Monday: W40K books

When I read books, I tend to go through phases of reading. I read very intensely for a few weeks and then read hardly anything at all for about a month or so, and so on. When an intense phase ends, it's usually because I get distracted by this machine (programming) or because the book I'm about a third of the way through starts getting a bit difficult. I think at the moment I'm entering an intense phase. This is helped by reading Warhammer 40,000 books (W40K), published by The Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop.

W40K books are pulp military science fiction, but this is no indicator of quality as there are some very good authors, specifically Gav Thorpe, Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett. I've just finished Thorpe's Path of the Warrior and I'm about a third of the way through Abnett's Ravenor omnibus, having read the Eisenhorn omnibus previously.

Mostly, the books are from the human perspective, but Path of the Warrior has an Eldar, an ancient humanoid race, as it's protagonist.

Gav Thorpe does a very decent job of conveying the "otherness" of the Eldar, but the book takes a bit to get going and there are too few battles in it for my taste. How the protagonist progresses from warrior to "exarch" (leader) after only two battles isn't sufficiently explained, plus the novel, which is meant to be part one of a series, concludes with the death and transformation of the character.

Ravenor is much more mainstream, part of Abnett's Inquisition series.

In W40K, human religion is based on a semi-dead God-Emperor, opposed by demons, aliens and heretics. The Inquisition is intended to oppose these forces, and the novels are a bit like a kind of baroque sci-fi spy/horror novel. Sort of advanced steampunk, but without the steam and with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. And they're great. The plots are a cut above the average W40K Space-Marines-kill-everything novel but there's enough shooty stuff so you don't get to miss it too much.