Graham Reads Warhammer: Xenos Edition
Eisenhorn, book 1
The following is a script for my forthcoming YouTube video.
Hey guys, it’s Graham, what’s crackin’? Warhammer, that’s what. Specifically the Eisenhorn series, written by Dan Abnett and published by The Black Library.
Look, I’m not going to mince words or intentions, I 100% decided to jump into this series because Henry Cavill is a huge fan of it, and I think he’s gotten a crap deal as an actor. He worked his way up from bit parts in The Count of Monte Cristo and Stardust to finally playing Superman, only to have the entire DC slate mishandled right off the bat by an overrated director who was absolutely the wrong match for the project. After bouncing around a few Netflix projects where his character got backseated for a female lead, he finally gets to strike out on his own and lead a project he’s loved since he was a kid: Warhammer 40,000.
If Cavill’s in, I’m in. I can finally be reasonably optimistic that we’ll get a faithful adaptation of a longrunning property, and not the gutted corpse of something popular that’s just pantomiming Current Day Marxism. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Marvel, DC, Halo, The Witcher, you freaking name it, it’s all the same crap now. A big corporation buys it up, puts someone’s well-connected niece in charge of the writing, changes everything about it, and craps on the fans for noticing. The only thing worse than a fast food corporate diet is a fast food corporate diet that openly hates you for wanting something better.
So here comes Cavill. Yes, he’s producing and acting in a 40k show. Yes, it is through Amazon, the same bastards who crapped all over Wheel of Time, and then crapped all over Lord of the Rings. Why am I optimistic? Because they adapted The Terminal List and Reacher without any of the typical garbage infecting it. I don’t know what the studio breakdown is over at Amazon but there are clearly different factions, and with Cavill in the chain of command, there’s a higher chance that #They don’t get to screw it up.
Thus, I thought it would be worth the effort to try it out, and try I did. Last year I started with HORUS RISING, but I ended up smashing my head into a wall of unbreakable lore that I wasn’t ready to understand. The 40k universe has tens of thousands of years of established history and the Horus episode is a huge event that changed a lot of things. I wanted a story about a boots-on-the-ground character who experienced life in the Imperium in a normal way, so that I could get a grip on the setting. After some recommendations, I checked out Eisenhorn.
Now, if you’re watching this and you’re a Warhammer aficionado, bear with me, because I’m sure I’m going to miss a few things here. This is a complex setting with a massive amount of history. As I give a rundown of the story, I’m gonna have some questions for the seasoned readers/roleplayers, and I hope you can clear stuff up for me along the way. Here we go.
The Story
Gregor Eisenhorn is an Inquisitor in the Imperium of Man, which started on Earth tens of thousands of years ago and now spreads across the stars, conquering world after world and terraforming each one for human life. At the center of the Imperium is the God-Emperor of Mankind, who decrees the laws and defends the faith against the heretical powers of Chaos. As an Inquisitor, it is Eisenhorn’s job to hunt down heretics and conspirators and thwart their subversion of the Empire. This is primarily a religious job with military backing.
XENOS opens up with Eisenhorn tracking a villain named Murdin Eyclone to an ice planet called Hubris. Eisenhorn isn’t exactly sure what Eyclone wants there, he just knows that he’s a dangerous heretic and has to be stopped. The occupants of Hubris spend most of the year in cryosleep to conserve resources, so they’re defenseless when Eyclone starts killing them. Eisenhorn’s team catches up to Eyclone and they each take casualties, with Eisenhorn coming off victorious. He kills Eyclone before he can get answers from him.
Since the case is unsolved, Eisenhorn retraces Eyclone’s steps to another world called Gudrun. Along the way he picks up a woman named Alizebeth Bequin, who is has the rare condition of being “untouchable” by psychic powers. “Psykers” are more or less wizards in this world with mental powers, such as reading thoughts, compelling action in others, and so on. Most people are susceptible to psyker abilities, so being untouchable has certain ups and downs that go with it. Eisenhorn and most of his team are such psykers, to one extent or another. (I think. Let me know in the comments.)
En route to Gudrun, Eisenhorn’s ship gets inspected by the Navy, only to have naval troopers open fire on Eisenhorn and try to kill him. This leads Eisenhorn to suspect that the troopers were either deserters, or else there are elements of the Navy that are compromised by unknown forces, neither of which bodes well for their mission. Once on Gudrun, Eisenhorn is able to track down some of Eyclone’s contacts but doesn’t get any answers. He does, however cross paths with another Inquisitor working the same case, and they agree to cooperate as the get to the bottom of it.
While seeking Eyclone’s benefactors, Eisenhorn is captured, tortured for information, and thrown into a gladiatorial arena by seditious members of House Glaw, the local big shots on Gudrun. They’re fooling around with dark powers that can thwart Eisenhorn’s psyker abilities, which isn’t good for anyone serving the Imperium. Eisenhorn survives the arena and is rescued by his team, but he’s permanently damaged by the enhanced interrogation, and as a result his face remains emotionless for the rest of his life.
He’s able to recover an artifact from House Glaw called the Pontius, but before he can fully deduce its purpose, a mutinous group of Navy ships attacks the Battlefleet that arrived to rescue Eisenhorn, leaving everyone with more questions than answers. It’s clear that Eyclone and his mission were more dangerous than originally suspected, but Eisenhorn doesn’t know why. With the help of his team he’s able to activate the Pontius and finds out that it more or less holds the soul of a Glaw patriarch who died two hundred years ago, and wants to be resurrected. The current leaders of House Glaw and their allies were going to do just that, using the life-force of the sleeping residents on Hubris, but have since abandoned that course of action.
When Eisenhorn and Bequin interrogate the Pontius, they learn that House Glaw is searching for an artifact called the Necroteuch, which is more or less a book of dark magic that teaches mortals how to channel the powers of Chaos. This is in direct violation of the edicts of the Imperium, and it’s up to Eisenhorn to stop Glaw and their allies.
From this point on there’s a fair amount of the story left, and most of it consists of teaming up with good guys, chasing baddies, fighting baddies, killing baddies, exploring mind-bending planets that don’t follow the laws of physics, and destroying all copies of the Necroteuch. Perhaps my favorite moment of the third act was when Eisenhorn himself was tempted by the power the Necroteuch holds, akin to when Samwise had to take up the One Ring for Frodo and resisted its call. Acts of righteousness in a grimdark setting are to be appreciated.
The Characters
Eisenhorn has been described as a James Bond-type in Warhammer, and that’s kind of true, I suppose. He can be a spy, an infiltrator, a combatant, an interrogator, all of that stuff. He’s a man on a mission and he sticks to his principles. I’d say he’s more like Reacher than Bond.
His supporting cast is strong. Aemos is an old man with a limitless thirst for knowledge, and acts as a walking hard drive of relevant memory for Eisenhorn, kind of like Thufir Hawat in Dune. Midas Betancore is an ace pilot and gunslinger, equal parts Commander Riker and Han Solo. Bequin isn’t your average femme fatale, and she proves to be very adept at deception, working well alongside Eisenhorn.
Some of the characters were overly similar in function, description, and even names, but as long as you keep an eye on the context and events, you can mostly keep track of who’s who. It was just one more thing to be careful of in a very busy, very unfamiliar setting as I was trying to understand it.
Conclusion
At its core, the story is rather straightforward. Strip away the complicated wrapping paper and you’ve got a high-ranking law enforcement officer/military operator trying to solve a case that blows up into something way bigger than he initially thought. It’s the setting and the characters that broaden the scope and add far-reaching implications for the future. One of the many things for the reader to process is the length of the characters’ lives, as apparently they can live to be multiple centuries old. Eisenhorn’s tone, written in first-person, is that of a many giving his memoirs at the end of a long career, though he doesn’t come right out and say that. Knowing this, and knowing that there are more books in the series, I expect we’ll see big changes in future installments for this character.
More important, after reading a relatable story in this setting, I feel like I have a better idea of what to expect when I read about other characters in other types of plots. I’m stoked to try out another 40k title by a different author to see how it stacks up.