of treachery underpinned by worryingly retrograde politics? Either way, False Gods gets the same score.
6/10
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
Infinities Of Reflection (Last Words On Horus Rising)
(As mentioned last week, Fliss is busy skipping through fields of
autumn flowers now she's been temporarily released from the nightmare
future of the 31st Millennium. With the place to myself for the next
fortnight, this seems like a sensible time to offer some general
thoughts on Horus Rising as a whole.)
Mirrors are awful things. All they do is sit there and accurately reflect the hideousness of the world onto anyone unlucky enough to glance their way. They're horrible.
And yet somehow we feel compelled to seek them out. I'm as vain as the next overweight balding thirty-three year old. I shouldn't need an unusually shiny static surface to daily remind me of the orientation of my features - the basic set-up I've been staring at for three decades, and the changes over the years have been pretty much uniformly negative - but somehow, there I stand every morning, attempting to tease what remains of my hair into some semblance of order, trying to keep my eyeline high enough to not take in my spreading gut.
It would be enough to make any rational observer weep, which is why self-deception is so important when we find ourselves staring back at us. Too much honesty is bad for the soul. Of course, too little honesty is just as corrosive, and oftentimes not simply to oneself. One should be particularly cautious with mirrors that themselves are less than truthful.
Horus Rising is a book deeply involved with mirrors. More particularly, with distorted and mistaken reflections, and whether people focus on the differences or the similarities. When Loken stares at the moon the Mournival have pressed into service as a replacement for Luna, he looks not at it directly, but through a pool of water. A distorted image of a counterfeit object. Torgaddon assures us such variation is of no consequence for the purposes of their initiation, and perhaps he is correct, for all that flaws in the in the approach of the Mournival brought about so much, well, chaos.
Other differences are more pronounced, both for characters and for the reader. The initial attack on High City, for example, is quite deliberately structured to involve Horus attacking a world calling itself Terra and ruled by a false Emperor that he then saves the day by destroying. A mirror, in other words, of what Horus will eventually come to believe he is doing. The implication here is hardly subtle: many of those who choose to follow Horus in the schism that approaches will do so for no worse reason than believing the Warmaster was as right the second time as he was the first.
This has enormous repercussions for those who would consider the loyalist Space Marines out and out heroes. Bred for war, incapable of fear, one cannot truly view the Astartes unswerving devotion to war for what they believe a just cause as some great virtue. One might as well praise a shark for swimming and for killing. It is not clear how one can celebrate the defeat of Sixty-Three Nineteen yet pour scorn on those that broke from the Imperium at Davin - or rather we can, but only because our villains were so good as to birth their new order in deliberate acts of mass murder (that said, it's always easy to argue honour binds us to the rules of war when those rules will almost inevitably hand you victory).
There are, I think, very broadly speaking, two types of people who identify with the Imperial forces in the 40K universe. There are those who appreciate the Space Marines despite their bloodthirsty, fanatical devotion to murdering anyone they consider anything less than pure, and those that appreciate them because of it. I can't speak as to which camp Abnett himself belongs to, but Horus Rising certainly asks the kind of question you would expect the former group to raise. Whilst the book encourages us to see the reflection of the Siege of Terra in this minor skirmish in the end days of the Great Crusade, it also demonstrates how completely the Luna Wolves fail to see their own image cast back at them. A people zealously devoted to their Emperor to the point where suggesting another human authority might exist is an immediate death sentence? That no-one draws the obvious conclusion is remarkable.
Of course, it isn't hard to understand why: the iterators in general and Kyril Sindermann in particular exist for the sole purpose of ensuring that link is never made. These people believe they must be right. But they cannot be right, because they disagree with us. And we know we're right. Therefore they can only think themselves correct, and we all know how thoughts can be wrong.
Whatever the uses of this strategy for maintaining morale and cohesion during wartime, Sindermann's efforts ultimately did nothing but cause the one weakness of the Luna Wolves to fester in darkness. By insisting the Emperor was always correct, and that Horus was the mirror of the Emperor - distorted, yes, but not in ways that meant any more than the variations in planets' satellites - the iterators both ensured utter devotion to two contradictory thoughts, and ensured those thinking them could never possibly realise that fact.
It is not a pretty picture. Fanatics so fanatical they pour scorn on other fanatics for not being fanatical enough. Soldiers boundlessly proud of the fact that they cannot even conceive of questioning orders. Such breathtaking hubris may not be of any real consequence while the pool is still and the reflection of the moon still looks more or less like the moon itself. But then Garviel Loken finds himself amongst the glittering bottles of a chaos fane.
A reflection in a limpid pool is singular, faithful, easily decipherable. A reflection in a half-full bottle made from low-grade glass is fractured and fuzzy. It moves in ways you do not expect. The glistening droplets that coat the outside invert and distort your image until you cannot recognise yourself. Loken is surrounded by these torn, mocking fragments of himself when Xavyer Jubal turns his heels and attacks.
When Jubal falls to the lure of Samus, he becomes one more fractured reflection in the tunnels beneath the Whisperheads. His identity shatters, taking his mind and much of Loken's worldview with it. Surrounded by the chaos of war and the chaos of reflection, and staring at Chaos itself where once stood a comrade in arms of unquestionable loyalty, Loken had every opportunity to recognise himself and every other Astartes in the horror that claimed Jubal - once the life-or-death struggle had come to an end, at least. Instead, inspired by the equally wilful blindness of his Primarch, Loken chooses to see only the differences in Jubal's broken reflection of the Luna Wolves, not the similarities. Perhaps Loken is simply more concerned with convincing himself he can never become Jubal than he is in discovering how Jubal became Jubal. We all lie to ourselves when looking in the mirror. Got to get through another day somehow.
The Deceived, then, is essentially an exercise in watching prideful men use that pride as a vehicle by which they may drive past the point at great speeds and distances. You can feel the accumulated weight of the mistakes borne of cupidity threatening to topple the narrative over. It's almost a shame that this is then shoved to the corner whilst the Luna Wolves deal with the situation on Murder.
It's not that I don't understand what Brotherhood in Spiderland is doing, or that it isn't doing its part to feed into the more general narrative. I mean, if you want to spend some time watching Astartes tussle with the 30K analogue to Tyranids - with added storm spells and Simmons-esque death trees - then I wouldn't dream of holding that against you. But there's more going on here. Whilst in the first part of the novel the hierarchy of the false Terra reflected the intransigent mindset of the Astartes, the second reflects back their obsession with genocide.
In itself, there's nothing to object to here. It's one more facet of the Space Marines to explore, and one more indication as to where everything will eventually go wrong. If The Deceived reminds us that the Astartes are dangerous fanatics who can only be labelled heroes because the forces arrayed against them are so horrific, Brotherhood in Spiderland reminds us of that horror.
So what is my problem here? Partially, it's a question of timing. The kind of genocidal war the Imperium finds itself embroiled in might underscore the problematic approach of the Astartes in general, but the sheer viciousness of the Megarachnids makes that dedication to extermination defensible. Remember, there are two types of Space Marine fans; those that can accept their excesses, and those that actively enjoy them. Both these groups would find little objectionable in the war on Murder. But the first section of the novel has already made an effort to split those two groups, and The Dreadful Sagittary will push them apart still further. Placing almost the closest thing possible to a justifiable war (it doesn't quite qualify, since the Imperium is capable of simply bypassing Murder entirely) in between the two seems like a stumble in the narrative. It might have been preferable to start here, where the Astartes have their most defensible reason for hostility, and then bring in the shades of grey later.
Of course, doing that would mean losing an opening that mirrors the close of the entire Heresy, which is a wonderful slice of circular narrative that I am entirely in favour of, so perhaps here we have the lesser of two evils. That said, the problem we have here is no less real for the most obvious solution causing its own issues. If nothing else, moving the caster of reflections from the Luna Wolves to the Emperor's Children dilutes the narrative somewhat. Yes, we gain something as well by allowing the two Legions to see their reflections in each other, but we learn too little of the III Legion to justify sidelining the building complications with the XVI. In the final analysis, Brotherhood in Spiderland is far from a failure, but it feels like a short story sandwiched between two halves of a novel, which is a shame.
By the time we reach The Dreadful Sagittary, we are back to the central theme, which is just as well, because we are also running out of time. There's a sense of a dash to the finish line here, possibly as an attempt to jump-start the escalation after seven chapters dallying on Murder. The result is a denouement that feels breathless and rushed, though I confess I can't see how padding the section out would help in this regard - any tinkering that might improve things here would probably have to take place in amongst the Megarachnids.
There my complaining ends, however, because the third and final part of Horus Rising completes the series of distorted reflections. At Sixty-Three Nineteen, we saw a twisted image of the Astartes philosophy. On Murder, it was their approach. Finally, here in interex space, we come across a reflection of the Legions' aims.
With thirty or more systems living in harmony, and all alien threats neutralised (one way or another) the interex is, if a little on the petite size, essentially represents a model of how the primary goal of the Imperium: a united and secure humanity. And yet when they come across such a society, not only safe but free from the endless war which carving out the Imperium seems to require, the first instinct of almost every Astartes present is to try and smash the mirror.
Why does this matter? Because by this insistence, we finally understand what a Space Marine sees when they look in the mirror. Not a warrior tasked to protect humanity at all costs, but a flawed image of the Emperor himself. Of Horus himself. Every part of the tragedy that follows stems from this simple fact: there was nothing the Astartes desired more than to have someone to emulate through slavish, thoughtless devotion. When the pool was still, the image was clear, and all was well. But throw a stone into that pool, maybe even a small one, and the images begin so separate. Devotion to the Emperor and devotion to the Primarch no longer look like the same thing.
When the image you see in the mirror becomes unbearable, when the reflection no longer matches what your soul tells you you are, there's not really much more you can do than break it, especially when its reflecting a past you no longer wish to lay claim to. For some, smashing the mirror itself isn't enough; you have to grind the shards to powder. Two centuries of inflexibility and unhampered aggression have conspired to create a mindset whereby no arrangement can be wonderful enough to not need tearing down if it hasn't been created at the whim of the right personality. Against such obsession, not even the past can stand.
Niggles notwithstanding, it would be hard to imagine a more thorough way to set the stage for the explosion soon to come. Indeed, the one irredeemable flaw here is that the build-up to the conflagration ultimately proves more interesting than the inferno itself.
Not that this is Abnett's fault, of course. With False Gods, we'll start working out exactly where the blame does lie.
8/10
Mirrors are awful things. All they do is sit there and accurately reflect the hideousness of the world onto anyone unlucky enough to glance their way. They're horrible.
And yet somehow we feel compelled to seek them out. I'm as vain as the next overweight balding thirty-three year old. I shouldn't need an unusually shiny static surface to daily remind me of the orientation of my features - the basic set-up I've been staring at for three decades, and the changes over the years have been pretty much uniformly negative - but somehow, there I stand every morning, attempting to tease what remains of my hair into some semblance of order, trying to keep my eyeline high enough to not take in my spreading gut.
It would be enough to make any rational observer weep, which is why self-deception is so important when we find ourselves staring back at us. Too much honesty is bad for the soul. Of course, too little honesty is just as corrosive, and oftentimes not simply to oneself. One should be particularly cautious with mirrors that themselves are less than truthful.
Horus Rising is a book deeply involved with mirrors. More particularly, with distorted and mistaken reflections, and whether people focus on the differences or the similarities. When Loken stares at the moon the Mournival have pressed into service as a replacement for Luna, he looks not at it directly, but through a pool of water. A distorted image of a counterfeit object. Torgaddon assures us such variation is of no consequence for the purposes of their initiation, and perhaps he is correct, for all that flaws in the in the approach of the Mournival brought about so much, well, chaos.
Other differences are more pronounced, both for characters and for the reader. The initial attack on High City, for example, is quite deliberately structured to involve Horus attacking a world calling itself Terra and ruled by a false Emperor that he then saves the day by destroying. A mirror, in other words, of what Horus will eventually come to believe he is doing. The implication here is hardly subtle: many of those who choose to follow Horus in the schism that approaches will do so for no worse reason than believing the Warmaster was as right the second time as he was the first.
This has enormous repercussions for those who would consider the loyalist Space Marines out and out heroes. Bred for war, incapable of fear, one cannot truly view the Astartes unswerving devotion to war for what they believe a just cause as some great virtue. One might as well praise a shark for swimming and for killing. It is not clear how one can celebrate the defeat of Sixty-Three Nineteen yet pour scorn on those that broke from the Imperium at Davin - or rather we can, but only because our villains were so good as to birth their new order in deliberate acts of mass murder (that said, it's always easy to argue honour binds us to the rules of war when those rules will almost inevitably hand you victory).
There are, I think, very broadly speaking, two types of people who identify with the Imperial forces in the 40K universe. There are those who appreciate the Space Marines despite their bloodthirsty, fanatical devotion to murdering anyone they consider anything less than pure, and those that appreciate them because of it. I can't speak as to which camp Abnett himself belongs to, but Horus Rising certainly asks the kind of question you would expect the former group to raise. Whilst the book encourages us to see the reflection of the Siege of Terra in this minor skirmish in the end days of the Great Crusade, it also demonstrates how completely the Luna Wolves fail to see their own image cast back at them. A people zealously devoted to their Emperor to the point where suggesting another human authority might exist is an immediate death sentence? That no-one draws the obvious conclusion is remarkable.
Of course, it isn't hard to understand why: the iterators in general and Kyril Sindermann in particular exist for the sole purpose of ensuring that link is never made. These people believe they must be right. But they cannot be right, because they disagree with us. And we know we're right. Therefore they can only think themselves correct, and we all know how thoughts can be wrong.
Whatever the uses of this strategy for maintaining morale and cohesion during wartime, Sindermann's efforts ultimately did nothing but cause the one weakness of the Luna Wolves to fester in darkness. By insisting the Emperor was always correct, and that Horus was the mirror of the Emperor - distorted, yes, but not in ways that meant any more than the variations in planets' satellites - the iterators both ensured utter devotion to two contradictory thoughts, and ensured those thinking them could never possibly realise that fact.
It is not a pretty picture. Fanatics so fanatical they pour scorn on other fanatics for not being fanatical enough. Soldiers boundlessly proud of the fact that they cannot even conceive of questioning orders. Such breathtaking hubris may not be of any real consequence while the pool is still and the reflection of the moon still looks more or less like the moon itself. But then Garviel Loken finds himself amongst the glittering bottles of a chaos fane.
A reflection in a limpid pool is singular, faithful, easily decipherable. A reflection in a half-full bottle made from low-grade glass is fractured and fuzzy. It moves in ways you do not expect. The glistening droplets that coat the outside invert and distort your image until you cannot recognise yourself. Loken is surrounded by these torn, mocking fragments of himself when Xavyer Jubal turns his heels and attacks.
When Jubal falls to the lure of Samus, he becomes one more fractured reflection in the tunnels beneath the Whisperheads. His identity shatters, taking his mind and much of Loken's worldview with it. Surrounded by the chaos of war and the chaos of reflection, and staring at Chaos itself where once stood a comrade in arms of unquestionable loyalty, Loken had every opportunity to recognise himself and every other Astartes in the horror that claimed Jubal - once the life-or-death struggle had come to an end, at least. Instead, inspired by the equally wilful blindness of his Primarch, Loken chooses to see only the differences in Jubal's broken reflection of the Luna Wolves, not the similarities. Perhaps Loken is simply more concerned with convincing himself he can never become Jubal than he is in discovering how Jubal became Jubal. We all lie to ourselves when looking in the mirror. Got to get through another day somehow.
The Deceived, then, is essentially an exercise in watching prideful men use that pride as a vehicle by which they may drive past the point at great speeds and distances. You can feel the accumulated weight of the mistakes borne of cupidity threatening to topple the narrative over. It's almost a shame that this is then shoved to the corner whilst the Luna Wolves deal with the situation on Murder.
It's not that I don't understand what Brotherhood in Spiderland is doing, or that it isn't doing its part to feed into the more general narrative. I mean, if you want to spend some time watching Astartes tussle with the 30K analogue to Tyranids - with added storm spells and Simmons-esque death trees - then I wouldn't dream of holding that against you. But there's more going on here. Whilst in the first part of the novel the hierarchy of the false Terra reflected the intransigent mindset of the Astartes, the second reflects back their obsession with genocide.
In itself, there's nothing to object to here. It's one more facet of the Space Marines to explore, and one more indication as to where everything will eventually go wrong. If The Deceived reminds us that the Astartes are dangerous fanatics who can only be labelled heroes because the forces arrayed against them are so horrific, Brotherhood in Spiderland reminds us of that horror.
So what is my problem here? Partially, it's a question of timing. The kind of genocidal war the Imperium finds itself embroiled in might underscore the problematic approach of the Astartes in general, but the sheer viciousness of the Megarachnids makes that dedication to extermination defensible. Remember, there are two types of Space Marine fans; those that can accept their excesses, and those that actively enjoy them. Both these groups would find little objectionable in the war on Murder. But the first section of the novel has already made an effort to split those two groups, and The Dreadful Sagittary will push them apart still further. Placing almost the closest thing possible to a justifiable war (it doesn't quite qualify, since the Imperium is capable of simply bypassing Murder entirely) in between the two seems like a stumble in the narrative. It might have been preferable to start here, where the Astartes have their most defensible reason for hostility, and then bring in the shades of grey later.
Of course, doing that would mean losing an opening that mirrors the close of the entire Heresy, which is a wonderful slice of circular narrative that I am entirely in favour of, so perhaps here we have the lesser of two evils. That said, the problem we have here is no less real for the most obvious solution causing its own issues. If nothing else, moving the caster of reflections from the Luna Wolves to the Emperor's Children dilutes the narrative somewhat. Yes, we gain something as well by allowing the two Legions to see their reflections in each other, but we learn too little of the III Legion to justify sidelining the building complications with the XVI. In the final analysis, Brotherhood in Spiderland is far from a failure, but it feels like a short story sandwiched between two halves of a novel, which is a shame.
By the time we reach The Dreadful Sagittary, we are back to the central theme, which is just as well, because we are also running out of time. There's a sense of a dash to the finish line here, possibly as an attempt to jump-start the escalation after seven chapters dallying on Murder. The result is a denouement that feels breathless and rushed, though I confess I can't see how padding the section out would help in this regard - any tinkering that might improve things here would probably have to take place in amongst the Megarachnids.
There my complaining ends, however, because the third and final part of Horus Rising completes the series of distorted reflections. At Sixty-Three Nineteen, we saw a twisted image of the Astartes philosophy. On Murder, it was their approach. Finally, here in interex space, we come across a reflection of the Legions' aims.
With thirty or more systems living in harmony, and all alien threats neutralised (one way or another) the interex is, if a little on the petite size, essentially represents a model of how the primary goal of the Imperium: a united and secure humanity. And yet when they come across such a society, not only safe but free from the endless war which carving out the Imperium seems to require, the first instinct of almost every Astartes present is to try and smash the mirror.
Why does this matter? Because by this insistence, we finally understand what a Space Marine sees when they look in the mirror. Not a warrior tasked to protect humanity at all costs, but a flawed image of the Emperor himself. Of Horus himself. Every part of the tragedy that follows stems from this simple fact: there was nothing the Astartes desired more than to have someone to emulate through slavish, thoughtless devotion. When the pool was still, the image was clear, and all was well. But throw a stone into that pool, maybe even a small one, and the images begin so separate. Devotion to the Emperor and devotion to the Primarch no longer look like the same thing.
When the image you see in the mirror becomes unbearable, when the reflection no longer matches what your soul tells you you are, there's not really much more you can do than break it, especially when its reflecting a past you no longer wish to lay claim to. For some, smashing the mirror itself isn't enough; you have to grind the shards to powder. Two centuries of inflexibility and unhampered aggression have conspired to create a mindset whereby no arrangement can be wonderful enough to not need tearing down if it hasn't been created at the whim of the right personality. Against such obsession, not even the past can stand.
Niggles notwithstanding, it would be hard to imagine a more thorough way to set the stage for the explosion soon to come. Indeed, the one irredeemable flaw here is that the build-up to the conflagration ultimately proves more interesting than the inferno itself.
Not that this is Abnett's fault, of course. With False Gods, we'll start working out exactly where the blame does lie.
8/10
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)