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Author: Sean Stiennon

The Wasteland: Swan Song by Robert McCammon

The Wasteland: Swan Song by Robert McCammon

Swan Song Robert McCammon-small Swan Song Robert McCammon-back-small

Swan Song
By Robert McCammon
Pocket Books (956 pages, $4.95, June 1987)
Cover by Rowena Morrill

Post-apocalypse tales are a rising star these days. Mad Max: Fury Road is rightfully acknowledged as a high-water mark for action films. Most recently the release of Bethseda’s Fallout 4 has anyone who calls himself a gamer holed up for power-armored adventure in the American wasteland. Whether the apocalypses are caused by nuclear blasts, hordes of the undead, or simply climate change, they consistently capture the imagination of millions.

The appeal is easy to understand. Our imaginations suggest that the collapse of civilization would give us ordinary people a chance to be heroes, to transform our baseball bats into swords, to see our commuter vehicles transformed into heroes’ chariots. We spend idle time in fluorescent-lit cubicles wondering how we’d fare if a mushroom cloud rose over the horizon.

Most post-apocalyptic settings have a clear surface pessimism. The end of civilization isn’t generally something to smile at. But I think the genre’s enduring popularity can be found in an underlying optimism about the ability of (relatively) ordinary people to become heroes in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. The misery of radioactive mutations or mass deaths are the grim background which makes the courage and heroism of the survivors all the brighter.

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The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

The Blood of Martyrs: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr

Sabbat Martyr-smallI mentioned last time that, out of the Gaunt’s Ghosts series thus far, I found Straight Silver the closest thing to a weak link. I have to give credit where credit is due, though: any novel that sets up a book like Sabbat Martyr is a novel I’m glad to have found.

The Ghosts novels seem to be roughly divisible into broad arcs. The first three books, retrospectively collected as The Founding, where an introduction to the broad cast of characters and a training ground for Abnett to find his groove as an author of military science fiction. The second arc, The Saint, began with Honor Guard, and finds its completion and climax in Sabbat Martyr. Sabbat Martyr picks up on the spiritual themes of Honor Guard, as well as key subplots from Guns of Tanith and Straight Silver, and loops them all together into a book that is easily the best Ghosts novel so far, and stands among the best books of its type I’ve read.

There’s a brief page at the beginning of each book, excerpted from a later Imperial history of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, that briefly gives us a big picture of how the overall war is going. Usually, these don’t have much direct relevance to the plot, and are mostly there for flavor. The one for Sabbat Martyr, though, informs us that the Crusade is overstretched, bogged down in an assault on the key fortress world Morlond, and vulnerable to counter-attacks along its flanks. Urlock Gaur, Chaos Archon, is engaged at the front, but his lieutenants are circling like sharks to exploit weakness in the Imperial position.

In short, the Crusade needs a miracle.

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In the Trenches: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Straight Silver

In the Trenches: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Straight Silver

Straight Silver Dan Abnett-smallThe world of Aexe Cardinal has been largely separated from galactic civilization for several centuries. Their technology is roughly on the level of ours around the time of the First World War — which is significant, because for almost half a century, the dominant nations of the planet have been in a deadlock with the Chaos-tainted Republic of Shadik. Their war is fought between lines of trenches across an ancient, toxic no man’s land. In all the ways that matter, it is the First World War, amplified in scale, duration, and stakes.

And who better to break a deadlock than the Imperial Guard, spearheaded by the tough-as-nails bravos of the Tanith First-and-Only?

The title, Straight Silver, refers to the foot-long war-knives carried by all the Tanith. I typically imagine them looking something like the classic Swiss bayonet. It’s a fitting title, because the cramped spaces of trench networks offer plenty of opportunity for blade-work.

After the intense battles of Honor Guard and Guns of Tanith, though, Straight Silver feels like a quiet interlude. There’s still plenty of fighting, but the only encounter which really stood out to me was a last-ditch defense of an isolated manor occurring in the last 20-30 pages of the novel. There’s another lengthy sequence where Gaunt personally leads a team across no man’s land to take out a battery of massive bombardment weapons, and while it’s certainly solid, it doesn’t particularly stand out from the other, similar sequences in the series.

Part of the problem is that, in recreating the conditions of a World War One style deadlock, Abnett hasn’t really given the Shadik troopers any unique features to make them more than generic bad guys — not even funny hats. It’s also not specified exactly how Chaos has affected them. The Shadik Republic thus stands out among the Ghosts’ adversaries only for its blandness.

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Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

Tanith Airborne: Warhammer 40k: Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Guns of Tanith

The Guns of Tanith-smallThe Guns of Tanith
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 5 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (315 pages, $6.95, May 2002)
Cover by Adrian Smith

The Guns of Tanith opens with another first for the Ghosts: A training sequence. After redeeming himself for the disaster on Hagia, Gaunt and the men of the Tanith First-and-Only are being deployed to Phantine. Phantine’s industrial history spans so many millennia that most of the planet is covered by smog toxic enough to make human life impossible. The remaining Phantine cities are perched on mountains whose elevations rise above the poisonous clouds. So naturally, when the time comes to liberate Phantine settlements from the occupying forces of Chaos, ground assaults aren’t an option. Thus, en route to Phantine, we find the Ghosts in training for an aerial drop assault, supported by Phantine’s elite aerial corps.

The training sequence reintroduces us to some familiar faces: Twitchy sniper Larkin, soft-hearted giant “Try-Again” Bragg, scout leader Mkoll, and the rest of the crew, along with some relatively new arrivals, particularly Commissar Viktor Hark, who joined the Ghosts in the previous volume to supplement Gaunt’s split role as both Commissar (a kind of propaganda officer) and Colonel of the Ghosts. Hark, as neither Tanith nor Vervunhive, is in a position to be a little harsher, a little more detached, and perhaps a little more objective in his disciple than Gaunt can ever be. He’s a fair man, and fits well with the Tanith, but is more at ease with the brutal reality of a commissar’s duty to enforce iron disciple.

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Road Trip from Hell: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Honour Guard

Road Trip from Hell: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Honour Guard

Honour Guard Dan Abnett-smallHonor Guard
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 4 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (312 pages, $6.95, August 2001)
Cover by Martin McKenna

The faith of the Imperium of Man — the only faith, thanks to a massive Inquisition — is centered around the God-Emperor of Mankind, who sits upon his Golden Throne on Holy Terra. Whether he’s a divine being incarnate, or a man who somehow gained god-like powers, is a question I don’t know the Warhammer 40K lore well enough to answer, but the emperor is kept eternally alive by the arcane machinery of the Golden Throne, and his massive psychic energies provide a beacon which allows mortal pilots to navigate spacecraft through the treacherous realm of the Warp.

The Emperor stands as the sole God, but there’s room in the Imperial cult to include various other figures, “saints” who are venerated for their faith in the Emperor and their deeds in his service. Given the Imperium’s nature, and the character of the WH40K universe in general, these saints are primarily warriors. One such is Saint Sabbat, the warrior woman who originally won the Sabbat Worlds for the Imperium, and in whose name the present-day (sometime in the 41st millennium) Sabbat Worlds Crusade is being waged.

We catch up with the Ghosts as they’re locked in street-to-street combat on the Saint’s own homeworld of Hagia, fighting the Chaos fanatics who have claimed the world’s holy cities as their own. This particular band of Chaos worshippers is particularly keen on denigrating the Imperial faith, so they’ve taken on the name Infardi, formally used by pilgrims to Hagia, and are heavily tattooed with blasphemous scenes involving the Emperor and various others figures of worship.

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Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

Street Fighters of the 41st Millennium: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Necropolis

Necropolis_oldNecropolis
A Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 3 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (301 pages, $6.95, December 2000)
Cover by Martin Hanford

Necropolis marks a turning point in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series for a few reasons. It’s the first book written entirely as an original novel rather than an expansion of previously published short work. It also broadens the scope of the first couple books in covering an entire Imperial Guard campaign from the first rain of shells to the final confrontation with a Chaos warlord, as the Ghosts join in the defense of a hive city besieged by a horde of millions.

Hive cities are one of the key features of life in the 41st millennium, and they’re exactly what the name implies: Enormous cities where millions, if not billions, of Imperial citizens live elbow-to-elbow in habitation towers most easily measured in kilometers. They’re usually built around some kind of industry, whether raw resource mining, mass agriculture, or manufacturing, and exist almost as worlds unto themselves. Hives have their own aristocracy, their own independent militaries, their own networks of corporations and guilds, their underclasses and underworlds.

Vervunhive, on the Sabbat Worlds planet Verghast, actually seems like a reasonably nice place to live, by 41st millennium standards. That is until warning claxons fill every corner of the hive, and a merciless barrage of shells starts falling from guns placed over the horizon.

Panic spreads through all levels of the hive as we skip viewpoints from Agun Soric, a manufacturing plant supervisor, to Gol Kolea, a deep-shaft miner, and from Tona Criid, a gangster from the hives depths, to Salvador Sondar, the half-mad ruler of the hive. An unstoppable tide of armor follows on the heels of the shelling, smashing the attempted counterattack by the Vervunhive defense regiments, and only the hive’s defensive energy shield keeps it from being overrun. Their neighbor, Zoica, has been corrupted by the dark powers of Chaos, and now the entire population and industrial might of that rival hive have mobilized to claim the rest of the planet.

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Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

Space Orks, Space Elves, and Tough Space Men: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: Ghostmaker

GhostmakerGhostmaker
A
Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 2 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (288 pages, $6.95, July 2000)

In the inaugural series installment, Warhammer 40K: First and Only, Dan Abnett introduced us to the Tanith First regiment of Imperial Guardsmen and their iron-willed commander, Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. That novel had Gaunt as its clear protagonist. A series of flashback chapters sketched out his past: Losing his father to Ork hordes in boyhood, growing up a ward of the Imperium, beginning a military career, and finally avenging his loss in a chainsword duel with the man who left his father to die.

We also got an introduction to the Tanith, a thousand men who together represent the only survivors of their homeworld. In First and Only, we saw them largely through Gaunt’s eyes, and received a comparatively cursory introduction to the various personalities among them. In Ghostmaker, Abnett establishes the men of the Tanith in greater depth, laying out a cast of battle brothers as rich and intriguing as any created by Bernard Cornwell or C. S. Forrester.

Ghostmaker is a fix-up novel. The brief “present-day” chapters are connective tissue for a series of short stories from the regiment’s past, each of which centers around an individual soldier of the Tanith and gives him a moment to shine. Along the way we learn more about what the Ghosts lost on their homeworld and how each of them lives with the horrors they confront on 41st millennium battlefields.

I’m normally ambivalent about fix-up novels. I’ve read good ones (see Tears of Ishtar by Michael Ehart for a great example), but in general I feel they end up too fragmented to be read as a novel and too connected to read piecemeal, the way I would normally approach a short story collection. Ghostmaker is a stand-out in the field, and ranks as my favorite of the first trio of Ghosts novels.

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Your Greatest Fan

Your Greatest Fan

John C. WrightJohn C. Wright, the author of the Children of Chaos and Count to Eschaton series (among others), recently put up a post on his blog which contains the most sublime encouragement I’ve ever seen offered from one writer to another. I’ll admit that I felt a mist of manly tears come to my eyes while I read through his words.

If you’ve ever written, or considered writing, you owe it to yourself to read his post: “The Brazen Author of the Book of Gold.

Wright includes some musings on the Muse at the end, but the beating heart of the post is the offset section.

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Where Extra-planar Daemons and Dark Gods Play: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: First & Only

Where Extra-planar Daemons and Dark Gods Play: Warhammer 40K: Gaunt’s Ghosts: First & Only

Gaunts Ghosts First and Only-smallFirst & Only
A
Warhammer 40K novel
Volume 1 of Gaunt’s Ghosts
By Dan Abnett
Black Library (272 pages, $6.95, March 2000)
Cover by Kenson Low

Warhammer 40,000 is, at its core, a miniatures game artfully designed to separate wargamers from their money with peak efficiency. But it may be more broadly known as a shared-universe fiction franchise which occupies several shelves in the tie-in fiction wasteland west of “Z” at your local book retailer. Our very own John O’Neill has covered several books in the ongoing Horus Heresy saga, and odds are that even if you’ve never picked up a book, you’ve noticed the Black Library imprint occupying ever more space on the New Releases rack.

WH40k occupies a gray area between science fiction and fantasy. I’d categorize it most accurately as a very grim shade of space opera, but extra-planar daemons and dark gods play a central role in its varied mythology, and there are sci-fi races which correspond to elves, orcs, and even undead (with heavy shades of Terminator). It’s primarily a canvas on which to tell stories about war, and so none of the various factions are particularly given to the arts of peacetime.

The majority of WH40K fiction is stories about the Space Marines (Adeptus Astartes for purists): genetically enhanced super soldiers who go into battle against alien and daemonic hordes clad in heavy power armor and carrying an assortment of massive guns and chainsaw swords. They tend to be hyper-manly, grim, serious, and generally without concerns besides waging war.

Honestly, I’ve found most of the WH40K fiction I’ve sampled to be fairly shallow. Every story is perpetual war and violence, with characters who exist only as warriors, moving from battle to blood-drenched battle. Most of the time, I’ve felt that any sense of deeper meaning to the carnage gets obscured, leaving little more than loving descriptions of weaponry and slaughter.

But there are diamonds in the ashes, and Dan Abnett’s work shines brightest of them all.

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Giant Season: A Review of Shingeki no Kyoujin (Attack on Titan)

Giant Season: A Review of Shingeki no Kyoujin (Attack on Titan)

I love anime, but I’d fallen out of the habit of watching it. The last series I finished was Claymore, nearly a year ago, and that disappointed me with paper-thin worldbuilding, slow animation, and one-note characters. Anime was beginning to look like a habit I’d dropped.

And then, based on a massive Internet buzz, I watched the first episode of Shingeki no Kyoujin, aka Attack on Titan. Within that short period — a mere twenty-two minutes, minus commercial interruptions — it became clear that I had stumbled across something great. I was moved, horrified, tantalized with the promise of soaring action to come, and, most importantly of all, captured by the mystery and terror of a bizarre world.

Take a moment to ravish your eyes on the glory of this opening song, which added a layer of fresh hair to my already-manly chest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2ju9FJNHJc

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