Book review: Horus Rising

content/reviews/books/horus-rising.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
++++
+title = "Horus Rising - Dan Abnett"
+date = 2019-10-30
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["en-au", "books", "reviews", "warhammer 40000", "dan abnett"]
++++
+
+[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?
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+{{ stars(stars=2) }}
+
+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.