Musings on my introduction to Warhammer 40k
It started with lore videos. Luetin09 had a playlist of lore videos on Warhammer 40,000. I never really paid much attention to the fiction or the tabletop game, but I thought the series would be a good thing to listen to as I fell asleep at night so I added the playlist to my library. I'm not sure when exactly I started to get hooked. It might have been sometime around the 7th or 8th video after the Horus Heresy story was told that I started to become much more invested in paying attention to the fiction. The tragedy of the Horus Heresy still compels me, the fall from grace is a reliable source of drama and emotion when done well, and the dramatic irony of an Emperor who sought to eradicate all religion and faith becoming a God-Emperor worshipped by the remains of his empire is rich.
Since I was most interested in exploring the world of fiction and less interested in the tabletop side of things, I started to look into what books would be the best to read to get introduced to this world outside of lore videos on YouTube. Most online sources and advice from others already into the fiction recommended the Eisenhorn trilogy of books. I happily downloaded and voraciously consumed the first book, Xenos, within a week. It was pretty much the perfect sci-fi space fantasy adventure. You had your cast of characters already known to each other and introduced to the reader through a mid-mission introduction that opens up into the larger conspiracy that consumes the rest of the plot. It moves and moves from beat to beat, seemingly always ending with enough of a teaser or revelation in the last line to make me eager to dig into the next chapter whenever I could. New characters get introduced, there are actual long lasting consequences and losses (most notably the destruction of Eisenhorn's ability to smile) and downtime where characters are given adequate time to believably recover and prepare for the next large setpiece and sustain even more damage before the ultimate resolution.
With Xenos wrapped up and my interest fully piqued into what else Warhammer 40k had to offer, I chose the first of the Horus Heresy novels, Horus Rising. The introduction was comprehensively confusing as it bait and switches your expectation as to future events with a meandering, perspective changing introduction revolving around Horus killing the emperor, emphasis on little e. Once my confusion was cleared up, watching Loken ascend into the inner circle of Horus, and seeing the intimate details of a body of people, the faults and cracks in the Emperor's Great Crusade became everpresent and ultimately believable as the fault of human beings. The Emperor is, as he claims, just a man, and that is why his crusade ultimately fails. As famously claimed by Halo: Reach, "from the beginning, you know the end." Horus will fall, legions of space marines will perish, and after a few more thousands of years we will reach the timeline of Eisenhorn, but for now, I get to fret and worry over the ultimate fates of the periphery characters of history such as Lorken and the various remembrancers accompanying Horus' forces across the cosmo. My one complaint is that due to the ultimate fate of the universe being known, a few too many knowing references are written in, things such as Astartes killing Astartes, Horus himself succumbing to Chaos, the Emperor dying and being worshipped throughout the empire, etc. It cheapens the surrounding characters as fourth wall breaks weaken the overall drama of the current time by referencing known facts the characters can't comprehend. These don't reinforce the tragedy of known events yet to happen, they just call attention to themselves as winks from the author to the reader and not believable dialogue between characters.
Once Horus Rising was completed, I returned to Eisenhorn with the second novel, Malleus. Though I didn't find it as good as Xenos, it was still a great sci-fi adventure, and the epilogue is a huge tease for the finale in Hereticus. Malleus, as a result of revisting and reintroducing various elements present in Xenos, something that, to me, happened only a week or two ago but for Eisenhorn happened a century ago, feels too fresh to have as much significance to me as I feel was intended. This pushes me more towards the various side-novels and short stories involving Eisenhorn, as they, presumably, do not have as many direct ties to each other and the mainline trilogy as to make the universe feel smaller than it is.
Now I'm beginning False Gods, the second book of the Horus Heresy. The series is quite extensive, as I've already looked into the order in which they were published, as well as some of the earliest Warhammer 40k novels as I'm always interested in seeing the very beginning of something that is now so large. It has also made me more interested in the games that seek to capture the experience of living within this world, at this time mostly with the Boltgun game, as I can never get enough of the boomer-shooters explosion (hopefully something will one day surpass DUSK.) I have been really enjoying this dip into Warhammer fiction though, and intend to see it through as long as my interest holds. I've already torn through three novels in less than a month, who knows how much more I can do.
