Graham McNeil - The Ultramarines Omnibus

Most of the Warhammer 40,000 books I've reviewed so far have taken place in the setting's underexplored corners or have followed its underdogs, which is to say puny humans, no matter how heroic. Not The Ultramarines Omnibus. Oh no. Here, we jump into the setting's very heart. It's time, ladies and gentlemen, for the eight foot super soldiers.

There are, of course, problems with protagonists so inhumanly overpowered, and McNeil knows them well. In his introduction, he writes: It's been said that you can't write for Space Marines, because they're not human and are faceless warrior automatons, but that's not true (p. 9). Alas, every one of the collection's seven hundred and sixty-five pages prove that last bit wrong.

Still, despite their difficulties, Space Marines are rather awesome. McNeil is aware of that too. To quote again from the intro: Space Marines… is there anything cooler in the Warhammer 40,000 universe? (p. 8) Alas, their very coolness is where the first problems set in. McNeil's characters are not so much human beings as they are walking avatars of badassery and military virtue. When reading, one gets the feeling that McNeil is not so much writing a story as he is hero worshipping every Adeptus Astartes he names. Constant speeches about honor, courage, and FUCK YEAH SPACE MARINES make the novels here sometimes read like propaganda for a regime that doesn't exist. One particularly horrific bit tells us that the main character, dear Uriel Ventris, dropped to one knee, overwhelmed by the honor his very existence brought him (p. 49).

In terms of theme, McNeil mostly concern himself with either truisms or issues that could not possibly matter to anyone who is not clad in blue power armor – or, at times, both. The worst of these is brought out in the short story that kicks off the volume, "Chains of Command." There, Uriel struggles with the idea of deviating even slightly from the Codex Astartes, the documented warrior code that the Ultramarines follow. In case you think this might have some universal significance, I should point out that Uriel is not talking about the moral rules of war. The Codex Astartes has nothing at all to do with how one should conduct oneself or the justifications for violence; instead, it deals with vital life questions like the proper way one should assail a gun nest.

Besides that fascinating debate, McNeil presents us with two contentions that form the basis for the Ultramarines warrior spirit. The first is the realization that the people of the Imperium are, well, people and should not be killed. As this is something all of us who are not genetically engineered for martial perfection have picked up some time ago, we'll move on quickly to what is likely the novels' heart. In a rousing speech to his supermen, Uriel says: "Never forget that every man is important; every man can make a difference." (p. 255) It's not a bad sentiment, though it might be a bit easier to follow, especially in this universe, if you happen to be so fearsome as to be colloquially known as the Angels of Death. In fact, despite a few polite nods to the toothless plebs along the way, Uriel just about confirms the credo's exclusivity in the next book: In giving up the chance for a normal life [and becoming a Space Marine], he had gained something far greater. The chance to make a difference (p. 519).

Admittedly, thematic complexity is not the reason why one reads a Warhammer 40,000 novel, but, by showing how vapid its themes are, I hope to get across how shallow the entire book and everyone in it is. The above are not solely questions for McNeil and the reader to debate. They are the questions that Uriel and his fellow marines ponder; they are the only questions that they ponder. Not a Marine in here has a thought besides war. The Ultramarines have less depth than a heavy bolter has subtlety. After following Uriel Ventris around for three novels and a short story, I can say that he has about as much characterization as a secondary or maybe even tertiary character in your average novel.

The civilian characters that abound in Nightbringer and Warriors of Ultramar are not an improvement. Each of those novels has, in addition to its alien foes, a human menace, a traitor. These are of the cackling variety. They are fools so bent on cowardice and wanton slaughter that their higher functions seem to have entirely shut down in their quest to injure everyone around them. When the dastard behind Nightbringer's evil is confronted by a peer, he responds thusly:

"You're just too stupid to understand. […] Events are moving in a manner decided by me. Me! I have invested too much, lost too much, to have things messed up by a globulous waste of space like you, Taryn. […] No, Taryn, we are not friends. You are just a pathetic piece of filth I stepped on on my route too immortality. And now it's time I discarded you." (p. 172)

Later, we get another glimpse of that bastard's malice: Blood, death, suffering, mutilation and torment unknown for millions of years filled his skull; it felt so good (p. 256). Right then. You enjoy that suffering. Lest you think the problem is limited to that one fellow, or even to properly human foes, the Chaos Space Marine antagonist of Dead Sky, Black Sun does not speak but rather sneer[s] (p. 574) and has this gem: There was nothing left but vengeance for hate's sake and malice for the sake of spite (p. 739).

After all that, McNeil's novels are still not without worth. It all goes back to how he begins his intro: Space Marines… is there anything cooler in the Warhammer 40,000 universe? (p. 8) For all the myriad problems that there excessive coolness causes, Space Marines are still cool, and watching them slaughter their way through Dark Eldar starships, Tyrannid hordes, and the Eye of Terror is still pretty awesome to watch.

It's that awesomeness that gives a potential reason to trudge through the first two books' weaker aspects. Though the politicking that makes up much of its first two acts is mediocre at best, Nightbringer still is the best paced of the novels here. For a time, the Ultramarines are battling the very very very sadistic Dark Eldar, but the novel not only broadens out but also explodes (in a good way, like a bolter round) at its end, pitting Uriel against rebels and then a waking Necron menace. The last of those is a suitably rendered menace of Lovecraftian scale. Warriors of Ultramar is a far more linear read, in which Uriel and assorted friends must defend a planet from the invasion of innumerable Tyrannids. It's a perpetual, last stand-style grind that grows rather monotonous but still does have its share of simply cool feats.

It's Dead Sky, Black Sun, however, that is by far the collection's most memorable read – though that is not necessarily to say its most pleasant. In it, Uriel and his loyal sergeant are forced to make their way across a demonic world deep in the Eye of Terror. Here, McNeil uses the settings' over the top nature to bring forth a whole host of inventive, vivid, and absolutely sickening sights. Like everything in these novels, he describes it with not only the single perfect word but several dozen moderately acceptable substitutes, but the overwhelming details work when every facet of the view is a twisted embodiment of Chaos. To give just one example:

A huge grilled platform filled the centre of the depression. Agglomerated layers of dust coated its every surface and its perforated floor dripped and clogged with jelly-like runnels of fat and viscera. Tall poles jutted from the platform, held in place by quivering steel guys that sand as the unnatural wind whistled through them. Hooked between the poles were billowing sails of flesh stretched across timber frames that the scouring, wind-borne particles might strip them of the leavings of their former owners.

[…]

Uriel turned in a circle, seeing row upon row of faces in the skins circling the platform – dead, slack features of men and women staring down at him as though he were the subject in an anatomist's theatre.

"Burn it," he said. "Burn it all." (pp. 579-80)

In terms of plot, Dead Sky, Black Sun is a rather simple affair that consists of wandering through hell and fighting constantly. As one or Uriel's companions sums it up, they go from one death sentence to another (p. 686), and the novel never lets you breathe. Still, the Eye of Terror flees McNeil from even the lightest bounds of common sense, allowing him to twist the plot in ways that are totally absurd and yet all the better for it. Simply put, the sheer, relentless, and imaginative gruesomeness of its every detail and development make this one a hard hitting read, even if much of its power comes from excess and extremity.

Graham McNeil is not a particularly good writer. Alas, he writes about cool things. There are far, far better books out there, but these do have the simple fun of genetically engineered super soldiers beating demons to death.

Dan Abnett - The Founding

"Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?" (p. 33)

In the war ravaged 41^st millennium, the Imperial Guard hold the line against the fearsome Xenos and Heretics in their endless billions. The Sabbat Worlds, infested by Chaos, are the target of a great Imperial crusade. One of the many regiments of Guardsmen involved is the Tanith 1^st, the Tanith First and Only, the Ghosts. The Gaunt's Ghosts series is where Dan Abnett first came into the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and it is still his most famous work. This omnibus, The Founding, collects the first three novels of the series: First and Only, Ghostmaker, and Necropolis.

Unlike Abnett's later Ravenor trilogy, Gaunt's Ghosts is purebred Military Science Fiction. The Ghosts, of course, are not any old regiment. They hail from a destroyed world, for Chaos fell upon their home even as they were brought aboard their troopships. It was Colonel-Commissar Gaunt who saved the troops who had already boarded, taking them away from their homeworld before they could die failing to defend it. For that, his men hate him. For his brilliance, and for the way that he knows and cares for each of them, they love him.

First and Only faces the burden of introducing the horde of Ghosts, but it doesn't let itself get bogged down in that task. After opening with a well executed battle, the storyline broadens to include intrigue and treachery from the Imperium's high command. The novel's middle sections, in which the character's gradually learn more about the plots afoot serves to deepen the action, and, when we return to war with the book's climax, Abnett is able to manage both the intrigue and the battle without sacrificing either, even if he does indulge (throughout the volume) in the occasional unnecessary, unfounded, and silly plot twist, like the revelation that a villain who already had perfectly good motivations is really just angry because Gaunt killed his father. Groan. Still, these failed plotting flourishes are saved by their very superfluousness, and their clunking does nothing to hamper the main storyline's successful execution.

But while the intrigue is initially successful, it doesn't always work as well. We are told early on that: The command echelon generally believed in the theory of attrition when it came to the Imperial Guard. Any foe could be ground into pulp if you threw enough at them, and the Guard was, to them, a limitless supply of cannon fodder for just such a purpose. (p. 22) Okay, fair enough, and we do see that attitude, along with Gaunt's desire to get his men through nonetheless.

And yet the command echelon's failings go beyond a cavalier dismissal of the cost. No, just about every commander in the Guard soon turns out to be evil on the level of moustache twirlers. As I said, it works in First and Only. One power hungry traitor is more than believable. But the trope comes up again and again in each of the omnibus' three books, and it wears thinner with each. By the third or fourth time we hear theoretically sane commanders speak of ridding him [the high commander] of Gaunt and his damn Ghosts, (p. 269) one has to start wondering how an army that does nothing but snipe at its own elite has managed to not implode in an hour, let alone managed to wage a successful crusade.

Nonetheless, Abnett is an excellent battle writer, able to, through the deft shifting of perspectives and viewpoints, give us both the jagged edge of the frontlines and the grander picture. The Ghosts are just one unit among many. Their surviving and falling is vital to them, and the reader feels the adrenaline besides them. But while they might even be the decisive unit, they are just one part of a larger whole, and Abnett is adept at showing his powerful heroes subservient to and occasionally thrown aside by events beyond their control.

In the Chaos-tinged setting of Warhammer 40,000, this means that he can indulge in some inventive and striking tricks and traps, generating a lasgun-armed equivalent of Lovecraft's fear of the unknown. One advancing soldier, cut off from anyone besides the men immediately around him, is just aware of the inexplicable syncopated and irregular thudding of the drum machines that that Shriven had left here. There was no pattern to their beat. Worse still, Corbec was more afraid there was a pattern, and he was too sane to understand it. (p. 52)

In addition to the battles and intrigues shown, First and Only focuses on establishing the character of Gaunt and his heroism, which it does through showing him in battle, through showing us our first glimpses of how his troops view him, and through flash backs at the end of each chapter. These flashbacks are a surprisingly successful tactic. Their very regularity prevents them from becoming a simple distraction to the action; the reader comes to anticipate them, and they become as much a part of the story as Gaunt's present whereabouts. More importantly, Abnett makes each flashback into a miniature story of its own, filling them with drama rather than leaving them as narrative-shaped infodumps.

With Ghostmaker, Abnett widens the focus from just Gaunt to the entirety of the regiment. Both of the first two novels were woven together from short stories originally published in Inferno! (as can be seen here). But while First and Only told a complete story despite its slightly episodic nature, Ghostmaker is more of a mosaic novel. As a major engagement on the planet Monthax nears, Gaunt walks through his lines and, as he encounters his men, we hear stories of their past.

The stories are excellent. In just a few pages, Abnett manages to establish setting and conflict (each takes place in a different battle) and then to delve deep into the focal character while still bringing the tale to a satisfyingly martial close. The greatest are those that take characters on the Ghost's periphery, those that hold specialized jobs, and immerse the reader in their minds and in their brutal work. In "The Angel of Bucephalon," the regiment's best sniper debates his hallucinations as he waits for the kill shot. "Sound and Fury" pits the scout Mkoll against a monolithic dreadnought that will slaughter him if it can find him in the forest; it is so successful at drawing the reader into the terrified need for absolute silence that, while reading, I found myself afraid to breathe too loudly. By the end of all these stories, I felt like I'd known the key Ghosts for years. Each of them was fleshed out, and knowing the men in the ranks gives the reader a stake in every gunfight to come.

The problem with Ghostmaker's structure comes at the end. Throughout, the frame story was nothing more than a prompt for reminisces. In the climax, the battle on Monthax fails to take on much more significance than any of the random flashback conflicts did. This isn't a crippling blow, and there are still interesting sequences. However, at the end, when Gaunt allies his forces with the Eldar against the crushing might of Chaos, it's hard to feel the necessity for such a potentially heretical act when this near ultimate Chaos threat has only come into being a few dozen pages before.

The final novel of this first Gaunt's Ghosts trilogy, Necropolis, has by far the strongest individual story. It is a brutal Science Fiction siege that resembles Stalingrad more than a little, albeit with the technology and the scale blown to delicious excess. The Ghosts don't enter for the first section of the novel, allowing us to get to known the people of Vervunhive as the attack nears and begins, devastating much of the city's defenses. As the Ghosts and other Guardsmen arrive, and as the war begins in earnest, we continue to follow those initial characters, who not only play into the overall military narrative but who also give us an understanding of the destruction's implications. Along the way, it should be noticed, Abnett delves into the well of untrustworthy leadership again and, this time, nails it, creating in Commissar Kowle a leader crippled by his personal ambition but still fervently loyal to his cause.

Though it is certainly a very fun story, Necropolis often borrows the tone of a history, constructing key events from a multiplicity of viewpoints and meticulously marking the siege's progress by counting the days. By its end, Abnett acknowledges this, saying that the future rivalry of two local characters is "not pertinent to this history" (p. 737). The themes of history don't stop there. Embroiled in a conflict almost certain to end in death, the Ghosts are each aware of remembrance. The true loss that occurs when the las-bolt hits home is not simple death but rather erasure, the way that a soldier's name, and bearing and manner and being, was utterly extinguished from the Imperial Record (p. 210). The First and Only, more than any other regiment, are aware of the significance of this. They are, after all, ghosts already. When asked where their home is, they do not say that it is a place that is now destroyed. No, Tanith has been erased […] from the galactic records (p. 67). The ghosts are from "nowhere" (p. 539).

The Founding ends with a short story, "In Remembrance," a look back on the carnage of Necropolis and war. Bitter, one of the Ghosts says: Behold and marvel, this is what winning looks like (p. 751). It's a bleak phrase and a brief picture, and "In Remembrance" embraces it. The story's central character, an artist, is tasked with remembering and immortalizing the battle for Vervunhive. To learn its heart, he follows the Ghosts through the city's ruined and abandoned streets and sees the dead and the wounded. One of the people that the artist speaks to says I just don't think there's very much nobility to be found in this misery. What little there is belongs to the Tanith Ghosts, and I doubt very much you could capture that (p. 753). But Abnett does capture the Ghosts' nobility. This volume is filled with bloodshed and horror, but it also has humanity at its heart, and Abnett is equally adept at showing the men and the guns. Despite its occasional lapses in plotting or structure, The Founding is a very successful example of Military Science Fiction at its best.

Sandy Mitchell - Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium

Ciaphas Cain is a hero of the Imperium. He is a commissar that knows and inspires his men, that leads from the front, and that has saved his soldiers, his sector, and his hide more times than can be counted. More than any of that, Ciaphas Cain is secretly a coward. Or, at least, so he believes himself to be. Hero of the Imperium collects the first three of Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels along with three short pieces. These are the story of the man behind the legend, the exploits of the unbelievably incredible commissar in his own self effacing words, the three books excerpts culled from his sprawling unpublished memoir that have been compiled and annotated by the Inquisitor Vail of the Ordos Xenos. 

Mitchell is a fantastically clever writer. By balancing Cain's narrative with added fictional histories (each of which, of course, is crippled by its invented author's obsessions) and copious footnotes courtesy of our inquisitorial editor, Mitchell manages to combine a deeply in character, and deeply self-centered, narrative with a grasp of the wider picture. The footnotes, in particular, are enjoyable. Mitchell generally refrains from using them as a formatting excuse for endless info dumps and, as the reader continues through the books, the relationship between Inquisitor Vail, who Cain comes to know as Amberly, and the commissar grows increasingly amusing and even warming.

The real joy, however, comes from Cain's narration. The famed commissar, you see, is boundlessly and delightfully sarcastic. Many of the best lines come in descriptions of Cain's malodorous aide, Jurgen, such as when Jurgen manages to look as though his uniform never quite touched his body, which given his casual attitude to personal hygiene and perpetual eruptions of psoriasis, you could hardly blame it for (p. 516). Furthermore, Mitchell has a great deal of fun with some of the sillier or less consistent aspects of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, such as when Amberly adds in a footnote that: Sometimes [the necrons] seem almost preternaturally able to detect an enemy, while at others, as in this instance, they overlook targets almost literally under their noses (p. 413). Finally, the familiar Chaos battle cry (Blood for the Blood God!) is here met with "Fine, he can have yours." (p. 684) But despite how funny the books can be, Mitchell knows restraint well and never allows himself to descend into simple parody. For all the crackling humor on display within them, Cain's adventures manage to keep the reader's invested in the characters and their struggles.

Needless to say, Ciaphas Cain is the chief character of his series, and his purported heroism and omnipresent terror might well be the series' calling card. Nonetheless, Cain is never really cowardly in the way of characters like Flashman, whom he is often compared to (in the book's introduction, as well as elsewhere). Cain does, of course, do his best to escape danger, and the author/Emperor/demands of plot always smack him in the thick of it as his reward. But there are just as many times when, for all his frightened mental monologuing, he willingly charges into the depths of hell. In an attempt to rationalize his actions, he writes: It all came down to picking the course of action that offered the greatest chance of getting out with my hide intact, however great the immediate risk might be (p. 705). But while that might rule out selflessness, it certainly does not rule out bravery.

Other quotations occasionally slip out that do even more to damage the idea of craven Cain. Once, certain he was staring death in the face, he reveals that he was determined to defy it for as long as possible (p. 289) – hardly the thought process of a fainthearted man. Despite Cain's constant attempts to establish and maintain his supposedly fraudulent reputation for heroism through elaborate speeches, it seems, by the volume's end, that it's actually his cowardice that needs justification. Judged solely by his deeds, Cain is every bit the hero he is proclaimed to be, and his favorite rhetorical trick – feigning modesty to increase his reputation – works just as well on the reader as on the soldiers.

No matter what their setting and broad plot outlines might make you think, the Ciaphas Cain novels are only tangentially Military Science Fiction. True, each of them does take place in a warzone. But the war is never Cain's primary focus. Instead, he is always off to the sidelines, hunting down some (in the first two novels, literally) underground piece of intrigue and averting a disaster far greater than the one everyone else is focused on.

Cain's fantastically titled debut, For the Emperor!, establishes the formula to come with style. Cain and the Valhallan regiment that he serves with find themselves in a tense standoff with the Tau. Neither side wants to fight, but they are being pushed towards armed conflict by a shadowy conspiracy that neither can quite spot. The book introduces Cain, begins his relationship with Amberly, gives him a large cast of supporting characters to play off and look at suspiciously, and manages a nice contrast between the powerful and alien, but communicative and reasonably sane, Tau and the mindlessly brutal Tyrannid threat they find below.

The follow up, Caves of Ice, is not as successful, in large part because it's a smaller and less interesting retread of its predecessor. Like inFor the Emperor!, the Guard is here stationed on a world to oppose one foe (this time the Orks), while Cain begins to see a far greater threat lurking underground (this time, the Necrons), which he then goes into the tunnels to pursue, until he eventually comes into horrific contact with it, and loses everyone he had with him. The key problem is not even that the two books are so similar; Mitchell's writing is amusing enough for me to (somewhat) forgive him that. But Caves of Ice's cast is miniature compared to For the Emperor!'s, and what few characters there are spend the vast majority of it off screen. Amberly doesn't enter until the end, and, here, both alien threats are of the mindless slaughter variety. All of this means that Cain has no one to really interact with, and he spends his time laboriously entering and exiting the same set of tunnels and going about his mission.

Thankfully, the last novel, The Traitor's Hand, is a great deal more fun and plays with the formula just enough to keep things fresh. Cain and the Guard are deployed to stop a ravaging Chaos fleet, but, before it can arrive, they find themselves embroiled in a guerilla war against a local Chaos cult, which is hell-bent on summoning a rather nasty demon. Though both serving the Ruinous Powers, the two Chaos factions despise each other even more than they hate the Imperium. The interplay between the two, and the way that the great secret danger part of the plot here comes out to interact with the rest before the big finish, serve to keep everything more nimble and exciting, even if each of the mystery's pieces are gift wrapped and delivered in the most convenient way possible and at the perfect (read: last) moment. Unlike For the Emperor!, which stayed relatively still geographically, and Caves of Ice, which moved about but had a whole planet painted with the same brush, The Traitor's Hand ferries Cain between all sorts of different settings and situations. Best of all, it gives him a myriad of secondary characters to mess with, including a rival in the Commissariat for him to humiliate and then pay the costs for doing so. I must say, though, that the ending confrontation between Cain and the "preternaturally seductive" (p. 749) and brutally destructive demon Emili was somewhat odd to read about right before I went to go speak to my not particularly destructive girlfriend, Emily.

The three short stories included successfully add to Cain's story and experiences, albeit in different ways and with differing levels of success. "Fight or Flight," which opens the volume, gives us a good first glimpse of Cain and some of the most convincing cowardice-cum-accidental-heroics we get through the whole thing. "Echoes of the Tomb" serves mostly to fill us in on Cain's glimpse of the necrons before he has to fight them full-time in Caves of Ice. The majority of it is the slow decision to head towards, and then journey to, the site where he's to meet them, and the payoff, when it comes, mostly consists of Cain running about frantically for a moment or two before the tale abruptly cuts off with his rescue. It's not bad, but it's not much of anything good either, and it suffers more than the other two by the narrow focus forced upon it by the lack of other perspectives and footnotes. Finally, "The Beguiling" shows Cain's encounter with Chaos (and the demon Emili) before The Traitor's Hand. In addition to providing welcome backstory and emotional depth to the events of the novel, it's an enjoyable short story in its own right, which makes good use of Cain's wit, some of genre fiction's more questionable tropes, and dramatic irony.

Though somewhat formulaic and predictable, Sandy Mitchell's first three Ciaphas Cain novels are simply an incredible amount of fun. Dive in if you are looking for some light, pulpy, and thoroughly amusing Science Fiction, and remember: Regrets are a waste of good drinking time. (p. 331)