Last Booklog entry, I mentioned heading back to the Horus Heresy series after catching up on the Warhammer 40,000 proper timeline. As it turns out, I decided to read through all of the lore of the tabletop game's 8th edition first. There's a lot of interesting info on the current state of the galaxy in there, along with a cursory glance at all of the relevant factions. I still don't really know much to speak of of the T'au or Genestealer Cults. Are the latter a part of the Tyranid race or not? If so, how are they different? I'll have to delve into some more 40K fiction at some point to find out.
In the meantime, I have returned to the Heresy timeline, finishing off book 43, Shattered Legions. It's a collection of short stories and a novella featuring Iron Hands Warleader Shadrak Meduson and other key players in the remains of the three loyalist legions smashed at the Dropsite Massacre. Meduson becomes a type of guerrilla leader for this asymmetrical war effort to confound and delay Horus's return to Terra. There is a lot of exploration of themes like survivor's guild, betrayal, the desire for vengeance, justice, and the righting of wrongs, as well as integrating disparate parts into a new alloyed whole and modifying the organizational structure of a fighting force to adapt to a wildly different set of circumstances than it was originally built for. It's a kind of underexplored area in stories of Space Marines, since the Shattered Legions are much more of a handicapped and underdog faction than most in the fiction.
The next book in sequence is The Crimson King, which will be the first time we've seen much of Magnus and the Thousand Sons since the razing of Prospero much earlier in the series.
No comments:
Post a Comment