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title = "Horus Rising - Dan Abnett"
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date = 2019-10-30
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "warhammer 40000", "dan abnett", "horus heresy",
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"scifi", "2 stars"]
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+++
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[Goodreads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/625603.Horus_Rising):
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After thousands of years of expansion and conquest, the imperium of man is at
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its height. His dream for humanity nearly accomplished, the emperor hands over
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the reins of power to his warmaster, Horus, and heads back to Terra. But is
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Horus strong enough to control his fellow commanders and continue the
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emperor's grand design?
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{{ stars(stars=2) }}
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I hate to say something like this, but you know that messed up fan made story
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with Gordon Freeman, in which there is mostly no punctuation and it’s really
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absurd?
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That’s what I felt when I read the intro of the book. And that feeling stuck
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with me for the whole book.
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This book came from a Humble Bundle pack and that’s why I didn’t have any
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previous experience with the Warhammer 40,000 universe. But jumping into this
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book (which is part of a larger series, as far as I know) is not a great way
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to get into it. The fact that the intro is really into the absurd (even if the
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book universe is absurd) just makes it a worse experience all over. Whoever
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came with this decision was not someone smart.
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The story is more about Loken, a captain that raises from the lower castes
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into a well known captain (or so I get by the excerpts we get from the past)
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and more much about Horus himself. It feels so weird that it seems more like
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someone calling “Shadow of the Giant”, which is a book focused on Bean,
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“Ender’s Game”. Although there is some overlap between the stories, in which
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Bean finds and fights along Ender, the book is in no way about Ender. The same
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thing goes here. More focus on the titular character would be better, or call
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this book “Loken’s Vision” or whatever. It not “Horus Rising” when it is just
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a sideline character.
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Also, the long descriptions of Horus, pointing how beautiful and with a great
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body and some mystical aura around it, doesn't help liking the character. How
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can you like someone that everybody thinks is the perfect example of humanity?
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It also feels like too many ideas where cobbled together for the book. There
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isn’t an spinal story that keeps the book together, they are simply different
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moments in Loken’s life — which, again, gives me the feeling that using “Horus
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Rising” as a name was a bad choice.
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So you have a book about a character that should be the main character but
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it’s a secondary one, in a universe poorly presented and with some bad pacing.
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I wouldn’t blame any fellow Humble Bundle purchasers if they decided to drop
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the series altogether after this.
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