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