Just read : Helsreach

It's another of the Warhammer 40k Space Marine battles books ...

Happy to say it continues the standard set down by Rynn's World. Actually, it's a better book because it paces its action well but most important, it doesn't lose its action focus. You know when you're reading something or watching something and you suddenly go "How the hell did that happen ?" You feel as if you've missed something critical, you've blinked and you've missed something important. That's what I mean by Action Focus, when a narrative loses that the reader/watcher starts thinking "what did I miss ?" instead of "what's coming next ?"

Helsreach is set on the Hive World known as Armageddon in a Hive City called Helsreach. In the Warhammer 40k world, the Hive Worlds are those where the population has grown so much and the world has become so polluted due to industry that they have to collect together in cities with numbers in the upper millions. That said, conditions on Helsreach seem better than the Orestes Forge World of Titanicus.

Anyway - the Orks are coming again (just like Rynn's World) and a contingent of Space Marines from the Black Templars are going to save the day. Or at least allow the defenders to hang on grimly until the bitter end. The Titans are also in play here, which is one of the subplots running through the book. When you have the elite superhuman warriors of the Space Marines and the Princeps of a 80 meter tall Titan, who's in charge ?

The character at the centre of the book is Grimaldus, a Space Marine Chaplain recently elevated to effectively being the right hand man of the Chapter leader. Let's just say he's having a confidence crisis. Matrix quote : "Don't think you can, Know you can". Grimaldus doesn't even think he can justify himself being in the Reclusiarch (religious leader of the Chapter) position and firmly believes he won't survive the assault on Helsreach. A confidence deficit like that can be highly infectious ...

We have our supporting cast for Grimaldus, which includes crazy Andrej, the Major and the Adjutant, the Crone, the priest and the various members of the Guard and Grimaldus' squad. The author (Aaron Dembski-Howden) does a good job here. The Space Marines are a little more Human too. In other books, look at a Space Marine the wrong way and they'll kill you. And these are the troops charged with being the first and last line of defence of humanity. The Black Templars want a good fight but they know what they're fighting for. A common fault with a lot of books is that the characters are all the same. Not so much here, there's a good selection of disparate characters struggling for survival.

And that's what this book is. The definite message coming through here is that in war, there are no winners. There's just the survivors and the dead. And the survivors may not have much to look forward to after the war ends. With that kind of message, it's all the more important for the author to keep the reader interested in a way that Turtledove's WorldWar series fails to do. There's only so much depression a reader can take ...

Bah - I'm rambling again ...

This is another book I raced through quite quickly. It's paced well, it's not too predictable. As is usual for WH40K books, the body count is catastrophic ... The epic scale of the campaign is dealt with admirably, with the Action Focus being retained all the way through. I'll be looking out for more from this author :-)