Horus Hears a Who

Title: Horus Rising (Horus Heresy Book 1)

Author: Dan Abnett

Publisher: Black Library

When you’re writing about a premise as silly as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 (W40K for short), or something equally silly like superheroes or giant robots, I think you’ve got two options: either revel in the silliness, play it with a wink and a smile and dial it up to 40,000, or else commit to it entirely, and really try to work out the realistic implications of the crazy premise so that you can wring some meaning from it.

If I can go on a quick tangent to illustrate what I mean, let’s look at some movies as examples: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Pacific Rim (2013) are very wink-wink we know this is ludicrous but ain’t it fun?, while Watchmen (2009) and Logan (2017) are committed to getting under the skin of either the whole idea of superheroes in the former case, or one superhero in particular in the latter case.

Point is, you can make it work either way, but this novel doesn’t.

THE SILLINESS AT THE CORE

The gonzo, over-the-top conceit of the W40K universe—a tabletop/miniatures wargame first published in 1987—is that in the year 40,000 giant, roided space marines in a pseudo-Roman intergalactic Empire will fight on distant planets against fantasy beasts, like Orks and Eldar (Elves), Ridley Scott Alien-esque Tyranids and other assorted weird creatures.

It’s supposed to be ‘grim’ in the sense that the default human protagonists belong to a bloodthirsty, evangelical crusade, and also in the sense that they have no hope of ever winning against the opposition ranged against them. That grimness, however, doesn’t quite hide the silliness at the core—it’s an over-the-top grimness, yet it’s never squalid or gratuitously shocking, so that grimness can be played for laughs.

So when it came time to build on W40K’s long-running popularity and expand the brand into the field of fiction, I think those two paths were open—go hard or go full ridiculous.

In 2006’s “Horus Rising,” the first of 48 (and counting) volumes in the “Horus Heresy” series, Games Workshop’s fiction imprint, Black Library, opted for serious, but it’s kind of a dull seriousness that never tries to scratch beneath the tropes it presents.

If the intent had been to produce a fun page-turner, then I think they’d have done far better to go the nudge-nudge, wink-wink route. Instead, the whole thing is a bit dour and downbeat, without any insight or innovation that might make such dreariness worth slogging through.

COMMITTED TO THE WRONG THINGS

Dan Abnett—whose career seems more focused on comics such as X-Men, the Punisher or Judge Dredd than novels—brings to the novel the Judge Dredd tone with none of the social commentary. It’s a competent and serviceable book, but really doesn’t have anything going for it beyond the mechanics of plot.

The story of this first book focuses on Space Marine Captain slash post-human superman Garviel Loken, and details how he and his avowedly atheist comrades deal with an encounter with supernatural, seemingly godlike creatures that live in W40K’s equivalent of hyperspace, called the Warp.

During a battle on an alien planet, one of Loken’s men is possessed by something that lives in the Warp, mutating him into a monster. Loken is shaken but reassured there is a scientific explanation, while one of the civilians who witnesses the horror is shocked into joining a secret cult that worships the Emperor (despite the latter’s insistence he is mortal). Meanwhile, Loken’s commander, Horus, is slowly corrupter by agents of the infernal/otherworldly power.

The question of “What happens to religion when humanity gets into space?” is maybe not an obvious choice for a wargame to tackle, and frankly one the book doesn’t spend too much time addressing despite it being the only thing of real interest happening—Abnett is much more focused on the machinations surrounding Horus and foreshadowing his eventual fall from grace. Presumably explored in more detail in the other 47 books in the series.

There’s potential in the idea, for sure. Will the triumph of reason represented by space exploration and colonization lead to the downfall of religions, when we do not find God or Allah or Zeus or whoever out there? Is religion truly just the retreat before the inexplicable, and will new mysteries in the galaxy drive us back into its arms? Interesting questions to ask, but not ones you can really deal with in a series—and oh what a series it is—of books about bloodshed and blowing things up across the galaxy.

MAXIMUM SILLINESS

So, for me at least, it feels committed to the wrong things: it’s committed to its premise, but only the surface details, the who is doing what to who, when and where, rather than the underlying concepts or ideas. I think Abnett could and should have jettisoned all the faux-introspection and just gone for maximum silliness—perhaps had the buffoonish Orks (who’ve always been presented as a kind of parody of the British working class in W40K) as foils to the serious space marines—and had more fun with this. 

Or is that ... HERESY?