A book about Henry Cavill's new thing.
Please don't suck...
Okay kids, we start with a quick YouTube short:
Cavill. A man among men, and a rarity among nerds, in that he can A) afford Warhammer sets and B) has actually had a physical relationship with Gina Carano. Also he was Superman. And he was in The Count of Monte Cristo with Jim Caviezel (who should have been Batman instead of Affleck, but given how the Snyderverse turned out, maybe that was okay.)
Anyway, I’m in the weeds. Back on track: Warner Bros and DC are some of the richest brands in the country, run by the biggest idiots in the industry. After a decade of malfeasance, Cavill—who is top 2 or 3 among all actors to ever don the cape—got punted from the role of Krypton’s last son.
Likewise he bailed on future seasons of The Witcher, after the show got taken over by lonely catmoms who kept trying to get him shirtless. Mad that he wouldn’t date them, they started a whisper campaign behind his back about how he was “difficult” and “toxic.”
Ha ha! Well EAT PATRIARCHY ladies, because this Cat-vill lands on his feet. Free from the idiocy of Netflix and DC, he now gets to embrace the heads-or-tails luck of Amazon Prime Video.
Heads? They’ve done great with military adaptations, like The Terminal List and Jack Reacher.
Tails? They like to ruin fantasy adaptations, like The Wheel of Time and Lord of the Rings.
Enter, then, a perfect mix of the two, with Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop game that spawned a series of novels some 250 strong…and counting.
I first became aware of Warhammer in 2004, living in Europe as a missionary. I saw ads for it everywhere. The minis looks really cool, but I wasn’t there for gaming so I didn’t look into it too much. I’ve only ever been the most casual of gamers, spending my money instead on books and movies, for better or worse.
Well, the books have been there this whole time, and now I’m jumping in. With the recommendation of a few knowledgeable friends I picked HORUS RISING as my entry point.
What’s it about?
(deep breath)
Holy crap.
Uh, okay. Here’s the skinny. 40,000 refers to the year, relative to our own. Sooooo yeah, this is even deeper into humanity’s future than Dune. We’ve conquered the cosmos, and we’re still expanding. New systems, stars, worlds, etc etc. There’s an emperor at the top of the Imperium of Man, and he has 18 sons called Primarchs. The emperor himself is a mysterious figure (more on that later? I assume?) but for now we’re worried about the Imperium itself.
This book is a thimbleful of water in Lake Tahoe. With every new development you find yourself rubbing your forehead and asking “Okay, but what is that?” As long as you’re willing to do that for a while, the general shape of the world and story will come together in your brain, and you’ll realize just how wide and deep it goes. The description above is enough to get you into the kiddie pool. Keep walking around the curve of the earth until you have to swim, and then swim forever.
This is a big world.
That said, we’re talking about the Horus Heresy, a series within the larger narrative of WH40k. What is that? Why does it matter?
Well, in this future, the Imperium has replaced all religion. Mankind doesn’t practice faith beyond the faith it has in the Emperor. No gods, no saints or angels, no demons, no heaven or hell. There are alien worlds with either monsters or sentient races on them. They shall all be conquered and brought under the command of the Imperium. That’s it.
Until a soldier named Horus comes along. A soldier who encounters a strange thing on a strange world…something that bucks his faith in the Emperor, and makes him ask some uncomfortable questions…realize some uncomfortable conclusions…
Ultimately, to be true to what he has personally experienced, he has to buck the rigorous faith required of him by his Primarch, and his Emperor. Thus he leads a rebellion against the established order, and we get the heresy described in the series title. Horus is going to rise up against the Imperium.
This book is the story of how he gets to that point.
The writing is pretty dang good. It’s not just cheap genre fluff, there’s actually a poetry to it, a prosaic flair reminiscent of classical works, which I didn’t expect. The writer took it seriously and it showed. That’s saying something, for a popular brand tie-in.
Content-wise, there wasn’t any sensuality, there was one scene where a vulnerable woman was sitting in her quarters by herself under a blanket, she had a soldier visiting her to talk about something (related to a mission.) When he left she got up and was naked, she locked the door. Other than a few PG-13 swear words, the rest was relegated to action violence, with space marines fighting aliens.
I’m going to read more of these, please and thank you.