Dan Abnett is arguably the best author working in the Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 setting. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue and his characters tend to be well-drawn and to have understandable motivations, even if he introduces them only to kill them off a few sentences later. This is actually one of his favorite tricks, and it means that his novels, set in the splinter of the 40K setting known as the “Daniverse” are among the more colorful and well-populated.
Abnett also understands a key problem with 40K, which is that it’s actually sort of a shitty setting. Space Marines are dull, Imperial Guardsmen are idiots, and even Orks can get monotonous after a while. Sure, in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but you have to write about more than war or risk your novel turning into a Risk War Diary. Abnett’s solutions, at least in the novels I’ve read, are to avoid writing about Marines whenever possible, and to populate his stories with more-or-less normal humans who exist in cultures distinct from the usual kinda-like-Nazis-kinda-like-Victorians Imperium of Man. Legion, the 7th novel in the very long-running Horus Heresy series, set in the 30th Millennium, long before the “present” of the 40K universe. The novel purports to tell the tale of the Alpha Legion, youngest of the Space Marine Legions and one that we know in 40K as a dreaded Traitor Legion. In fact, like a lot of the Heresy novels Legion takes place mostly from the perspective of a series of bystanders, normal humans serving alongside the Alpha Legion in the vast non-Marine human armies.
John Grammaticus, an immortal psychic, works for a Cabal of aliens who have seen the future. They would like to meet Alpharius, leader and genetic template for the Alpha Legion, so they can warn him about a coming danger to the galaxy that the Legion might be able to help avert. The aliens don’t trust the humans, who are a young and violent species, and the humans don’t trust the aliens because various aliens have perpetrated mass slaughter against humans at times when the Imperium was weak. Wacky misunderstandings and hijinks ensue.
Continue reading Schmannonball Schmead: Legion by Dan Abnett
