Adam

Firstly, I do love a lot of 80's slop and I love discovering lost forgotten tales. This kind of sits in the realms of both. However, some 80's slop can be really good and well written, the rest is just not good to painfully mediocre. Sadly, I'd probably rate this in the realms of not good overall. I can really find no info on the author, it might be a pseudonym, or this Tankwar series might be a one and done for this author.

I found a few of these books at a library sale and they looked so ridiculous I had to give them a try. Bonus points because they were short and hopefully a quick read. Unfortunately, the story wound up being somewhat boring at times that I could not tear through the writing as fast as I would have liked. I also had to switch on and off with another book just to read something a little bit better. However, this entire series being lost to time, might mean I read the whole thing so someone out there has a full review of the books!

The story is primarily about the outbreak of World War III and the tank crew of an experimental tank called "No Slack" suddenly caught behind enemy lines. For whatever reason the experimental tank was in Germany and when World War III broke out as the Russians moved into the region, our intrepid tank crew found themselves needing to escape the region immediately. The book starts off with these kinds of tank action sequences and it was pretty good at first. I was somewhat hoping it would be similar to that movie Fury, which was a really fun movie. I will say, at first glance this book felt a bit like that, but rather quickly deviated.

The main character is the commander of the tank crew Sergeant Max Tag. As with a lot of military novels, the rest of the crew has plucky nicknames, which makes it annoying to read when there are too many to keep track of. Luckily this book doesn't get that bad for the reader. As they make their escape Max and his crew run into an old German buddy Holz. Who is heading up a small German unit with his sister Giesla.

...And this is where the ultra bad writing begins. Reading this in 2026 is probably very different from reading this in 1989, and I don't know if I ever would have thought about it back then, but I've seen enough lists of bad writing tropes of women to know that this pretty much checks off all the boxes. First off, she's basically the only woman in the entire novel. Like, we seriously don't encounter any others at all anywhere in this universe. Maybe this will change in future novels? I'll keep you posted. First off, I assure you this woman is very hot. Because the only woman around a warzone better be? She also has a traumatic past, to "give her character depth," I assume? Guess what happened to her? She was kidnapped and sexually assaulted multiple times. The assaulters also killed her husband and made her watch. Was this during a war? No, no it wasn't, it was during a car race... At this point we've very much lost the plot... but it gets worse.

We have a couple chapters of war action, which weren't terrible, but then we move into a 20 something page chapter about Max's past. About how awesome he was in high school, of all times. This isn't even much of a spoiler, because it has literally nothing to do with the book. It feels like it exists just to show off how awesomely cool Max must be? Anyway, this is where another woman shows up in the book, she has pretty no lines, while Max rattles on about things. You see, instead of going to prom with someone he really liked, he took pity on the homely girl and asked her to go with him to show off how great of a guy he is, I guess. It's just dumb and very bad writing all around. But low and behold she gets dressed up and now she's hot! They stop for gas and these bikers start to harass her about going with them. Now Max needs to show off how cool he is and stand up to the bikers at the gas station. He, naturally, embarasses them, but now they lie in wait after the prom and they bring the whole gang! Max challenges them to a race and wins... which solves the problem? The sheriff gets involved and forces the bikers to back down, but then Max goes and has a talk with his dad. His dad proceeds to tell him stories about Vietnam and now we have this whole Vietnam sequence in the middle of this book... what in the hell am I reading at this point? Now the plot has really been destroyed and I'm, frankly, bored out of my mind.

I'm really hoping the rest of the tank crew doesn't get these weird twenty page monologues, because then there would be almost nothing left of World War III to talk about... and while that, thankfully, doesn't happen, their backgrounds are minute blurbs. To be honest, they feel more like one sentence author notes that just got put in here and weren't fleshed out at all. So, now we know the backgrounds of everyone on the team, now we can get back to the war. The action rather drops off for quite a while as most of the time is spent running and hiding. They end up meeting up with some other Americans and with the German Jagd unit they make a break for safety. I don't know if, being American, I just don't know much about the German area, but I was getting pretty lost in their descriptions of where they were trying to go. They pretty much escaped into farm country and I imagine the areas and lands are just as nondescript as driving through those regions of the U.S.

The writing often feels a bit clunky, where the author tries to be funny or witty with his characters. Sometimes it works, but maybe I just don't know 80's military slang, because everything feels like slang at a certain point. It's also weird to have all the American soldiers throwing their slang at the Germans as if the Germans would understand what is going on... They eventually get to a farmhouse and regroup and this is where the obligatory sex scene has to occur? This was just awkward to say the least. Giesla basically trauma dumps on Max, telling him all the horrible things that were done to her and her husband when they were kidnapped. And here we find out that she was taken by a group of black men... that were in cahoots with the Russians? Does our intrepid author explain the connection, certainly not. Just throwing around things people fear at the time... but it's not a racist book, one of Max's tank crew is a black man. So it's all good right? So, after she trauma dumps, it is now time to have sex. We are, thankfully, assured that Max is very big down there, I know all of us reading it wanted to know.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, it's time to get back to the war. I will say the actually parts where there is tank action are good. The battle sequences and final escape were good. I actually tore through the last thirty or so pages wanting to see where things would go from there. At this point, I do wonder if the following novels get better. If this is really the authors first try ever at a novel, it would explain a lot of the bad writing. Most authors first book is not well written and they have to grow into their style a lot more. I think of Clive Cussler as a staple comparison, where even he knew the first Dirk Pitt novel was not that great. Comparing the first writings to his like tenth book are night and day... maybe that will happen with Steelbaugh as the series progresses.

Outside of the action sequences this book is bogged down by all the bad writing tropes people would later identify and complain about constantly in the mid-2000's. There is none of the wackiness of the 80's I was hoping find. This is labeled as sci-fi, but it really isn't. The experimental tank isn't even all that experimental. It has some new armor coating to make it more defensive and then more powerful guns, but like... it's not run by anything super different than regular tanks. The only other major factor is that it's fast... but like, fast for a tank. This book ends up reading a lot more like a Vietnam war story, but instead of a squad making their way in the jungle, it's a tank crew. Personally, I'd give it a pass, I'm gonna read these so you don't have to! I need a break from this though... we'll see when I get around to book two.

When Games Workshop was attempting to add some novels to expand on the lore of their franchises in the late 80's their first foray into Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 only published novels of short stories to see if there was any interest in such novels. Dark Future a now rather defunct intellectual property was given the same treatment. Personally, I'm not a very big fan of the short story anthology and so, this would have been a bad idea to garner interest from someone like myself. However, I think there are loads of people that like the sci-fi/fantasy short story approach, meanwhile, I just think it's never enough of a story for such usually epic settings. Dark Future, while being post apocalyptic, suffers from a similar trait.The Dark Future setting is starkly different from the products that Games Workshop has mainly been built around. It's core game is a sort of Mad Max styled road warrior game. If anyone remembers an old game called Thunder Road from Milton Bradley this seems very similar. However, I think Thunder Road ripped off the Road Warrior in its car design a lot more. Dark Future's vehicles seem more rooted in a sort of high tech James Bond style with the secret embedded weapons while still being sports cars. Some cars are very post apocalyptic and Mad Max inspired in a modified dune buggy fashion. So, as with loads of other things Games Workshop does, it's a blend of lots of different things that have already existed. Another interesting aspect of the setting is that it takes place in the U.S. and focuses on life after the collapse. It also has a bit of a Judge Dredd flair in the cops vs. criminals aspect as well and probably some of the vehicle ideas, but loads of creators at Games Workshop were inspired by the “2000 AD” comic books. Unfortunately, the setting didn't get developed much more beyond the big box game. There was a single supplement created and it was not a major contribution to the game. After that the whole project was dropped and left to die, only to be resurrected in the form of a weird video game in the 2000's era. I have not played that video game, but it didn't look like much more than a racing game. Anyway, let's dive into the stories.

Route 666 by Jack YeovilThis is the first short story and it shares the same name as the book title, which is used again later as a full length book title, why they would do such a thing is baffling to me. Anyway, this story was not too bad, however, I felt like there was way too much being introduced to us and it feels like less of a short story than it should be. There are entirely too many characters and various factions brought into this story. It should have been more focused on the main people involved.The first group we are introduced to is this group of resettlers called the Josephites trying to make their way to Utah led by a guy named Elder Seth. Elder Seth and his group made me think of The Stand quite a bit. They made me think of the guy building the paradise out in the desert, but it was a hellish place and knowing that reference made everything predictable on my end.Amidst this world we are also introduced to a faction in the gang called the Psychopomps led by a crazy woman named Jessamyn. We first meet this gang while they are fighting with another gang called the Daughters of the American Revolution, so you can see some of the historical reference/comedic concepts that arise in this setting.The other group are the cops lead by Sergeant Quincannon and another important figure is clearly Leona Tyree. They first come across some dead bodies left behind by the Josephites and are then told become a police escort for the group. The challenge now was to catch up with them.All of these parties end up meeting up again in a small town, where Elder Seth runs into his previous assaulter in the Psychopomps. Apparently Jessamyn stole some magic glasses from him and he's taking them back. Here we learn that Elder Seth wields some strange powers and now the cops are a bit more scared. But once he gets his glasses back, Seth and his group start to move on and the story just ends... That's when we find out this was just an elaborate introduction and we'll see the story continue in the forthcoming novel Demon Download. I really hope all of the stories aren't like this in terms of an elaborate introduction to something else where I could just read a full novel.In the end, the story wasn't too bad. It just wound up being pretty cliche as far as anything else goes. Lots of references and styles that already existed and didn't feel all that unique.... maybe as the novels grow the setting it will get better.

The Old World setting has really returned to the original ways of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, sort of... In the original creation the setting was broken up around the rule book then the forces of "good" and the forces of "evil". In the new edition they've used the same split, but now it's just the "Forces of Fantasy".

This book gives you a little bit of lore to get you started with your army. Right now none of the massive events from Warhammer Fantasy Battle have happened, and this setting feels a lot more of a pre-game of what's to come. I fully expect to see the forces of Chaos rise in the near future when we get back onto the regular timeline of the original release decades ago.

"Forces of Fantasy" gives you rules for the various armies and gives you instructions to help create a muster list. From here you will need to get a hold of your army's respective Arcane Journal to flesh out all the details of running your army. I'm sort of surprised they went this route instead of creating the old 128 page army books that gave you all the information you needed. I do wonder if they eventually march into the next edition they will eventually do that. There are just some minor details that I sort of wish they would get into and flesh out, but that's what makes this feel a lot more like a "getting started" sort of design. The rules are fully fleshed out, but I mean more in the sense of the lore at this point.

I did enjoy reading all the basic lore of all the armies though, so, in that regard I did enjoy the book. Maybe they're trying to entice people to start more than one army... which I can very much see Games Workshop doing. In any event, to play this game as any of the armies in this list, this book one really be enough. You need three books to fully play your army of choice in this edition of Warhammer.

As someone who is not a massive fan of the zombie genre, I've wound up consuming a fair few things in the genre over the years. I picked this entire book series up a while ago and I've finally sat down to read it. It took me a little while, not because it was bad, but because all books that are the first in a much larger series always have the first half of the book paced pretty slowly. So, sometimes I have trouble cranking through the first book, while the following novels go much faster for me. I mean, everyone should know, it's a necessary slog because the author wants you to care about the characters and one of the best vehicles to do that is to flat out introduce them, often in relatively mundane ways to make them seem relatable/realistic. Smith did an awesome job of this, but very few people could ever make such things feel extremely fast paced. Other than to do that time line jump around stuff where one chapter is in the thick of the action and the next is back in time to build the characters etc. I kinda prefer the slow slog than time jump if I'm being honest.

<i>Extinction Horizon</i> features two fairly main characters Reed Beckham and Kate Lovato. We are introduced to them quite separately as they go about their day jobs and Smith jumps between the two at the beginning. Naturally there are side characters in this, such as Reed's team, but early on I'm expecting these two to be a bit of a "Mary-Sue" and this is about their survival and just about everyone else is expendable (as is the usual case for Post Apocalypse scenarios).

(The following is not much of a spoiler, because it honestly all pretty much happens in the first couple of chapters.)

Beckham is an extremely highly trained covert operative in charge of a special forces unit called Ghost that is sent in when the US government needs to leave no trace that a team was sent in... for reasons. Beckham's team is kind of thrown into the action quite early on where the government has lost contact with a research facility on an island in Building 8. Beckham's mission is to extract a sample of what they were working on and get out. On the plane ride it is revealed that during the Vietnam War our government's desire to create super soldiers never really waned after World War II and we find out they tested out a new drug called VX99. However, the test subject went berserk and killed everyone around them then went into the jungle hunting. It's pretty wild stuff and a really cool concept. Fast forward to the modern era and our government is at it again, but this time messing with Ebola to create a more intense contagion, under the guise of "trying to cure Ebola". A member of Kate's team, Ellis, is with Bekham as an advisor on this mission and he will be transporting the sample back to CDC where Kate works. We are then introduced to Kate and the rest of her team.

Needless to say things go very awry at the lab and Bekham and his team are lucky to get out alive. However, by the time they make it back to relative "safety" it's already too late. The virus is out and spreading rapidly. One of the things I really like about the novel is that the zombies aren't really like the traditional style of zombies. Instead they are a true threat, which I think is a bit inspired by 28 Days Later and the concept of the Rage Virus from that franchise. The victims are often faster and stronger, so it's really terrifying trying to defeat these things. Smith also gives us a dash of Resident Evil and introduces strange body horror level mutations into the victims. Their hands transform into claws so they can rapidly climb walls like a spider and their mouths transform into these weird sucker shapes, ostensibly to bite victims and spread the virus faster I assume.

It's kind of surprising how fast the world falls, as I thought Smith would milk it a bit over a couple of novels, just to give us readers a bit of false hope that maybe the virus could be contained... but nope, the world just falls in about a week. There are pockets of resistance and at this point I'm assuming the next novels are going to sort of be about trying to coordinate with those that are left or trying to maybe rescue who survived while looking for a cure or vaccine of some kind. A vaccine would be an interesting thing to include because it would take away the threat of infection, but it doesn't stop the zombies from being an insane threat given how strong they are.

Another aspect that I really liked about this was that it's a third person story and it's military based. I feel like the majority of the zombie genre books and movies are often told from the perspective of some random person who survived or a random group of regular people who made it. Maybe that's why Smith's zombies are a real serious threat due to their speed and strength, so coupled with the horde mechanic zombies always feature fighting trained operatives can feel like a truly desperate event. Do you have enough ammo to survive a swarm? Can you reload fast enough? etc. That dynamic really makes the battles intense to read and Smith does a superb job of making those action sequences feel like a desperate fight. Whereas the usual slow zombies a la <i>Day of the Dead</i> or <i>The Walking Dead</i> would be little threat to a team like Ghost. They would just kill all of them and establish a perimeter for extraction fast enough to get a helicopter in. With Smith's zombies you don't have time for that.

The one thing Smith gives his people a chance with is that you can just shoot the zombies in the chest and kill them like a normal human. If you do enough damage to the zombie it dies. The threat of things like <i>The Walking Dead</i> is that you do need to shoot them in the head in order to stop them.

The book clearly ends with the intent to write a second installment. I'm actually going to be quite interested in reading the next book to see where things go. A lot of stuff happened in this first book and things I thought he would bleed out over the series just all happened in this first novel. I quite like his characters Bekham and Kate, even if to a certain degree they feel a little bit one dimensional at this point. But gosh, a lot has certainly happened so having super deep characters in an action packed book like this right away is not very realistic. Just run with the 80's/90's action flick feel and enjoy the ride.

Maybe 3.5 half the time

As usual with Hugh Howey, it took me a long time to read this book. I tend to read other novels throughout reading his books and that trend didn't stop with the third. In fact, it got a bit worse. For whatever reason I can't stay focused long enough to tear through a book of his like other authors. Maybe it's the writing style? I do not know, because the previous two books I quite enjoyed even though they took me a long time to read. Sadly, I think I only half enjoyed this novel.

Unfortunately, I only remember a few details from the prior books and I never reviewed them. I've been going back to re-read some books so that I can write proper reviews, but I'm making the decision to not do that with his books. They just take me way too long to read. Re-reading them just feels so untenable to me. Alas, this will have to stand as my only review.

The massive conclusion to the Silo series has finally been read. Now, my lower rating does not have to do with the conclusion. It's not a bad end to the series, to be perfectly honest. So, that's not why I'm rating this down. My problem is how over written it is. I really feel that we could have done without a solid 150 pages of this book and been able to get all the important and emotional parts of the story. I've started stumbling upon something I prefer in my story telling a lot more and that is a tight story. I'm starting to think they are crafted in a superior way.

The best example I can give of this is that in the mid 2000's there was a writers strike for TV shows. Traditionally stories were told over 24 episodes, now we find ourselves where a whole season can be an 8 to 10 episode story. This has been the greatest thing to happen to television for me. It has forced writers to write stories that are extremely compact and the plight of the "filler episode" seems to be a thing of the past. Well, in some respects, I would love a bit more of a revolution in books like that. Just no filler. <i>Dust</i> has an extremely annoying filler episode at the end of the novel and it really kind of killed the conclusion a bit. Mainly because I was reading through it and wondering "why are we wasting time on this??"

<spoiler> Towards the end of the novel when Juliette and the others are escaping their Silo to go to Silo 17 as it's being gassed... there's a bunch of religious people that follow them. Now, these religious people, as far as I remember, were not a big deal in <i>Wool</i>. I don't recall them even being mentioned and I can't figure out why they were being mentioned in <i>Dust</i>. For full disclosure, I am not a pro-religious person and I am not offended by this book. I am offended by the fact we spent time on it at all because it did not need to be here. Anyway, Elise starts to chase her dog up the Silo from Mechanical and eventually she gets waylaid by the religious nuts. They coax her into whatever part of the silo they staked out and immediately marry her off to some middle-aged guy. Remember, she's like seven. So the first thing these people can think to do now that they left their silo is start marrying children... I don't know, I feel like Hugh Howey had an opinion about religion and needed us all to know? They also go out of their way to burn all the books, because you only need one book to live or some nonsense. I get it, that way of thinking is bad, but this had nothing to do with the book. It's even more overtly a nothing burger, because after Juliette and Solo save Elise and kill the dude burning books, we never hear about the religious people again! Are they part of the group that left with them? Are they still in Silo 17? We don't know. Juliette saved over a hundred people walking out of the silo... were they part of the group? No mention. The crazy dude doesn't go looking for his "wife" and Juliette and her people stayed around for days more after the incident. No one went to go check on the dude that was burning the books... where Juliette and her people were staying. Nothing, just a waste of pages and time.</spoiler>

The filler episode is sometimes rife throughout this book and its more palpable than the others. I also felt like we were short on information. In the arc of Silo 1 I really thought we'd get more insight into why this Thurman guy chose to destroy the world and put everyone in Silo land. Either I don't remember, or he just never really explained why they were needing to get it down to a one silo world... I was kinda lost when Donny and Thurman were talking sometimes. It always felt like Thurman was holding something back and I was hoping it would be revealed later, like in secret files or something. But does Juliette ever find anything out? Nope, nothing. No indication that Charlotte eventually told her or anything either. This is why I hate filler episodes, we could have spent our time doing something more meaningful. And if what we did was meaningful it wasn't explained well enough for me to really get it in the end.

In the end, I do like the world building Hugh Howey did. It's a really interesting world and I understand overwriting to some degree because you want to stay in that world you created. Some filler for atmosphere is sometimes worth it, but some filler is just filler and should be nixed. This is why I am looking forward to the TV series a bit more. I'm hoping they will cut a lot of the filler material out of the books. Stick to just what we need to know to move the story along. Maybe as we get to the end, there will be a bit of a re-write/re-phrasing of Donald's and Thurman's conversations so we can all get deeper insight into why the world is the way it actually is and the end goal of the villian. I was really looking forward to one of those classic villain explains all moments, but I feel like it fell a bit short.

If you've read the first two Silo novels and enjoyed them, this one is still a good book and worth the read. I just think it could have been a great book, because again, the world build and characters are very well written.

My ambition to read through all the BattleTech sourcebooks starting with the old 80's releases kind of stalled out with merely diving into the second one. Don't get me wrong, I actually read through a solid chunk of it right after reading the book on Kurita, but somewhere in there this book sort of stalled out on me. It just wound up not being as wildly interesting as the Kurita book. I think at some point in this book it started to read more like a reference book rather than an interesting historical narrative. Somewhere in the succession war tales I started wanting to read other things, and then a year later I finally finished this book off.

I think, for some reason, this book is written in a more dry fashion compared to the Kurita book, but the whole initial sequence of how the Lyran Commonwealth came into existence was all still quite interesting to read. It's around the Succession wars where, maybe the information is just rather quite the same all the time and it was starting to get a bit boring on that front. I think part of the problem, and the other books may also suffer from this, we'll see, is that all these books are supposed to be written from the perspective of ComStar. So, all the faction analysis is really always going to have one perspective. We're not getting information about the succession wars as perceived by the Lyrans, which could feel like a different read, instead it's just an analysis of what the Lyrans were doing. So, the historical overlap of all the factions is going to feel pretty similar, since the Commonwealth and the Combine overlapped those histories quite a bit. I'm sort of expecting the Davion book to somewhat stall out now because there is so much overlap with the Lyrans. Maybe the Capellan Federation and Free Worlds League will feel a bit different, since I feel like those regions aren't always center stage. Even in the first group of novels its more about Davion, Steiner, and Kurita.

Well, I might take a break from reading all these for a bit... maybe when I pick up the next BattleTech novel I'll get the itch to read another one of these sourcebooks. I still have lots and lots to go in these series, probably more than I can finish in a lifetime... but we'll see. I will continue to plug away at it.

I really love that they've decided to make this book which syphons off the rules of ‘Mech combat for the game. If you're not playing an extensive game of BattleTech and are just really focused on ‘Mech combat, this means you do not have to carry around or flip through the full rulebook which is a much more involved affair.

The rules are well written, but also as concise as can be. There are multiple examples and diagrams drawn to clarify more obscure questions. The game of Classic BattleTech can be quite a bit granular, and this book helps to figure out the clarifying rules for all kinds of different situations. As with any game of this level of complexity there are still a few situations here and there where players will need to make their best judgement call on what the rules might intend, but I think the creators have done a fairly good job trying to think of the majority of situations you could run into, even in more niche situations.

I should point out that to new players, this is not just a hardcover version of the rules you get in the beginner set or the boxed set of “A Game of Armored Combat”. The rules ino those box sets are even more stripped down than this book. However, as with most two player games, since those rulebooks have the tables in there, picking up a slightly more expanded rulesset like this is real handy to have. That way both players don't need to pass the rulebook back and forth.

I grew up watching Indy on screen in the 80's, so I've been pretty familiar with the movies given how many times I've seen them. The only books I had were some scholastic books about the movies and there was a series of Choose Your Own Adventure style books at one point, I had some of those... but I don't remember them. I also only found one of the books when I was cleaning out some stuff at my parents house. As an avid book collector I am surprised I missed out on the initial printing of this back in 1991, but I picked up all of them around 2008 when they were repressed. Probably to go with the long awaited fourth installment of the movie franchise. MacGregor writing in 1991... these books should be closer in feel to the original films. This is sort of the case, but it is certainly not on par with the greatness of the films really. But, what can one expect from a first foray into trying to bring this character to the page in a long form novel.

Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi is more a prequel to the films, where we get insight into the development of Indy's character on his way to being the hardened adventurer we meet in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this story, set in the 1920's, we meet Indy as he is graduating from university. This is sort of the only area of the book I had a bit of a problem with. I suppose MacGregor was trying to portray some level of high minded hi-jinx of college students... but for me this sort of felt way out of character. In the beginning he makes a statement of free speech by hanging the founding fathers of the U.S., and while the statement made sense, the hanging didn't make as much to me. I feel like the trouble Indy often got into was more to do with him trying to do the right thing and then things going weirdly wrong. I don't know, it just didn't seem like that's what happened here.

Anyway, after this we move more into the proper setting. Indy in the PhD program. Here we find him in Paris, France, where he is going for a linguistics doctorate. One of his professors, Dorian Belacamus who is an archeologist, is... as one can expect an incredibly beautiful Greek woman. It's an Indiana Jones story... at some point it needs to follow the Bond formula of having a different woman for every installment... I mean why would anyone want to read about a power couple with real staying power... (for the record, the power couple is honestly one of my all time favorite setups and there just aren't enough around). I digress, in any event, she lures him to Greece to try and pique his interest in archaeology so she can convince him to switch majors. Do they end up sleeping together? Of course they do... So, this is all very predictable, just as its very predictable in the movies!

Well, now the adventure can truly begin, because Indy finds himself in some power politics plot between Belacamus and her real lover Alex Mandraki. (That's right, the villain women is always sleeping around, of course of course.) The draw for going to Delphi is that there was an earthquake which apparently unearthed some hidden objects, but the big draw was the vapors were appearing again. I knew nothing of Delphi, other than that scene in the movie 300, so I rather appreciated MacGregor's explanations of whole point where Pythia would inhale the vapors and babble about stuff, which then required the special priests to interpret her predictions... which they would basically use as a method to sway political decisions. Ancient history, what a hoot. When they arrive at the dig there's already a bunch of hubbub about the vapors and a secret sect thinks Dorian could be the next Pythia. So between Belacamus trying to just do her job, plotting with her boyfriend and now this sect coming into play there are a lot forces vying for the vapors of Delphi.

Things really come to a head when the King of Greece gets involved, because he would naturally need to view the site.Essentially, Mandraki, who is a high ranking official in the military, wants to make a play against the king. He is going to use the backdrop of the vapors as a literal smoke screen to cast the king into the crevasse to plummet to his death. I don't think he planned on Belacamus becoming Pythia, but I'm sure he'd be fine ruling through her ideas. The secret sect is eventually done away with by Mandraki in one fell swoop. Only Indy and his friends from Paris manage to escape and eventually manage to tell the king the truth of what really happened. Enough evidence exists that the king believe Indy and eventually moves against Mandraki.

In the end, I did think this was a pretty decent book. Despite the predictability, and the time of its writing, I was able to look beyond some of the flaws and just enjoy it for the adventure it is. I think MacGregor did a pretty good job trying to cast a somewhat more doubtful Indy in his younger years. The budding college student, unsure of their future, looking off in the distance of time trying to figure out what they really want to do and reconciling the baggage of past mistakes and familial expectations. While, reading about a less confident Indy was a bit jarring at first, I did get into it and it really did make sense amidst the time frame... however, I do look forward to any novels that cater to the more hardened adventurer version of Indiana Jones. Perhaps I will find one in my pile of books as I read these in order of release.

Bounces around a 3.5 to a 4.5 for meThis is the second installment in the Horus Heresy series that would become an eventually bloated fan favorite of the Warhammer world. So far, for me, I've enjoyed the book overall, but I've read some reviews that have some decent criticisms of this and I tend to agree with some of the nit picking they bring up, some I don't... let's dive in.One of the jarring things I think with this novel is the interactions everyone has with the Interex is just done now? Like, I thought they didn't subjugate those people at all and instead ran away for their lives? But Horus never brought the full bore of the crusade against them, and instead they're just off doing something else? According to the Lexicanum (a big Warhammer 40k wiki for those unfamiliar) they've already been defeated and destroyed... well... I thought this novel would be about that, guess we all missed it? It's a real shame though, because the Interex had contact with the Eldar and I thought this would be an incredibly interesting tie for the 40k era. As the 63rd expedition is about to engage xenos that still exist in 40k, they get side tracked by suddenly needing to overthrow the Emperor! Ah well, guess we'll never see the Eldar around here.This is where I get into some speculation. Many reviewers complain of the “silly” decisions being made by Horus throughout this novel and how quickly things happen. Well, I somewhat suspect that this is because I'm not sure Games Workshop envisioned this spawning 60+ books in the end. I wonder, if at the time of this writing, this was going to be just some sort of trilogy and they were telling authors to get to the point? Dan Abnett's book is a much slower pace compared to McNeill's and I do wonder if they wanted McNeill to just get to the important part as fast as possible and this was the most effective way he figured he could do it within the constrains of 400 pages. Whereas, it feels like the pacing of this book should have gone much slower, because then it would have felt paced more appropriately against Abnett's work.In any event, we find ourselves on the planet Davin as the 63rd expedition is sort of regrouping a bit, I assume after destroying the Interex? So, some of the pacing issues people are bringing up, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that an entire campaign has been fought with the Interex in between these novels. An interesting point of this novel that comes up is the insistence on bringing in the Imperator Titan, the Dies Irae. Games Workshop hasn't made an Imperator model since the late 80's/early 90's in the epic scale for Adeptus Mechanicus and at the time this book was written... there is no new one forthcoming. (I have hopes that with the new Legions Imperialis set we will get one though.) Anyway, Davin was brought into compliance a long time ago and put in the care of an old friend of Horus' named Temba. Now rumors abound that Temba is holed up on a moon and is defying the will of the Emperor or something... so Horus feels compelled to go and bring things back into compliance.Horus feels the need to take care of a lot of this stuff personally, but the real issue here is that one of the captains that has Horus' ear, Erebus, has already fallen to chaos. I think part of the problem with the "speed" people complain about is that Erebus has already been wearing down Horus for quite a while. Horus is not the same man from Abnett's novels. He is getting angrier, more apt to rash decisions and I think this because Erebus is psychically stronger with Chaos supporting him. To me, this would explain some of the aspects of Horus' seemingly quick fall and essentially falling for what appears to be rather pedestrian attempts to dupe him to turn against the Emperor.Horus is so enraged at Temba's seeming betrayal he brings the full brunt of his forces against Temba who is holed up on one of Davin's moons. Once the expedition lands everything is seemingly quiet except for some strange transmissions talking of Nurgleth. This smacks of the Whisperhead's incident from Abnett's novel. These are the parts of the book I thought were really cool, anyone familiar with Nurgle will know what to expect from this particular combat scenario. I won't ruin it for anyone, but suffice to say Temba is taken down (I mean, kind of expected given the point of the series), but the shocking fact is that Horus is mortally wounded. Which should not happen to Primarch, or so many believe. In the end the Mournivale, Horus' most important advisory council is fractured on what to do. Loken and Torgaddon return to the moon to retrieve the weapon that wounded Horus to see if knowing more about that will help Horus, but Abaddon and Aximand stay behind. Abaddon had always been an impatient and angry man, and as Horus seems to become more victim to those aspects of emotion Abaddon is far more fearsome in this novel, so he and Aximand seek another way to save Horus. Erebus tells of a special healing system on Davin and without notifying Loken and Torgaddon they simply bring Horus back to Davin out of desperation.Here's where you, the reader, really begin to question whether these primary characters are starting to fall to chaos or not. They are, honestly, starting to become quite different in action and temper as laid out in [b:Horus Rising 625603 Horus Rising (The Horus Heresy, #1) Dan Abnett https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414166935l/625603.SY75.jpg 611957]. This definitely feels jarring as some readers point out, but that's because the time scale is never really made very clear between the two novels. I think much more time has passed and we're “just supposed to know”? This is the part where I think the book is somewhat rushed or poorly written, but I have no idea how much that's because of McNeill, or Games Workshop meddling in the novel brief or editing after the fact. Where people accuse McNeill or writing Horus poorly, I must point out that I feel like Loken and Torgaddon are pretty on par with Abnett's story. Yeah, he doesn't get nearly as much character development, but I feel like because he couldn't. If you think about how much has been put into this novel and all the things that happen... when was he going to do that? Take all the time spent with Horus' internment in the healing device on Davin... which is spoilers... but... In the healing device Horus is subjected to a series of visions, for us readers in the know, these are obviously from the realms of chaos. He is guided through it all by Erebus, who is now a very known traitor to the Empire and is trying very hard to coax Horus into doing his will without expressly asking. It really is never made extremely clear why Horus decides to turn, but I sort of assume it's his desire to live and his vanity that play a major role. Even going against the Emperor he probably really believed he would be able to steer humanity into a better light... however, as this is all at the bidding of Chaos, I find it hard to believe Horus would be ignorant of that fact. However, the only argument I can think, is that the Emperor has drilled into his people that Chaos doesn't really exist and there is nothing beyond the material, SO much, that they just blindly believe this. So, even though Erebus was lying to Horus in a very obvious way, how much do we really understand how Horus interprets Chaos at this stage. You'd think at this point his encounter with Temba would have him seriously questioning stuff, but, honestly, after watching some people be duped by obvious things they simply "didn't wish to be true" or "must have another explanation" I'm kind of willing to believe Horus could fall for this regardless of how smart and perfect he is portrayed in these novels. Even smart people will believe incredibly stupid lies as I've come to find out in 2025 as I write this.The last part of the book is called “Crusade's End” and, honestly, this should have just been it's own novel. We go from Horus being healed on Davin to all of a sudden in the midst of a massive war with the Auretian Technocracy. A war that is not going super great apparently, but my gosh a lot has certainly happened between the two blank pages that divide up the novel parts... The big deal with the Auretian Technocracy is that they have access to an STC device and I really think it harnesses some serious AI tech that is absolutely feared by the Imperium of Man. However, it seemed like this was the missing piece Horus needed to truly bolster his forces. (I mean, I'm sort of assuming this allows them to bring about the Dark Mechanicum.) This isn't much of a spoiler, but of course they win and destroy the technocracy and take their tech. In this all too brief part of the book we start to see things put into motion for the fall of some of the Primarch's, the most overt is Angron's performance during this last war. I suspect that will be glossed over in the next book, but Loken and Torgaddon are starting to become extremely suspicious.The big revelation at the end of this book is painfully expected, so I find it hard to believe it a spoiler. But, at the end of this expedition Horus tells a group of the secret lodge members of his plan to turn on Terra. There's an entirely new author for the third novel, so we'll see how this goes. But I do wonder if it's going to have a similar ridiculous time jump that just comes out of nowhere. Depends on how fast they wanted to tear through the tale of the Horus Heresy without expecting it to take 60+ novels.In the end, I really liked this novel. I was able to kind of figure out reasons to justify some of the pacing even though it was largely annoying at times. The mysteries with Temba and the blade that harmed Horus were simply awesome parts. Loken and Torgaddon were the saving grace of the novel for me as their characters try to navigate the fact that all the other Space Marines around them are turning into something they don't understand. The seeds of Mersadie Oliton founding a new faith in the Emperor which can potentially turn back actual daemons. It's sort of a nod to the future of things like the Sister's of Battle, which is pretty awesome. So with her and Sindermann, that entire arc was really interesting. It was a fun 30k novel ultimately and I do look forward to reading the next installment.

Easily a 4.5 through and through

Despite a booklist of the Sharpe series existing that puts the books in chronological order of the story, I think I'm going to read these in publication order. I've found I prefer reading books in this order, because the authors tend to improve quite a bit as they hone their craft. Or, if for some reason, the first book is amazing and the others are not, at least I read the best book first!

I must confess that I was never much interested in the Napoleonic Wars and I must solely blame a youtuber by the name of Chris Peach (his channel is Peachy Tips) for introducing me to this. He raved so much about the Sharpe series and a TV show starring Sean Bean that I felt compelled to give this a shot. So, I had my mom order this book from the library to see if I'd even enjoy it. Now, it should be known, I do quite like history, some histories I find more interesting than others and while I, naturally, knew who Napoleon was, I have never sat down and truly engaged that history at any higher academic level. So, to my surprise I wound up cranking through Cornwell's first book pretty well. The story was interesting and very exciting! Thus, begins my journey into Napoleonics...

Sharpe's Eagle introduces us to a new hero in historical fiction named Richard Sharpe. I will say, he is a bit of a Mary Sue, but as I'm going into this series there are 20+ books, so I fully expect him to be living through the wars. However, the hardships Sharpe faces come more from dealing with the classist structure of the British military more than fighting with Napoleon's forces in this book.

In this novel Sharpe is already a Lieutenant, but he's been promoted up through the ranks. Meaning, he's not a gentleman and therefore is much less respected amongst the rich leaders who paid for their commission. Apparently merit based promotion on the battlefield is looked down upon... so anyway, Sharpe seems to draw up the ire of new British commanders when they show up in these books.

Within the world of Sharpe, he is already in charge of the Riflemen and Wellesley is bringing forces into Spain to fight the French. A new British Force, the South Essex are arriving in Wellington's encampment early in the novel. The South Essex are led by Sir Henry Simmerson and he and Sharpe are on a real crash course in this novel. Simmerson believes in flogging his army in order to keep them in line and Sharpe knows all too well this does not make a good soldier. So, Sharpe is worried about coming engagements, because he knows Simmerson's men are not battlefield ready in the least. However, at the same time Major Hogan and Wellesley are brewing up a plan to make things harder for the French by blowing up a key bridge. So, in a joint effort with the South Essex and a Spanish regiment, Sharpe and his crew are sent to help blow up the bridge.

The engagements at the bridge are really what start the ball rolling for this story. Without trying to spoil too much, Simmerson makes some extremely ridiculous errors and the French see this as an opportunity to take out some British forces. The whole thing is a mess, which Simmerson then tries to escape blame by laying it at Sharpe's feet, when Sharpe was the one who actually made the defeat less total for the British. However, Simmerson is not willing to suffer the lower classes getting a leg up.

Due to Simmerson's status, Wellesley does not have the power to really protect Sharpe and this leaves Sharpe in a position where he needs to do something incredibly heroic to prove his worth in a way the court can't ignore. This is where Sharpe devises the plan that his only way out is to get a French Eagle, which has never been done before. Now, I don't know how historically accurate this is, but it is on par with taking the British colors from one of their forces.

Now that the mission of the bridge is concluded, Wellesley is ready to march the army to another place in Spain to prepare for a much larger engagement. Here Cornwell brings in some of the aspects of just waiting to go to battle. Sometimes for days, as they wait for weather to clear or they wait for other reinforcements to appear. I can see why Cornwell set out to create more interesting sub-plots in the meantime rather than trying to simulate the doldrums of nothing going on for days on end. This is much appreciated as far as I'm concerned. The interactions with the other commanders and how things play out were actually interesting to read about, so I praise Cornwell for making segments that could have been boring into a more engaging light.

I don't consider it a spoiler to say Sharpe succeeded, as mentioned earlier, he is a bit of a Mary Sue character. It feels a bit like the Star Trek style where if there's a side-character in the hero's vicinity they are likely to be the tragic death... especially if they are beginning to be well liked. I was worried about his friend Harper for a brief moment as I quite liked this character, but I think he will have real staying power for a while. He seems kind of essential to create a good banter between Sharpe and other aspects of the army. I just worry that by book 20 maybe something bad will happen, but maybe I will be pleasantly surprised.

In addition to all this, there is a bit of a James Bond element thrown in with the presence of Josefina, who is really there to purely be a love interest for Sharpe. She is also a major source of conflict for Sharpe and Simmerson's nephew, Gibbons. This is an underlying plot through the whole story with Sharpe playing the standard faire protector of fairer sex or what have you back in the 1800's. However, these are not exactly star crossed lovers and Josefina winds up breaking off with Sharpe eventually, which, maybe because of the period, I don't exactly understand. It just made her seem kind of shallow and searching for status, but it's not like Sharpe is massively different in his ambitions, because he wants to rise in the ranks of the army in order to also have status. It does make sense with the period and how classist the structure of Britain is at the time and, honestly, now that I write this out, it probably is more realistic because it's not exactly like people back then were going to have elaborately thought out goals on the average. No, most people were probably simple, especially those growing up in the slums like Sharpe and he saw the army as a way out. Anyway, the whole Josefina arc, by the end, solidified my assumption that Sharpe is also a bit of James Bond. Women are highly attracted to them, but the women in his life wind up being a flavor of the month, which is a bit annoying. I quite enjoy power couples with two people working together... but i have hopes for this as I've seen a bit of the TV series, so maybe the James Bond feel won't last...

I would be remiss without bringing up the TV series starring the amazing Sean Bean. The TV movie series is a bit different from the books as they tried to put things in a bit of a more chronological order. This has created a sequence where they have taken serious liberties with what happened in the books. Because there is another main love interest for Sharpe later on, she gets introduced early, so that meant Josefina got a bit pushed out of the sequence as they made this book into a TV movie. They also left out a lot of the stuff involving the Spanish army, which does make sense for cutting out time. In the end, I did really enjoy the adaptation to film despite some of the changes made. Given how many of these TV movies they made, hopefully Cornwell feels similarly.

So, in the end, I probably should thank Chris Peach for introducing me to this. I'm not surprised it was not on my rader, this stuff doesn't seem to have been well distributed in the 90's for America and since I wasn't massively into Napoleonics in my youth, I can see why this never even crossed my path. Now Peachy is into miniature wargames and I am as well, so I imagine it was only an inevitable crash course that I would go down this road. He painted up a wonderful set to look like the Rifleman from Sharpe. I picked up the same set from Wargames Atlantic to do just the same thing! So, now I am planning on getting some more sets and putting together a proper force. I would also be remiss not to mention that all of this has been exacerbated by the wonderful Big Lee from his channel Miniature Adventures. These two have been such a pleasure to watch as I enter the foray of the Napoleonic Wars on the tabletop!

Easily a 3.5 at times

Treasure Island is a classic book and probably needs no introduction to readers. I have read this before, albeit many years ago when I was a kid. However, it was one of those “children's classics” editions and I have no idea if anything was abridged, nor do I remember much about the details of the story other than it was about pirates looking for treasure. I remember liking the story, but for all I know, that's just a six or seven year old's general response to stories of pirates. Almost forty years later I've revisited the tale...

The whole reason I went back into this book is because I have recently binge watched all four seasons of the show Black Sails. I thought the show was very well done and entertaining. I don't know why it didn't dawn on me until after a few seasons, but when I was looking into the show it listed that this was an imagined tale for a prequel to Treasure Island. The show goes into the background tale of Flint's treasure, but it does a very cool thing where they insert the fictional characters into the world of historical characters. It's one of the more gritty versions of pirate tales hitting the big screen as it's probably a bit more accurate for what things were really like. “Pirates of the Caribbean” is a good fun movie, same with “Cutthroat Island”, but there's quite a bit of joy and reveler and outright fun for those movies. But “Black Seas” is a bit more grim, which is a bit closer to the truth of the matter I suspect. I thought this was pretty interesting and upon finishing the show, I picked up a copy of the novel.

It's been such a long time since I've read the book, I went in with almost no expectations and it felt like reading it for the first time. I usually can enjoy my old timey novels like this one written ages ago. However, it felt a bit bland of a tale to me in the end. I don't know if this is because I've consumed too much high adventure tales of pirates, but Treasure Island isn't too much about piracy. It's about men trying to reclaim something from a bygone age, the last foray into a treasure hunt. There's no ship to ship battles, they only ever deal with the one ship in this novel and very little swashbuckling to be had.

The tale centers around the young boy Jim Hawkins, which is primarily the only reason this is a young adult book, nevermind back in the 1700's a 16 year old would pretty much be considered an adult. In any event Jim works at an inn with his mother when an old pirate shows up at their door. It comes out that he is a hunted man by his old shipmates and he has a map on him that can lead them to a massive treasure. Some men, one of which is Billy Bones (he's in the show), appear and get into a fight with the lodger. One thing leads to another and the lodger is killed and Jim winds up with the map. Some other important men show up to investigate and somehow this leads to them deciding to go search for the treasure, so they commission a boat. They contact Long John Silver ot help raise a crew as he's an ex-quartermaster.

John Silver is a rogue though and upon getting to the island he mutiny's with some of the crew and wants to keep the treasure for himself. This is where I felt like the story got a bit goofy. There didn't seem much of a reason, to me, for them to be against the captain as much as they were and this wasn't a very big ship, so there wasn't much of a crew. When they started killing each other off, I couldn't help think to myself... but who's gonna sail this ship back... At one point the pirates had taken over the ship and the “good guys” made it to land and holed up in a fort that just happened to be there. So the pirates start firing the cannons at the fort, but the fort is kind of far away so they can't reach it, or consistently miss, I can't remember. Either way, they fire the cannons until there is literally no ammunition left... why? Why would you do that? It's gonna be obvious you didn't hit your target, why are you still firing the stupid gun! It was almost like the author needed to have something with a cannon in there, so he just used up all the ammo, because firing cannons is cool?

Anyway, now they go and fight on land and kill off more people so now they're running into that territory of neither side has enough people to sail back by themselves. Jim Hawkins, meanwhile, leaves his people and goes and does a bunch of really random stuff for no reason whatsoever. Like cutting the ships anchor, so the ship just floats away... like what is this kid thinking?! Now there's no hope of leaving. I mean, he got lucky, but seriously, how could he know? He didn't, he was just doing random crap as a 16 year old that is, frankly, being an absolute idiot, which is how most 16 year olds are, I suppose... but this was maddeningly stupid to me.

Eventually, Silver realizes that too many people have died and tries to make a truce. They all agree and go find the treasure. Obviously they succeed, because the book would be so massively unsatisfying if they didn't... so I think anyone shocked at this spoiler is a bit weird. Anyway, they go home and live happily ever after.

The main reason I rated this down is because so much depended on luck to assuage a teenager making massively stupid decisions that could have gotten himself and everyone else killed. I feel like this is a sort of tale that tells us to never really trust teens, because they're one snap decision away from getting your entire crew killed. Whatever, at least John Silver liked the kid and is really the only reason he lived through this tale... though after reading it, I can't fathom why, Silver should have been pissed the kid cut the anchor too! Bah!

I continue my trek down the rabbit hole of Necromunda novels, luckily there aren't as many as Warhammer 40k. I've made it to Junktion and all I can say is I feel very neutral about this book. It's not a bad book, but it's also not a great book. It is merely an okay little adventure.Part of the problem I had with the book is that it was from a perspective I don't really enjoy reading very much, first person. I've read some books that worked well enough because the story was good like Outgunned (Lucille von Shard #1) by Denny Flowers, but most of the books fall pretty flat for me nad Junktion is a bit of a classic case of what doesn't work for me.Junktion follows around a character named Sinder Kass. He has a job in the town of Junktion that he is extremely dedicated to, lamp lighting. Basically he and several others have the job of maintaining the lighting and electrical systems for the settlement. It's a cool flavorful idea for the Necromunda setting. And I do like the idea that we get to see some life outside of the gangs to be honest. I think the setup and story concept were a very cool idea. From the start we get the feeling that not all things are right in the land of Junktion and there are political machinations at work behind the scenes.So, while I quite like the idea of Kass being a commoner, we never really get to be privy to what's going on behind the scenes very much. Instead of just Kass reacting to everything that goes wrong while still trying to “do his job”, which is all he wants to do. The problem with Kass' job is that it is a tad boring to read about, so when a good amount of time is devoted to explaining how Kass is fixing something, it's extremely dry explanatory text... which you'd expect. But we don't need to go through it that often as readers, once is really enough, after that you can just say “he worked on this thing and moved on”. At one point in the story he gets sent on a long journey to fix lines on a trade route and this goes haywire to the point where he encounters giant rats and scavvies. This felt a bit like an excuse to include giant rats because the models are cool. But in escaping the rats he wound up captured by scavvies, but the scavvies were weird and didn't just kill him and steal his stuff, no, that would end the story. So, instead they kidnap him? I dunno, just seemed out of character for them. At one point he is brought with them to engage a caravan of water being brought to Junktion by The Curse, an escher gang. So, this entire lead up was an excuse for Kass to cross paths with The Curse gang. The thing about this escher gang is that they were really a nice group and they healed Kass' wounds and brought him back to Junktion. Sure, they were going to ransom him back, because even they knew lamp lighters were important, but that's just business and Safine (the leader) was an honorable leader in that regard.Kass, unfortunately returns to Junktion that is now being held by two very frightening gangs. A gang of Goliaths called the Steelheads and a gang of Cawdor. The problem with the Cawdor gang is that they're redemptionists, the most frustrating of the lot to deal with due to their religious zeal and tendency to set everything they don't agree with on fire. The Goliaths are abusive towards Kass, but since they see him as a runt they don't really mess with him much. One of the Cawdor, Hetch, takes a special liking and torments Kass and his friends trying to convert Kass to the redemptionist way. Anyway, things have come to a head really, the town fathers, who originally conspired with the gangs eventually get overthrown kind of, and Kass hatches a plan to call in two other gangs to help, one of which is The Curse. This being a novel with a semi-happy ending, they overthrow the really horrible gangs, but now have the Escher and Berzerkers to deal with. This is less bad though, because at least those two gangs care more about working out trade deals and making money, trust me, it's better than burning everyone.At one point we do get a bit of explanation of the political machinations as told by Guilder Tai to Kass. It's a frustratingly fragmented conversation in the book, meaning some parts of the conversation are laid out, then a bunch of stuff happens to Kass and his friends, then more of the conversation is revealed. Based on the things that happened, it didn't seem like this was necessary. The missing piece of the convo wasn't suspenseful and to be honest, I had no idea it was fragmented until more was revealed later. So there was no feeling, as a reader, that there was any big reveal to be had. A lot of the writing and sub-plots feel this way. They don't feel like they're going anywhere, it never feels like there is much of a greater goal in mind, other than to find a way for Kass to do his job. And I think that's why this novel falls a bit flat for me.In the end, I don't feel this is a must read Necromunda novel. The town of Junktion and the people in it are well constructed. Junktion seems like a cool map to play a game on or even an extended campaign, but as a story of the people? It just doesn't seem well crafted and comes out very dry at times. I think this is only worth reading if you're obsessed with Necromunda and have nothing left to read in the setting.

Easily a 4.5 at times.

This was my first foray into Warhammer Fantasy. With the revival of the Old World, I've decided to move beyond the realms of 40k. I've got loads of Age of Sigmar stuff, but, I don't know, the lore of that realm just hasn't grabbed me as much. But I'll eventually pick up some books in that setting and see how they go. However, the return to traditional Warhammer Fantasy had me pretty excited and since I've never played that game or read any books from it, I decided to dive in. I have read a number of different things from Dan Abnett, so I figured he would be a strong choice for my first tour of Warhammer.

I should preface all of this with, I think this book will make a lot more sense to new readers if they know something about the setting. That is definitely assumed based on the way this book has been written. This is designed for readers/players familiar with the game setting and the many factions within the game. However, Riders of the Dead really focuses on two main groups, but knowledge the sub-groups this focuses on is pretty useful for getting an idea of character motivations and generally what's going on with the bad guys.

The book opens up with an Imperial force being gathered to fight back a growing army of Chaos, no doubt led by Archaon who is referenced later in the book. Archaon does not make an appearance in this novel, before you get too excited about it. (I don't feel that's a spoiler, because by the time he gets brought up, you kind of know it's outlandishly likely for him to appear.) This book is really focused on two primary characters, both of which are from The Empire. Both are from the same regiment of demilancers, Gerlach Heileman and Karl Vollen. (On a side note, I know Karl is the name of the Emperor at this time, but my god, there are too many people named Karl in this book. I'm sorry, I get it, I get why there are so many, but it's annoying.)

This novel is primarily focused on The Empire versus Chaos Warriors in terms of the game setting. There are sub-groups to each really and The Empire has many allies. One of the interesting aspects is that this battle is joined by the warriors from Kislev and I think that's what makes this book so special for people. So, the book kicks off with a huge battle, can't complain about that, but this is not a campaign of the Empire doing away with the hordes of Chaos, no, in the initial battle we find our characters being defeated!

When the forces are routed Gerlach finds himself among a band of Kislev warriors that escape with him in tow. Gerlach is really in no condition to try and find his way back to The Empire so he rides on with the Kislevite horsemen. He goes on a long and arduous journey into the Steppes and in that journey learns a lot about himself and the people of Kislev. You see, Gerlach was sort of the cliche haughty character that was of more noble birth. However, after such a devastating defeat he had to get over himself and work with this other group of warriors he had previously considered a “simple” people. To be honest, I thought such a journey into Kislev culture might be rather daunting or a slow read, but I have to hand it to Abnett, he made it really fun and interesting to read. Gerlach ends up being an pretty good character by the end of the book and his character changes quite a bit.

Karl Vollen, on the other hand, suffers a much different fate. Instead he is captured by the Armies of Chaos and sold into slavery. The particular group that purchases him are followers of Tzeentch. However, I have a bit of an annoyance here, which I do with loads of Black Library books, in this book they refer to this god as Tchar... because that's the particular dialect these warriors speak. Now, I suppose this “deepens” the world a bit more having a varied linguistic setup, but this doesn't help sell the models to me. Instead, I have no idea who Tchar even is and have never heard of it based on the products Games Workshop sells for the game. Luckily I was able to figure it out because they eventually referred to “change” a lot, since Tzeentch is the “Lord of Change”. I just can't help thinking that a new reader stumbling into this book will never figure that out. Anyway, I was pretty elated to read about Tzeentch specific force, because I don't think Tzeentch is written about as much in the novels, with big battles often centering around Khorne quite often. In any event, Karl finds himself captured and this is essentially his journey into becoming a follower of Tzeentch, which was, frankly, awesome to read.

Almost everything involving Karl hit that 4.5 star mark for me. So often we read a heroes journey like Gerlach's of the noble born upstart getting his dose of reality, but the bad guys are vague or “just so” characters. Maybe the main bad guy has some depth, but the underlings or followers are just cannon fodder for the good guys. Not so with this novel! No, Karl's “hero” journey is a stark opposite. And boy is it a wild time and really enjoyable to read. Abnett flesh's out all the characters around Karl so when you hit that final climactic battle at the end of the novel that is pretty obviously inevitable... you have a really potentially tragic tale no matter who falls in battle.

I will say, at one point towards the end as the book was finishing up and the page count was dwindling they alluded to Gerlach at some point facing Archaon. I thought that was outlandish and would bring the novel in a strange ending given how many pages were left. The fall of Archaon can't possible be a 30 page stint... and it was not. The ending conflict was much more obvious, and in many ways wrapped up nicely and quite satisfying. However, I will say, I think it would have been kind of cool to set this big stage where it alluded to Gerlach facing Archao and left it up to the reader to play out such a battle on the tabletop! Go and build and paint your Gerlach hero character and take his Kislevites to the field! That would have been pretty fun to I suspect.

In the end, I quite loved this book. Abnett is, once again, a safe choice for me as I quite like his writing and consistency. I hesitate to say that any fan of the fantasy genre can pick this up, I think it would still be a good book. But, knowledge of The Empire and the Chaos Gods will make this book much more enjoyable. To be honest, you don't even need to know a huge amount of it, just a quick summary of these things and you'll be good go and dive into a fun read.

Hits about a 2.5 once it gets going after page 200 or so.First off, let me premise this with the fact that I have a Tyranids army and I really like Tyranids in general. Nor do I think any of my complaints are all that related to Darius Hinks as an author. I think the way Games Workshop wants people to write about Tyranids is just generally not great. Onto the review!I didn't pick up the 10th edition launch box, because I already owned most of the Tyranid forces featured in the box, so it wasn't worth my time. However, Games Workshop has been putting out companion novels to coincide with the launch and since I quite like reading I picked this up. I was excited to read a book about the Tyranids, because I feel like they are not written about too often. However, even at the beginning of the book I started running into similar issues I had with other books I read about the Tyranids, such as [b:Warrior Brood 691593 Warrior Brood (Warhammer 40,000) C.S. Goto https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1177280762l/691593.SY75.jpg 677936]. However, I've come to find out I'm just not a C.S. Goto fan after reading a few more novels by them, so I was hoping Hinks would put a better spin on things... sadly he did not. (I will say, I did like his writing a lot more, so I'm sure there are other books by Hinks I would like.)There are two issues I have with this novel. First off, it's a launch box book. I wasn't expecting some grand lore book launching a series as compelling as Horus Heresy or anything of that caliber. I was expecting a fun one-shot jaunt into the fourth Tyrannic war. Hive Fleet Leviathan versus the Ultramarines! Should be epic! To Hinks' credit, by the end it was VERY epic. Some of the battle line parts of the novel were easily brought this to a 3-star level. The sequence where the Tyranids had deceived the Solar Auxilia was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, this was not most of the novel. Not that I want to read just a battle report for 400 pages, I do want characters, but despite a long lead up of half the book which felt quite slow, there wasn't much to any of the characters. The book primarily focused on Vultis, a Space Marine that has spent a huge amount of time researching the xenos threat. The book kicks off with the Leviathan fleet attacking an Imperium vessel and Vultis encounters a new Xenos threat, which is never named. However, I sort of assumed it was a Norn Emissary. Anyway, Vultis escapes to the planet Regium nearby and that's when the Hive Fleet begins to invade the entire planet.It's a fine story on how tyranids work, but it does come up a bit short on writer motivation. The problem with tyranids is that, even in the lore, they're just too powerful. They basically cut people's communications off and swarm a planet so intensely that there is really only one outcome, most everyone is going to die. So, as an author, you need to plan on people just dying all over. Maybe you can save the main character? But even then, it's going to be a real long shot. Even if they escape to a planet nearby, that planet will just be eaten next. So, realistically, Tyranids aren't going to be stopped. In the game, you can win battles against Tyranids and maybe stop smaller branch fleets, but huge hive fleets like Leviathan... yeah, you're not stopping that stuff. It's only going to be replaced by another massive fleet at some point anyway, as the codices say, they don't even think this is all of the hive invasion. So, eventually this galaxy will just be overrun with tyranids if they ever wanted to move the time line forward (not that they ever will, so celebrate retcon hell with everyone else...)So yeah, there isn't going to be a lot of space to create deep characters and why bother, they're all gonna die. A lot of the novel falls flat, there are a couple cool moments here and there. Since I knew what was going to happen as I started the book, that long 200 page lead up to the full invasion war just came off as a bit tedious to read. I think it could have easily been a hundred pages shorter, because a lot of the side characters just didn't matter much.Now, the bigger, more frustrating problem is how GW insists on writing about the tyranids. Now, I understand just about all of the xenos material are written through the lens of the Imperium. So, this is humanity's way of cataloging what they know. I get it, it's a semi-cool approach. And, honestly, after thinking about it, this makes the thing I hate so much more galling to read in these novels! The Tyranids (somehow similar to Chaos) have taken on this role of being more of a cosmic horror. It's a bit more to the Cthulhu-esque level where they do not care about us, all living things are their food. The Chaos gods at least do care to interact with humanity and other sentient life. Tyranids do not care. We are their food and that is all we are. So, as far as novels go, it's a monster story where you can't interact with the other side because it's just an animal. This is what makes them a lot more like dealing with the movie Aliens (and also the whole swarm mechanic thing). I get that, it's fine. I like stories like this and have read novels that are good with these restrictions.However, as it applies to the game and novel crossover, it gets really annoying. It's like they go far out of their way to tell their authors that the tyranids are an unknowable other, so just describe them. So, there are multiple times in this novel where Hinks is describing one of the models in “vague” terms like “the Tyranid had tentacles...” and it's like, ok, which one? There are like five of those and they do different things. I started getting more and more frustrated every time I came across this. I wanted Games Workshop to sell me some models! Tell me it's a Malceptor ramming into the city! Tell me it's a Trygon bursting out of the ground. Sell me some models damnit! But no, GW, just wants to leave that money on the table. Once, and only once at the very end of the novel with less than ten pages to go do they actually call one of them the Norn Emissary! The one from the beginning, that I was able to figure out. None of the others though... ugh. It was just so tedious to read about this.The reason I find this so frustrating is because the Imperium is allegedly the ones who named the tyranids. Humans are the ones who have called these things the ravener, the barbagaunt etc. So, to me, it's just stupid not to name them. I get it that most people die who encounter tyranids, but my god, who cares. Name the damn models. I can suspend my disbelief that a random Solar Auxilia person won't know a Trygon from a ravener, I'm telling you now, it won't ruin my experience of the story. In fact, it might get me to buy a model! I might sit there and say, hey that thing sounded pretty cool in the battle, I'll pick up a box of raveners and paint them like Hive Fleet Leviathan. But no, no, vague descriptions... could be a bunch of different choices. Things don't need to be that unknowable to be threatening, we don't need to H.P. Lovecraft everything to death here.Anyway, I long for the day GW decides that maybe they can name more tyranid models in a book. Apparently they're becoming sort of okay with it, hence we have the Norn Emissary... far too late in the book though. I will definitely pick up other books by Hinks and read them, because as an author, I think he did a good job with the limitations he was given.

Mostly a 4.5, but I'm taking off a star for killing off a character I liked :P

We return again to the adventures of Qwill and his two cats Koko and Yumyum. These books are super fast to read and I'm trying to savor them since there are only thirty or so, but here I am, already on book ten. I do like the fact that she's settled into a bit of a slow burn with the small towns of Pick Ax and so forth. However, a constant them in the books seems to center around Qwill needing to move to different locations and this book is no different.

A slight spoiler at the beginning here. In some respects, I am glad Braun ripped the band-aide off from early on, so I could get over the death of one of my favorite characters. Iris Cobb is killed off within the first few pages of the book and I am saddened to see her go. She was a long time recurring character. I think the dynamic created between her and Qwill was still best when they were in the mansion together and I still wish Braun had dragged out the existence of the mansion and its secrets longer than she did. Alas, we must give a fond farewell to the wonderful Iris Cobb. The death of this character precipitated the requirement for Qwill to suddenly pack up from his apartment from the garage and head off to a more remote area to watch over the Goodwinter Museum.

The character in question claimed they were hearing ghosts before their demise and so Braun brings us on a bit of a spookier turn in this novel. I rather liked it in the sense that Qwill was quickly dismissive of ghosts and sought out other explanations throughout the book. This, naturally, prompted the need for Koko to be on the case! I will say, the cat antics were are a pretty big minimum in this book, unfortunately. The museum basically had a living space attached to it and the cats and Qwill were in there, but the cats were not allowed to roam the museum. However, Qwill did let them out to wander the place when some stuff went missing to see if Koko could help find it. Sadly, he was unsuccessful, but the whole thing was pretty quick. I wanted a few more feline hi-jinks and I felt this story was a bit short on them. The cats were very much cat like though with Koko staring out the window for hours on end and Qwill wondering what he was looking at. The cutest thing the cats did was burrow under the rugs though, I thought that part was good fun.

The greater portion of the mystery was centered around a couple of new characters and I think that's one of the reasons this mystery was fairly obvious to solve. I rather worked out the most likely killer early on and I hadn't really been able to do that before. Braun, to me, usually wrote the mysteries in a way that were very obtuse at times so when Qwill solved the crime it sort of happened all of a sudden out of nowhere. And the explanation made sense, but it was hard to trace the clues really, unlike in a Doyle styled mystery where Sherlock explained things and you could sort of see the thread throughout the story. However, “The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts,” did have that thread weaved throughout so the explanation made a ton of sense this time. Frankly, I'm not sure what's better, I kind of found the haphazard nature of the prior books a bit charming.

The mystery centers on old tales of one of the founding Goodwinters who was hated in the community and allegedly lynched. But rumors abounded throughout history that he wasn't, so Qwill and the cats were off to find out what was really going on. Needless to say they found out some interesting things with the history of the area and how the people are interwoven into it, so that their ancestors seem to still be swayed by tales of the past.

In the end, I found this a pretty good mystery and everyone was quite well written. There are some parts with pretty heavy topics such as spousal abuse and sometimes child neglect. A few animals were poisoned at one point, which was a really sad thing to read about, but a lot of that was designed for throwing the reader off the trail of the “who-done-it”. If the above topics would really put you off of the book, you might want to give this one a pass even though they are not major portions of the novel, still some of the themes wound up being a bit darker than her usual.

I have finally done it, after relatively being into these games for quite a few years I have finally started my journey down the path of the Horus Heresy! Just in time too, as I've also been acquiring quite a few models in that setting lately and have gone full into the world of Legions Imperialis! However, I am not a fan of their rulebook and have to try out a game... so it will be off to YouTube to see if someone else can better explain the rules. (Review of that rulebook coming in the future). Anyway, we're here for Dan Abnett's penultimate kick-off to the epic saga that is the Horus Heresy. Quite a few of these 50+ books are out of print nowadays, but if I am lucky I will be able to track down some affordable copies... or GW could just reprint some of them... please do a reprint run, it's been a long time for some of these. My Horus Heresy collection is a mere smattering of the series at the moment so I do not know if I will ever read every single book in the series, but I do have this original trilogy and I am very set on reading that.

First... some history. The Horus Heresy has been around in game form for quite some time. It first appeared in game in the guise of Adeptus Titanicus in the late 80's. The history is somewhat interesting, because when making that game they were unable to afford to make different molds for the Titans at the time. So, there was an offhand comment written in something Rick Priestly made about the Emperor of Mankind throwing his son Horus into the warp, thus the Horus Heresy was born! And since this hinted at a civil war among the Imperium the game Adeptus Titanicus was set in that timeline, thus they were able to make their Titan models the same ones, but just fighting each other. Brilliant!

Fast forward to 2006, they finally brought into the light the full novelization of the series. I am not sure if Games Workshop intended to create the monster they did with this, but having a prestigious author of the lore like Dan Abnett to kick it off was certainly the right choice. It's interesting to note that at the time I am writing this, they are wrapping up the series with the epic ending “The Siege of Terra” a book series of it's own epic length... since, you know, everything in Warhammer should be, well, epic?

Some background for those unfamiliar with The Horus Heresy. This is not set in the time of Warhammer 40k, instead this is about ten thousand years in the past and why players refer to this as Warhammer 30k. The Horus Heresy takes place after the Emperor has stopped crusading the stars to subdue any alien planets and reuniting any human run worlds with the Imperium. Horus is his favored son and been given the title of Warmaster and is commanded to continue the crusade of the stars. This novel starts well after Horus has been given this title and I'm not sure any novels have been written about the Emperor of Mankind on his unification crusade which predate these novels.

While this book ends on an extremely strong note and makes me want to immediately pick up the second, I will say the middle of the book somewhat dragged for me a little bit. I didn't end up tearing through the novel like i had expected. I've read other things by Abnett and quite enjoyed them, so I expected to here as well. However, kicking off such an epic series sort of means the first novel is going to be a bit of a slow burn. And that's exactly what “Horus Rising” is. So, if you're interested in the series, don't be dismayed if this novel can feel a bit slow at times. Abnett is really setting the grand stage for what will come, so in this book we are introduced to the players, we get to them in a bit more detail so we understand who they are and what their motivations are. We see how they act in battle and how they interact with other chapters of the Space Marines, most of all we observe how Horus behaves and is as a person as well as a warrior. There is a lot more politicking than fighting in this book, especially between Space Marine chapters, so just be prepared for that going in.

Even though this book is titled “Horus Rising” the main character we seem to follow is Captain Loken. This book starts off in a particular time when Loken is being elevated as a mere Captain, to a special advisor to Horus directly. Horus has a group of advisors called the Mournvale and one of their member had recently fallen. So, Loken has been elevated to take over based on his deeds and bravery as a leader in battle. As readers we follow Loken closely and we interact with Horus as an advisor, so while Horus is in this book, he's not as much of a main character as I expected. I think this makes for a rather interesting way to tell the tale, since we are not really privy to Horus' inner thoughts, so when he makes choices we don't always know all the reasons or have all the information.

Those into Warhammer 40k are well versed in the existence of the Armies of Chaos and how they interact with the Imperium, however, in this series of Warhammer 30k, mankind doesn't really know or understand it. They don't truly understand the dangers of the warp and those aspects of the novel are some of the most arresting portions of the writing. In one campaign to subjugate a world they encounter a mysterious group called the Whisperheads and their coms units are inundated with something claiming to be Samus (yes, you can buy a model of this), and this was one of the early encounters with Chaos beings. I tore through the book at this section, because it was so fascinating. However, in response, and to deny the existence of this stuff the knowledge of what happened was summarily suppressed. You have to understand, there is no real religion in the Imperium, gods do not exist, only loyalty to the Emperor.

The book sort of wanders through three different campaign fronts, one of which involves a species the humans call “Megarachnids”, but, to be honest, this just felt like an excuse to write about Tyranids in some way. Now, these are NOT Tyranids, Tyranids are an extra-galactice species that isn't first encountered until about 35k, so this is years before humans know about them. However, these things just seem like Tyranids, they're Tyranids light, sure, but the similarities were a bit much. I actually felt this encounter, despite supposed to be exciting and filled with battle, was the part that dragged a bit. I don't know why, the battles were well written, but the interaction between the different space marine chapters took a long time to get through. I'm sure it's important for world building purposes, but the final sequence of the novel was the most fascinating.

I think Abnett was inspired by the saying “if you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself,” and well, the final encounter is with another fringe human group. However, these humans are very powerful and have had interactions with the Eldar. In here we get another hint about the dangers of chaos, I won't spoil it here, but this whole entire encounter was fascinating and I tore through this. There was very little fighting and it was mostly all political in nature, but I found the lore creation here far more exciting than the Megarachnid battles. Maybe I'm weird, but I usually don't like too much of the politics, but I think Abnett se up enough of a mysterious entity that I just needed to know more and that's what really kept me engaged. The Megarachnids weren't as mysterious. We couldn't communicate with them and there was no society to study, only xenos to be destroyed by decree of the Emperor... so there just wasn't much to that encounter I guess.

In the end, I wound up landing in the four star realm for this, at moment it was easily five stars and at others 3.5. I wouldn't say it ever dropped below three though. I did have to keep reminding myself that this is setting the stage for an epic tale and often book ones tend to run a bit slower than the second or third book in a series when stuff really begins to kick off! So, I look forward to picking up the next book and reading that in the near future. Now that the series has an end, I am a bit more motivated to try and wade through this incredible tale.

I've been a bit of an off and on collector of miniatures wargames for years. I've primarily been into products released by Games Workshop as I also quite enjoy model building as well. Lately, I've been getting quite into the hobby again and bought loads of stuff. On YouTube you can watch a lot of hobby channels while engaging in your own hobby building and through that search I've encountered a wonderful channel called Jordan Sorcery. By far some of the best and most enjoyable I've run across thus far. Anyway, on his channel he does pretty interesting dives into the history of the games and he does a wonderful job putting it all together. If he encounters a mistake he'll even make an errata update like you'd find from a real researcher. I found the history so fascinating that I wound up wanting to generally know a lot more about it and I got roped into building a huge archival project of all released Games Workshop products on the MiniSet website, so I've been diving into the history myself through the lens of how they structured their product codes! Needless to say, I'm on a bit of an obsessive tear with the project as now I'm interested in reading about the history in my free time!Luckily two books have recently arrived on the scene! [b:Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop 62921113 Dice Men The Origin Story of Games Workshop Ian Livingstone https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1665341483l/62921113.SX50.jpg 98739795] which is written by one of the original Games Workshop founders from the 1970's was recently published and released, which I haven't read as I write this review. I'm sure that will be a fascinating read in terms of hobby gaming in the 70's and dealing with things like Dungeons & Dragons in the UK. Since Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson were more interested in the role playing end of the hobby, I figure the book is more about that end of spectrum. While I do like RPG's, D&D, being an American product is all around me. What isn't as available is Game Workshop stuff. I really wish it was available more around me when I was a kid in the 90's, because I would have probably gotten loads of their games instead of trying to backtrack into the historical catalog at wildly increased prices! Whatever, I've built a semi-decent collection thus far.I decided to dive into Robin Dews & John Stallard's book first, because even flipping through it, I could tell this was more centered on the Wargaming end of things. That is exactly what I got out of this and it was a wonderful journey! Robin Dews & John Stallard were both employees of Games Workshop going back to the 80's, so they interviewed a lot of their colleagues from that time frame. The big names in here, for me, are people like Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers and Jervis Johnson. Just absolutely top rate creators as far as I'm concerned. This book is a little bit different than I expected though, because these aren't really normal interviews like you'd expect from a talk show host who asks pointed questions etc. No, Robin and John are recording conversations with their old colleagues, so it's quite a bit of reminiscing about the old days of trying to found a new approach to the wargaming hobby and bring it into the fantasy and sci-fi genres, which no one was really doing at the time.They did a great job of typing up all the interviews, but since these are conversations sometimes in the flow of the read I'd lose track of who was saying what. But this wasn't a big deal, as what I was after was the meat of the history and all of that is fully retained in the conversations. When I first saw the price of the book, I somewhat balked at the 85USD price tag, but I really wanted to read something of this nature, so I took the plunge. I have to say, they really make it worth your while in purchasing a book like this. They have it all split between two volumes and printed on very heavy paper, maybe even a little heavier than you'd find in a Games Workshop rulebook even. The two volumes are in paperback, personally, I would have preferred hardcover, but I'm sure that would have just increased the price. However, the books are actually of similar size if not a little bit bigger in dimension to the rulebooks published by game creators. I actually feel like they are the same dimensions as the old Imperial Armour books from Forge World, which were a bit taller than the standard Games Workshop books. (I sorely regret not getting the Forge World books when I had the chance and alas... I only have two.) Sifted throughout the book in true rulebook fashion, there are tons of photos of old products, pictures of the staff from GW working on things and even pictures of the buildings that still stand today of where GW used to be located as it moved around.While they obviously go into the history of the games and their design, Robin and John go beyond just this one simple task. They also talk to all kinds of other areas of the staff that were absolutely instrumental in getting this hobby off the ground. They talked to the painting staff that became the ‘eavy Metal team eventually and talked about the challenges of painting so many minis for a new product launch and the problems with photographing the minis at the time, which I found absolutely fascinating. They also dove into the history of White Dwarf magazine and how it transitioned from being just another hobby magazine reporting on all things in the hobby game industry and transitioned to only being dedicated to Games Workshop products. Which seemed like a bizarre choice when I first encountered it, but those magazines have loads of content that are really quite wonderful with rules supplements and extra lore etc. So, creating that kind of content every month was quite a huge initiative and those interviews are wonderful as well.One mysterious thing Games Workshop did was they created a sort of “sub” miniatures company called Marauder Miniatures which featured sculptors like Trish Carden. When I encountered this company in my archival process, I was so baffled, since it seemed like a lot of hte sculpts were eventually folded into the regular range in the 90's. Well, we get a good telling of this story in this book. It was very cool to read about the sculpts being made for this new “company” though and they have wonderful photos from Trish's personal collection as well.Surprisingly they even interviewed some of the people working as managers in the company, which was very interesting to read about. Some of the best stories came out of those interviews, such as the person eventually finding himself working on organizing the events like Games Day. Tim Pollard has one of the funniest stories in the entire two volumes when he regales us of a tale when a couple of the security people found someone stealing! I highly recommend this interview at least. They even interviewed people from the admin team like Helen Morley, which was pretty interesting, because she got to go into all this info about how things had changed from the 80's into the 90's. This was pretty typical of the interviews where they talked about the old technology of the time and how things were changing rapidly. One thing that was interesting was they also interviewed Anthony Epworth and he talked about the process of casting the metal minis and how that technology has largely been unchanged even into today.I couldn't help but notice that a huge portion of these old Games Workshop employees now work for Warlord Games. So, if you want to see where some of the designers and creators went you can probably find similar content from them.There were a few interviews I would have really loved to see, but I imagine they would be tough to get. First and foremost, I would have completely loved to read a reminiscing interview with Bryan Ansell and at the time of this books writing that would have been possible. Sadly, Bryan passed away recently on December 30, 2023. Bryan wound up being the real driving force for the wargaming hobby that Games Workshop would be known for. He set the major foundations and all the interviews talk about him and his incredible creation. However, they always make some passing reference to how he could be difficult to work with etc, but no one ever really goes into details, because I gather, at the end of the day, they truly respected the man and what he was trying to accomplish. He could also be very kind and go out of his way for his employees, but his vision of what he was creating was probably somewhat uncompromising I reckon. I still would have liked to read an interview with Bryan reminiscing and seeing if he had accomplished all that he wished to accomplish with the company. They speak of the transition and buyout from Tom Kirby and it is usually phrased that Bryan wanted to take a step back from the company and I always wonder why at that point. It doesn't seem like he really confided in many people on his staff about it. It makes it seem like it was not a hostile take over and Bryan was never ousted by Kirby. Which brings me to another interview I would love to read... one with Tom Kirby. Under his management he grew the company to a global force and it would be interesting to see some of his insights of that time. He also killed off a lot of unique aspects of what Games Workshop did at the time as well or didn't believe in some of the initiatives like the publishing of novels. Only to have the novels come back later.Aside from those giants of the company I would also have loved a John Blanche interview, arguably one of the most influential GW artists that set the tone for the whole franchise practically. At the time this book was being put together he was still employed by GW and has only recently retired, so maybe he will be free to get some interviews. Naturally, I hope he will wind up on Jordan Sorcery!With such a massive history under its belt it is probably impossible to tell the full story in these interviews, even in two rather massive volumes. So, this installment of interviews stays pretty focused on the 80's, with some sections diving into the late 70's. Since Robin and John started in the 80's, naturally most of their colleagues are from that era. However, I would love to see interviews discussing the creation of material in the 90's as that is what I collected the most of at the time. Some games are mentioned in passing, like Necromunda, Epic 40,000 etc. but these interviews stay pretty focused on Warhammer Fantasy Battle and the 80's games. In the epilogue section of the book it is clear that Robin and John realize this and made allusions for a possible second edition of interviews featuring more things from the 90's. I would love to read these! Covering things like the creation of Forge World, which seems to have recently been folded back into the company and labelled with “Expert Models” in the store rather than the Forge World logo. Maybe we could get that coveted John Blanche interview! Andy Chambers and Rick Priestly took on game development in the 90's and I'd love to see them talk about these. Andy's work on Necromunda would be a wonderful read as well.While I do enjoy the reading of the interviews, because I just love reading. Part of me also would have enjoyed listening to the interviews as well. Sitting down and putting on an audio version of this while I build and paint some minis would be a wonderful afternoon. Who knows if the source material is good for that kind of release though.If you are fascinated by these games and want to relive some of the history with the creators I highly recommend this book. They do an absolutely wonderful job of putting it together. You get to read about some first rate remembrances of the time and what it was like to work in the games industry back then. I truly hope for a second volume!

1.5 at timesThis book isn't quite as bad as [b:Aliens: Alien Harvest 196263 Aliens Alien Harvest Robert Sheckley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385176176l/196263.SY75.jpg 189820], but wow, it hits that level once in a while. There's just some serious nonsense that shows up along the way with how Aliens act that is just outright a disregard for anything established by these creatures... anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. As usual, full disclosure, I don't usually like first person novels and this really wasn't any different. Being first person, while not my favorite, wasn't even close to why I didn't like this novel. It had a lot more to do with the fact that the story was incoherent (possibly due to poor editing) and the Aliens did some weird things that they would literally never do, nor is it even suggested anywhere they can do this stuff.This book starts off with an attempt to make the crew seem like a plucky band of misfits. Someone's escaped pet is wreaking havoc on the space ship as it is coming in to land on a planet. This is somewhat used as a vehicle to introduce the main characters, which is fine, but the real problem is with how long these chapters are. It took an extremely long time to get through this introduction and this “too long” chapters persists throughout the whole novel. We don't need forty page chapters in a 250 page book, it's daunting and doesn't break up the story often enough.The main character we encounter in first person is basically a cop named Rory sent to make sure certain things are done correctly for the ships mission onto a planet that is slotted for terraforming. An advance team had been sent to the planet which included Rory's mother, whom he is quite estranged from. She's a scientist that is obsessed with the Aliens, so you guessed it, this will fall into the mad scientist tried and true story trope. Now, I am not super bothered by tropy stories, I can get behind a solid mad scientist story if it's well written. As far as the scientist and mystery surrounding the motives of the advance team, that was, honestly, the best part of the book. Carey could have built that into quite a compelling arc, but it just sort of slogged on and never really went much of anywhere. Too much time was spent describing the characters walking around various areas when lots of that stuff could have just been skipped in favor of a good mad scientist mystery.The first red flag I encountered was when the team from the ship was exploring and trying to find the advance people, they were, at some point, attacked by a swarm of face huggers? It was so confusing and this is where things got really weird. First off, they were sent to the planet to eradicate any non-native species on the planet with these special poison machine things, so it sounded like they knew there were Aliens present on this planet. But then when they got there, they didn't even know what to call the face huggers? So, does this book ignore all the Aliens data from the prior books/movies? Or do they know what these things are, because it sure sounds like Rory's mother is very well aware of what the Aliens are and wants to study them. In any event, the idea that the face huggers hatch from the eggs and then run around a planet looking for people or animals to impregnate makes the whole need for Aliens to capture people moot. It's just nonsense and far afield of what is discussed in pretty much all the prior Aliens literature written by those people paying any attention to the franchise.Another part of this that was madenning to read, was how the ship itself had a protective field that had a specific radius. So the crew could wander around safely. However, when the Aliens showed up, they found out that they weren't sure if the Aliens could be stopped by the ship... like what? Why would you send people to cleanse a planet of Aliens with technology you just aren't sure works against them???Eventually, the crew from the ship track down the original team sent to the planet and they are in this giant hide away that the Aliens can't see or sense. However, the team of researchers have been diligently collecting data on the Aliens and everything. Rory's mother has grown a sort of cult following for her cause. A portion of the original team has, unfortunately died, often due to the Aliens, which makes sense, but Rory senses there is more to the foul play. This is the thread of the story that Carey should have played up more and talked to more of the remaining scientists. It would have made for a far more fascinating tale, but instead she focused on writing about Rory, his mother, and his sister more than anything else. Then throwing in some tidbits about Aliens in general for good measure.So, some other stuff happens, that I won't spoil in case someone actually wants to read this thing, and towards the end the Aliens start fighting against themselves. It turns out there are two hives? Out of nowhere that no one knew about... seems weird. Anyway, this felt like an excuse from one of the other comic series, I believe it was Genocide which brought up the idea of two hives. Carey just leans into that as the reasons the Aliens stop attacking the people. But the the attacks begin when some weird sound is given off and end when another weird sound is made. There is literally no explanation for this and it just makes zero sense in the context of Alien creatures anyway.Since the Aliens aren't attacking the people Rory and the others from the ship decide to make a run for it. This is where things get really dumb. While they are running for the ship, the Aliens are fighting each other and apparently that means they roll around like tumbleweeds? Seriously? These things aren't wheels... to make matters worse, they roll over one of the marines, Edney, and she is killed. Like they tear her arm off and rip out her eye and everything. Then in the next few paragraphs she is totally fine and being helped up a rock face with everyone else and they're pulling her up by the arms that got torn off? Anyway, later on it seems Carey remembered that Edney was actually dead and then she stops existing in the book after that. (This is what I meant by poor editing.)Along with this mad dash the face huggers attack again! But, and get this, this time they fly. I was actually willing to give the story almost three stars until I hit this particular feature. This was just incredibly dumb. This made absolutely zero sense for anything and I am so glad no one else has tried to include such utter nonsense in any of the other novels.Meanwhile, the poison robot things have been unleashed and the people need to make it to the ship safely. While they were nearing the ship they saw that the Aliens had destroyed some of the robots by dying on top of the robot and melting them with acid blood. So... that makes it seem like people didn't know what Aliens were? So, what was the point of sending this ship to cleanse the planet of Alien DNA??? This story just makes no sense at all towards the end.I need to rant about one final thing... remember the pet that escaped at the beginning? Well, this creature is not from the planet they are on and it escaped the ship at one point. Simultaneously they realized the poison robots that will kill anything non-native to the planet had been let out too. So, the pets owner, Bonnie, wanted to leave the hide they were to go save it and Rory, our plucky hero won't let her leave saying all this stuff about how it could survive just fine on the new planet. There would be lots for it to eat etc. THE POISON ROBOTS WILL KILL ANYTHING NOT FROM THIS PLANET!!!! I wanted to scream, it's like this dude was gas lighting this girl into thinking the pet would be perfectly safe while they brought the means to kill anything with them. AND the robots were already loose, so that pet was in real danger at this point, so yeah, Bonnie was right. She needed to get her pet out of danger, because it really could have been killed at any moment!In the end, this book felt like a chore to read. I am pretty concerned that the next Aliens book is also written by Diane Carey, but I don't think I'll be starting this any time soon. Who knows, maybe this book got such bad feedback when it was first released, the next book is better? I don't know, I need to read something else in the meantime. Hopefully something better. If you are an Aliens fan, I highly recommend skipping out on this book. Some parts are okay, but it is not nearly enough to make it worth your time. What could have been a decent mad scientist story falls pretty flat as this tale continues.

This was another fun and enjoyable mystery book starring Qwilleran and his two cats Koko and Yum Yum. In this novel we return with Qwill to the log cabin he first stayed in a few novels ago in Moose County. Now he is not just staying there to work on his writing, now he is the owner of the place. His new love interest is away in England for the summer, so this is why Qwill winds up there on his own. (Please note, if I accidentally type “Moosehead,” it is because my own family had a cabin in Maine on Moosehead Lake many years ago and I also went there for the summers sometimes. So, I apologize for any confusion.)

While hoping for a nice relaxing summer with his feline companions we, naturally, find that Qwill's ability to relax is constantly being interrupted by mysterious happenstances of the murderous kind. Only he and Koko will be able to figure out what is going on, but to make matters worse, Qwilleran keeps running into problems with the cabins general disrepair! First it's a plumbing issue, then an electrical issue, it's a nonstop repair person coming and going fiasco.

Amidst this, Qwill decides to give himself and the cats some more breathing room and wants to put an addition onto the cabin. This is easier said than done, because apparently the availability of carpenters in the summer is quite scarce. Unfortunately, this leads Qwill to ask around to see if anyone is up for the job and he's in luck! He manages to find a wonderful one that seems competent and punctual, something Qwill really appreciates. Eventually the guy just up and disappears one day. This brings Qwill into finding out that this happens with carpenters on the regular in Moose County and a lot of the townsfolk are used to dealing with transigent carpenters in the summer. One guy starts one a job and then wanders off then another comes along and finishes it. It takes years to get any projects done! However, Qwill is shocked at the attitude concerning his carpenter, since he's a local man too. Sadly, this puts Qwill in the same position as everyone else and hires another transigent carpenter... but then he disappears too!

Not to worry, Koko is on the case! Qwill is certain foul play is involved and he's sure Koko agrees, but everyone else is quite dismissive of the mystery. Needless to say the mystery is always solved with the help of Koko, but I felt this was a far more tragic tale than some of her previous novels. The motivations of the killers were a bit more typical, although I do appreciate Braun switching it up a little bit, but this one ends on a far more tragic note than usual.

Despite the tragic back story of our killer this time around, there are many wonderful antics with the cats and the, often, hilarious cast of characters Braun brings into our world. She had a lot to work with in this “who-done-it,” because it's a popular vacation spot, so there are a lot of new people that can come and go for little or no reason. This really helps to keep us guessing throughout the book. Anyway, if you've enjoyed the prior novels, this one keeps up the same level of quality as the past few books.

Honestly, more of a 2.5, even though I did wind up liking a lot of the characters.Unlike the other Necromunda novels I've read, this one wasn't nearly as great. Now, when I first got into Warhammer 40,000, I picked up some of the original books many years ago and I was excited to read a Tyranid novel, which was also written by C.S. Goto and I didn't like that one very much either... so I stopped reading those books. I regret this, because I have deprived myself of some awesome novels. So, in conclusion, I think I just don't really like C.S. Goto's books very much, purely as a matter of taste. I'm sure there are people that enjoy these immensely. I think part of my issue is that the chapters are just too long. A lot of chapters are 30 pages long and the book is organized in a very fragmented manner. So it tells a little bit of what this characters is doing, then what another character far away is doing and I have no problem with this, but my gosh... end a chapter.Salvation is kind of a strange book in that for something based on a skirmish game, it's not very action packed. I do applaud Goto for daring to be different and I think the premise is a good one, but like I said, the way he goes about telling the tale just doesn't work for me. This story centers of a librarian curator named Zefer Tyranus who works in the librarium of the Ko'iron family. As many other reviewers have pointed out, this is a bit of a slow book that picks up later in the story. This is all very true, because the entire first major portion of the book is rather dedicated to bureaucratic dysfunction. So, as our character suffers from the insane hoops he needs to jump through, so does the reader. Sometimes this can be a wild journey with an awesome payoff, but I really didn't feel like that by the end. I haven't read many books in the 40k universe, but a book that did this well was a recent book I read called [b:Outgunned 62050199 Outgunned (Warhammer 40,000) Denny Flowers https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661152907l/62050199.SY75.jpg 97814426].In the end the whole initial portion of the book suffers from being extremely slow as we journey with Zefer from office to office getting permission to do anything. He finally meets with a member of Ko'iron royalty, but she is just a child... but not really. First, I rarely complain about typos, but this book had a rather overwhelming amount of them, even compared to other Black Library books I've read. Secondly, when Zefer meets with this “child” I think there might be a typo... the book says she is 14, but honestly, I think she was supposed to be 11 or maybe younger. 14 year olds just don't act this way and later in the novel when we run into her again it says she has trouble reaching across a desk to reach something her older brother can. To me this implies she might be even younger... 14 year olds aren't tiny humans that can't reach across a desk... or demand to be played with to “make echoes” with visitors as Zefer was asked to do. Plus, in the initial meeting it had to be cut short, because she needed to be put down for her nap... so was she supposed to be 4??? She definitely acted like a 4 year old and that would make more sense. The real kicker is they actually typed out “fourteen”... so it makes me think C.S. Goto does not remember being fourteen nor does he know anyone that is fourteen...Anyway, once Zefer gets his stuff together its time to go on his quest to find out some historical thing about the House Ko'iron. This is where Goto makes another weird mistake in the stories logic. Zefer is given an envelope in the Underhive that came from the Upper level offices, and he never reads it! It just makes no sense, throughout the entire story and some of the points of him having down time, he never opens the envelope until the very end to make some weird point that also made no sense. I understand this being a Grim Dark Future genre and things not ending nicely, but this whole ending was bad and didn't make a lot of sense to me, so it doesn't even end on that much of a satisfying finish.I think Goto tried to include too many things in the book too. Like, he tried to show almost all the different gangs and factions interacting and I felt like it was just too much at once. He sacrificed character development for extra content, so that the main gang leaders we did encounter were just caricatures. Elria the leader of an Escher gang was a “man hating feminist,” which is exactly what I assume Goto was pulling from. Triar of the Cawdor's was a firebrand redemptionist that wanted to burn all the wytches and thus fought with Elria. Then there was Uglar of the Goliaths who was a stupid roided out guy, but his gang wound up being quite the strongest in battle. Then there was Orthios of Orlocks who didn't do much of anything except die... I guess Goto doesn't play that faction. The only Delaque we really interact with is Krelyn who is a venator for the Ko'irons. I actually really liked Krelyn and I wish more time was spent on fleshing out her character. As they go deeper into the Underhive they run into the Ratskins, so now that gang is brought in. See what I mean? It's just too much for a 250 page story. In order to fit in all the painful bureaucratic dysfunction at the beginning, it means rushing through all the end parts where the action is with almost no development behind much of it. I understand that this a story where people risk their lives on a fools errand, but the characters are barely fleshed out all that much. In the end, basically everyone dies except Zefer, so he's the only one to really get to the last painful stupid ending where he finds out his journey was all for naught.In the end, while I liked some of the characters and world building, the overall story was just tedious. I didn't really like it all that much and I felt the end wasn't very satisfying. I mean, it's not supposed to be satisfying, but the way in which it is unsatisfying is also unsatisfying... yeah, I think that makes sense. Anyway, unless your a die hard Necromunda fan that must read all the books, give this one a skip.

Easily hits the 4.5 mark most of the time.

This was a really interesting tale in the world of Warhammer 40,000, because it comes from a perspective not really told often in books as far as I can tell. I haven't read a ton of 40k novels, but even so, I feel like this isn't the usual choice for a main character in a game designed around having the most epic of epic battles. Outgunned introduces us to Propagandist Simlex and it's through his eyes that we have a first hand account of observations of the Ork invasion of the planet Bacchus.

The story is told from a first person perspective, which I am normally not a fan of, but wow does Denny Flowers make a good use of it. I can't think of a better reason to use first person than to see through the eyes of an Imperial Propagandist and their thought process on trying to turn situations into well framed propaganda tools! Simlex is tasked with putting together a piece about the Aeronautica Imperialis and one of the intended main subjects is Flight Commander Lucille von Shard, since she is one of the most skilled pilots in the Imperium. However, Simlex does not know that she is a bit of a black sheep amidst the extremely loyal von Shard family, so Simlex has his work cut out for him.

The real problem on Bacchus is that despite the finery of what the governor tries to show, the war is not going very well for the Imperium. The citizen believe the Orks to be backwards low-tech creatures that can't even get off the ground. So, imagine Simlex's surprise when he encounters Ork aircraft trying to shoot him down as he arrives on planet! This is the first dose of things not being entirely what they seem. Coupled with the fact that Shard resents being used as a propaganda tool, makes turning this job into a viable propaganda piece nearly impossible.

However, along the way, while Simlex tries to execute his duties, he and Shard find out some startling truths about the nature of Orks. They learn that the xenos are much more dangerous than they feared and that the governor of Bacchus has been in contact with other dangerous aliens, that have had a truly adverse effect on the entire planet. Denny Flowers weaves a rather captivating tale through the warzones and political intrigue. It really shows how the bureaucracy of the Imperium is more a hindrance to its people rather than a feature. Shard also knows the war is not going well at all and she is one of the few soldiers to take on an air of complete cynicism in the face of the losing battles.

In the end, I thought this was a really good book. Some of the political aspects can drag on a little bit, but one of the more major reveals at the end make that more worth it, because it makes sense as to why. The only thing I thought was a bit strange was that at the beginning, as I mentioned, they only thought the Orks were a spear wielding race and had no guns or machinery. But in the actual game it's pretty well available to field these kinds of weapons. I guess I'm just a bit confused on where this story hits in the Imperium time line or if the Imperium has been going far out of it's way to hide the Ork threat. I mean, the Orks can field Titan level weapons... so it just seemed a bit off that people wouldn't know about that. Especially since in the historical setting Necromunda had a problem with Orks a long long time ago.

Either way, really solid book with great characters. You actually don't need to know much about 40k setting to enjoy this book at all. I've read other books, where it's almost essential to know about a particular faction or know about the game, but this book stands out as something I think just about anyone could read.

Hits a 4/4.5This is the first full novel in the Necromunda universe, written by Andy Chambers who is also a game designer behind the scenes. This is also Chambers' first full length novel. Survival Instinct comes out quite a few years after the initial anthology [b:Status: Deadzone 133173 Status Deadzone (Necromunda) Andy Jones https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1626354680l/133173.SY75.jpg 128290], which was a book that covered short stories written for the first edition of the game. However, this book launches a new string of novels after the release of the 2nd edition of the game: [b:Necromunda: Underhive 18658190 Necromunda Underhive Matt Keefe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1381375660l/18658190.SX50.jpg 26474900].This novel is the first to introduce us to the character D'onne Ulanti, who fled from the noble house Ulanti into the Underhive to carve a new name for herself with chainsword in hand as Mad Donna. Chambers brings us on a tale of revenge that is some what more uniquely arranged. In order to follow Donna's motivations Chambers intersperses chapters of her history which drove her to leave the Underhive and go even deeper.Chambers does an excellent job of making this a solidly exciting tale with great characters throughout. It's a great first showing for a first novel, even if the writing can get a little bit clunky at times. However, as far as the story goes it's everything you'd want out of a Necromunda novel. It starts with someone tracking down Mad Donna and using her real name, which prompts her to go hunt down the original culprit. This seems strange, until we get deeper into Donna's background history of why she left the Spire and the circumstances surrounding that.I was kind of surprised the journey brings us to so many various places. We go through a few different settlements and eventually get all the way to Down Town which is near the Sump Sea. Along the way we meet some Escher friends of Donna's that help her on her quest and I thought their inclusion was a great addition to the story. A major player in this was a Delaque duo that was a real thorn in her side. So, as far as a the game goes, we could kind of imagine this as a battle between the Delaque and the Escher.The one and only criticism I can really level at this is that we never get to find out what happened to Donna's Escher friends at the end. We can sort of imagine they get away, but while the ending is wrapped up well for Donna, I felt like Chambers was a bit long winded on some descriptions and ran out of room to tell us everything in the end. However, this is merely the first installment, so maybe we will find out in future novels?Either way, I thought this first foray into a Necromunda was a lot of fun. If you're a fan of that universe, you'll find this enjoyable to some degree I'm sure. I did like it a lot more than the short story anthology that first appeared. I'm glad they're going into full length novels, because this kind of setting really deserves it, just as Warhammer 40k does. I'm really looking forward to reading the next Necromunda novel at this point as well, so, till next time!

Easily a 4.5 all around.On the heels of way too many mad scientist stories Aliens finally returns to a more action packed series, this time with a bit of a twist from a standard Colonial Marines story. Now, some of those mad scientists stories are quite good, but let's be honest, it had been getting a bit repetitive with how many there have been and while [b:Aliens - Music of the Spears 28175009 Aliens - Music of the Spears Chet Williamson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1449865702l/28175009.SY75.jpg 48193491] was very different and moody, it wasn't action packed. In fact, it had a bit of the mad scientist vibe, but instead it was a mad musician... yeah, we'll go with that.Berserker isn't really about the Colonial Marines, but it definitely gives of that feel in a lot of ways. What I'm going after is, remember the old comic series called [b:Aliens: Colonial Marines 24969100 Aliens Colonial Marines Chris Warner https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1424320836l/24969100.SX50.jpg 44633531]? That series should have been like Berserker. In this story John Wagner brings us into the world of a corporate clean up crew. Ex-cons and, what I assume are underpaid ex-Colonial Marines are stuck in an endless cycle of cleaning up Alien infestations. It's not a large crew or anything, so they can handle smaller hives and we get to see them in their prime in the first issue cleaning up a problem on a mining planet. The reason they don't need as many people in this crew is their major weapon, the beserker unit!The berserker unit sort of reminds me of the Clan Elementals from BattleTech, but Aliens being a major dystopia it's much more grim than that. The pilot is encased in the suit and basically lives there. When not on duty they are heavily sedated until needed. When they need to clean out an Alien infestation they get hit with various drugs that shock their system into overdrive. Who would sign up for such a job? Convicts. This is basically a return to the idea that violent criminals can receive this fate worse than death and they will eventually die from it anyway... so “justice” is served? Remember, Aliens is very much a cyberpunk world, especially when it comes to the corporate end of things and I love the way Wagner interfaced it into his story.Aliens, crossing into Horror realms, also means this series won't always be a nice tale of total success. Part of the issue with having a small crew is they can only take care of a certain level of infestations. Such as a LV-426 sized hive, but after the mining job they are called into check on space station 949 which holds thousands of people... contact has been lost and you can surmise why by the title of this comic.I think Berserker had excellent characters through and threw and most of the crew was fleshed out enough so you got a feel for them. Wagner didn't spend a ton of time, instead opting for corporate intrigue and action, which, honestly, I rather was fiending for after the last few rounds of Aliens comics and I didn't realize how much I needed an action plot until this hit.So, if you're looking for an awesome action series, pick this one up. Mendoza does a decent job behind the pen, the only complaint I might level is that sometimes his Aliens look a little wonky. But everything else is spot on and I can get beyond that with such a well written story anyway. His action sequences are excellent and sometimes the way he chooses perspective in a panel adds a lot to the tension in the image. So, all around a job well done as far as I'm concerned. The cool part is our berserker crew shows up in a future series and if you want to find out what happens next, check out [b:Aliens vs. Predator: War 343365 Aliens vs. Predator War Randy Stradley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1173904247l/343365.SY75.jpg 21771120]

If I'm being honest, this is more of a 1.5.Said plainly, I do not think this book was for me. In that regard, I am simply not it's target demographic in the least. So, perhaps, my review and criticisms should be taken with a grain of salt. I shall hide my details critique behind the spoilers wall, but first, it maybe be of some use to get an idea of the broad stroke of my issues. Firstly, this was rather sold to me as a bit of a sci-fi novel and I am an avid sci-fi reader. However, that is not really what this book is. The setting and mechanisms are right out of sci-fi, but let's be honest here, this is a romance novel. It is no different than the likes of [b:The Time Traveller's Wife 25848636 The Time Traveller's Wife Audrey Niffenegger https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1436025478l/25848636.SX50.jpg 2153746], and while I do not like romance as a genre, I found the The Time Traveller's Wife a more entertaining book.Sifted throughout reviews I have read, you will all find a common theme: This book is overwritten. By page three I found the writing tedious. If you are enamored with a turn of phrase, find beauty in the poet, then my gosh, this book is for you. You will lose yourself in the poetry of these authors and in that regard their writing has an aesthetic beauty to it, but it is the strive for that beauty that makes the story suffer and die for me. It would have made sense for the love letters to be overwritten and using a level of poetry that makes heart strings yearn, but that is not the case. No, we find the letters are a bit more plainly written and the narrative is poetry. We are beaten to death, dear readers, by metaphor after metaphor. Bludgeoned by pop culture references and popular sci-fi concepts and titles. At one point [b:A Wrinkle in Time 33574273 A Wrinkle in Time (Time Quintet, #1) Madeleine L'Engle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1507963312l/33574273.SX50.jpg 948387] is referenced. The description of Red at the beginning made me think of someone having finished playing a round of Cyberpunk 2077. But it felt somewhat ham fisted in its design, all of it points to levels of Shakespearean popularity, an homage to pop culture as if to market and sell books by seeding these little tidbits in for a readers glee.Why is this a problem? Because they sacrificed the entirety of world building to make this happen. The poetry is there, because the authors clearly do not want to build a world. Say what you want about [b:Ready Player One 9969571 Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) Ernest Cline https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1500930947l/9969571.SY75.jpg 14863741] and all it's nostalgia, it at least built a world. But that is the problem if you are a sci-fi reader, This is How You Lose the Time War lacks the indelible construction that makes for good sci-fi and that is why I do not think this is really worth reading if you are interested in reading sci-fi. This is almost a book for people who are okay with sci-fi concepts, but really don't like the genre very much at all. In that regard this book has succeeded, and I reiterate again, this is staunchly why this book is not for me. The things I like about a sci-fi story are painfully ripped away from this book, so it can laser focus on writing in a particular fashion to motivate a romance. That's it.If you are impressed by well written works then I would recommend [b:The Waking Engine 17910112 The Waking Engine David Edison https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1370532615l/17910112.SY75.jpg 25095567] by David Edison. This is another book I could not get through, but my god was the writing beautiful. I daresay, better and poignant in many ways. I have no idea if the story is great, I had to DNF it, due to my lack of interest, but I have to give props to Edison, the writing was quite exquisite. It was not overwritten, it was just the right amount of poetic phrasing and it never felt like the story was written as poetry, but still held all the qualities we hold dear for a novel.(I have somewhat overwritten this part of the review, so a reader may get a taste, nay, a flavor, of what reading this book was like without spoiling much. If you like that stuff, you like that stuff and this book is for you. Go on, get lost in the beauty of the words.)Okay, this story is about two people caught in a war. They are from different sides, so the story is the trope of enemy agents that fall in love. It is a tale as old as time and eventual culminates in references to Shakespeare that even I won't ruin here. But I assure you, it is cliché. The enemy agents to lovers is a standard fair plot that also got even more popular in the Cold War era.As a story motif, it's fine and a story, if told well, I'd easily enjoy despite my disinterest in romance as a genre. The real problem for me was that our two protagonists didn't seem to be in love with each other. Instead they felt more like they were in love with letter writing. They didn't even feel in lust with each other either, the yearning was for letters regardless of the words. You'd think you'd get to know the mind of our protagonists through the letters or personal anecdotes, but the letters are a little short on this information. They have some, sure, it would be weird not to, but nothing to truly foster a relationship outside the fog of war and two people suddenly interested in letter writing. A huge problem with this is if they had provided more detail the authors would have to world build. This is something they seemed absolutely opposed to doing. So, instead, there's not much to build a relationship on other than well, writing a letter. Perhaps the feeling of doing something a bit "naughty" because their commanders might catch them doing it etc. They try to create that tense feeling in the novel, but still... why are these people even in love? Lot's of metaphor is levelled at us, but I don't get one indelible fact or common interest between the two people as to why they should even want to foster a relationship. Towards the end you might be able to claim some excuse due to the ending, but it's so circular that it's rather annoying and would, no doubt, be bad writing.So, that's my biggest gripe. Amidst all this flowery language and beauty it fell flat for me. The writing style made me feel like they were trying to disguise something. Hiding the fact they didn't build the world or that they didn't give much of a reason for things to be. And we get that impression early on. The war being waged is not explained. Not in the slightest. Time travel abilities just... exist. They talk about "strands" are these parallel universes without saying so? It seemed to be. But again, it's so overwritten that it hides what actually is or what the authors plainly meant to say. The fact is, they go way out of their way not to talk about it. Instead they focus on historical events and if you've read enough history you can figure out when something is happening, however, our authors stay clear away from the future. Again, that pesky world building requirement...As for the enemy construction... it felt like someone had just finished up playing Horizon Zero Dawn and said "what if Gaia wrote love letters to the machines?" That's kind of it, I really think Blue represented the concept of Gaia (even though she was merely an agent of Gaia) and Red represented the machine system that would eventually destroy Gaia with it's technology. Has a bit of the Final Fantasy vibes in that regard too. Honestly, if they wanted to go the route of Horizon Zero Dawn, I would have been all about that. It would have been really cool, but I think they just wanted to write a poetic novel with some sci-fi elements to have an excuse for time travel.PS: (I know, I couldn't resist, since they made a big deal out of it in the book.) Their attempt to include all this stuff about math was interesting. Though I will say I was a bit confused when they referenced the creator of Hyperbolic Geometry, since there are three that kind of made that happen. I want to assume they were referencing Bolyai though. The fun part of it is that Hyperbolic Geometry is used in relativity and I assume this was a nod to how the time travel system might work in their minds?

Solid 4.5As usual, I read the comics in the usual single issue format.This is the first series written by John Arcudi and his name didn't stick out to me at the time, but later on the Aliens universe I saw his name pop up more and by then I always knew I'd be getting a good story. Well, here we are, his first foray into the Aliens universe as far as I know and what an awesome story. I read this when I was pretty young originally, so I was pretty happy with just about any Aliens content, but if I was an adult, I probably would have cringed at yet another mad scientist tale. Especially with [b:Aliens: Labyrinth 405637 Aliens Labyrinth (Dark Horse Collection) Jim Woodring https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347731502l/405637.SY75.jpg 394987] so close by. Granted [b:Aliens - Music of the Spears 28175009 Aliens - Music of the Spears Chet Williamson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1449865702l/28175009.SY75.jpg 48193491] came out right before and it was a real breath of fresh air for the Aliens series, showing what you could really do with the franchise... albeit some people didn't really like it based on the letters column in the comics, ah well. I thought it was an interesting branch to something new.So, on the heels of “Music of the Spears” we find ourselves visiting “Stronghold” and it has pretty much a similar story backdrop as “Labyrinth.” Despite the tried and true trope of secret corporate research facility researching the dangerous organisms to fight them... Arcudi brings us an incredibly well written tale. He manages to do quite a bit with the small space he's given, creating characters that are well written and enjoyable to deal with while in tense situations. While Arcudi's story is hardly new or “fresh” as you could say, it's just so well written it's hard not to enjoy. One of the parts I loved about his story is the nods toward other series. The facility in question is run by Grant Corporation, you may remember them all the way back to the stories when the Royal Jelly drug hit the market in the Aliens universe. My favorite part though is that this story features yet another robot Alien that is designed for Hive infiltration. Dr. Mayakovsky is even referenced as someone whose research was used to build Jerri in this series. You can read all about the adventures of Mayakovsky in [b:Aliens: Hive 2100300 Aliens Hive Jerry Prosser https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1227505268l/2100300.SY75.jpg 2105664].Our story begins with two corporate inspectors to check on a facility in remote space where an Alien hive has been allowed to prosper. They are there to check on the facilities operations and to check in on the good Dr. Nordling. Our two protagonists are the husband and wife team, both doctors, the Strunks. This facility is different from others we've seen because the only human there is Dr. Nordling and his team of androids. Naturally this would seem to get lonely, but there is one female android, Lizzy, and as we have seen in prior lore they are “fully functional” as Data would say. However, when Joy Strunk observes Nordling and his inappropriate touching it's rather disturbing and lends to the concept that this man has gone off the deep end more than we previously saw.So, the Strunks are off and looking into the facility and it's accounting of the project. The real joy is meeting the team of androids that work with Nordling. It is such a homage paid to Asimov in [b:I, Robot 41804 I, Robot (Robot, #0.1) Isaac Asimov https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609035271l/41804.SY75.jpg 1796026], that if you are familiar with the tale you'll be pleasantly surprised here. Granted the Aliens androids were clearly taken from the concept of that Asimov story, but Arcudi does a great job of making it feel more related than some of the other stories.Naturally, when the Strunks stumble upon some suspicious accounting, the real conflict hits the fan. We are treated to the last issue being action packed from beginning to end. The art by Doug Mahnke was simply excellent. The art really stood out and set the mood and stage for a lot of the conflict and action within the story.In the end, this was a real treat. It may be the same story we've all read before, but Arcudi gives us enough variation, coupled with outright good writing, it's a very enjoyable tale. Strangely, this is the one of the few four issue comics that did not get a novelization during this era. I don't know if one was ever scheduled, but we just never get one.