Hammer of the Emperor, Steve Parker, Steve Lyons, Lucien Soulban. Paperback! This was a used purchase which lingered for a long time on my nightstand. 762 pages of excellent semi-mindless reading.
Steve Parker has a novel and two stories in the compilation:
Mercy Run (short story) and Gunheads (novel) explore different facets of an Imperial Guard armor unit. The themes of sin and redemption are threaded through both stories, reflecting different facets of the Imperium’s moral and ethical bankruptcy. Mercy Run features a last-minute dash to find a missing officer. It has a couple of unpleasant twists before a surprise ‘happy’ (ish) ending.
Gunheads has some of the same characters on the Ork world of Golgotha where they are supporting a fame-obsessed general’s effort to recover the personal tank of an every more famous leader. It’s a Gallipoli-style debacle deep behind enemy lines. Tank commander Sergeant Wulfe, first introduced as the protagonist of Mercy Run, goes through his own personal moral and ethical crucible in parallel to the larger story.
The third story, Waiting Death, continues the same general themes he explored in the first two. The setting changes to Catachans in a jungle world where there’s more rot than meets the eye. The protagonist continues Parker’s other overarching theme, which is headstrong senior officers making poor decisions.
Steve Lyons contributes the novel Ice Guard and story-length A Blind Eye:
Ice Guard deals with a group of Guardsmen fighting a rear guard action on a planet about to be virus-bombed out of existence. They’re given a seemingly impossible quest, which turns out to be both doable and...not...at the same time.
The same basic plot is reprised in A Blind Eye. In both, brave people face the consequences of deception. Questions of honesty and trust are raised. The answers are disconcerting.
Finally, the excellently-named Lucien Soulban gives us Desert Raiders:
A psychic cry comes from across space and time, and a composite regiment of Guardsmen from violently-opposed tribal factions is dispatched to an empty desert world. Things are very much not as they seem and the novel ends on a sharp, bleak note. There are heavy overtones of hubris, deception, and bigotry, mixed with very modern notes of ethno-religious identitarianism. And those are the good guys. There is also, though, an interesting if slightly heavy-handed exploration of gaining and losing paradise--and whether paradise is possible at all. Grim and dark.
All of the stories in this omnibus were well-written, although I thought Waiting Death was the weakest. The story arcs are more character-driven than many quick-and-dirty SFF works, and explore some real moral and ethical quandaries.
I thought that Soulban, in particular, laid out a surprisingly subtle set of personalities and situations. To their credit, Parker and Lyons also crafted plots where everyone is caught in the middle space between their duty and horrific situations. I was usually left wondering if that center could hold, so to speak. Soulban paints a picture, however, which made me wonder if there is any center to hold.
“Soulban’s use of language is great, filled with rippling nuance. Desert Raiders’ first page starts with this:
“The transmission fell like a carelessly discarded blade from the heavens, straight into his naked brain. The astropath’s muscles seized into hard cords, and his teeth snapped down, cracking the enamel. His skeletal hands gripped the cardle’s iron grasp bars, cutting flesh with rust, and he bucked against the leather straps holding him fast...From the heavens, tonight, fell death, and visions of history undone and ghosts unmade.”
Indeed. ”
Written in 2007, the story has an all-too-up-to-date feel. The soldiers Soulban writes about have been set up to fail on every possible level--first by a heartless system and then (twice over!) by a universe which is absolutely indifferent to their struggles. They are thrust into a situation none of them actually understand, without the tools to survive. Riven into two hostile camps by ancient passions, they have to find some measure of unity to survive enemy onslaughts of literally mindless, relentless hostility. And then, when escape seems to be achieved--wham!
Another theme in all of these stories--it runs through the whole construct of Warhammer’s Imperium of Man--is that of largely decent people trying to get by in a series of hellish worlds where their own feckless leaders are at least as much an existential threat to them as their enemies. This is a bleak and cynical world, where amoral and brutal realpolitik rules supreme.
It’s not simply that people are punished by the “system” in exquisitely passive-aggressive ways before their guilt is even established. More often, it seems the system simply can’t be bothered to care. It’s deadly in its indifference. It grinds on, driven by hubris, stupidity or simply inertia, and the regular folks at the bottom and middle of it are to all intents and purposes on their own.
That, I think, is what makes it hard to write in this genre. There can only be so many ways to describe horror and dystopia before it gets repetitive, which puts a premium on writers’ imaginations and skills. On top of that, an author needs to tease out the inner life of characters who even at the high end are often just glorified (although violent and heavily-armed) serfs. All of that is set in a grimdark universe designed to be over-the-top and prone to self-caricature.
Given that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of Warhammer fiction drifts into repetitive and formulaic tropes. To be fair, too, this is a problem in large swathes of the rest of SFF too. But it is why the writing in this anthology was generally a pleasant surprise. The authors have managed to take what could be one-dimensional stereotypes and give them some--albeit limited--complexity, nuance and depth. All without being preachy.
If you want to read these for the action, you’ll find more than enough of it, set in everything from the tundra to the desert. But if you want just a little more, the authors deliver that too — there’s something here for most fans of the genre.
Not bad at all for adaptations of a game based on plastic miniatures!
Only slightly exaggerating.
Image: imperatorguides.com