I don’t read the various Horus Heresy novels, I started out reading
them with the best of intentions, but it was eight years back when I started,
and after the first few, I came to the realisation that like many things games
workshop, they were just going to milk it for all the money they could before
bringing it to an end.
It’s not that I object to them making money off their own IP, I just
have a problem when it’s something that everyone already knows about, everyone
knows how it started, and everyone knows how it ends, and they knew that more
than twenty years ago.
Behold White Dwarf 131…
Without question, my favourite issue of White Dwarf ever, mostly for
the fact that it had two of the best pieces of fiction that I’ve ever read in
it, and another reason, that was only to become apparent in later years…
The first piece of fiction was The Emporer and Horus, by William King,
which detailed the last hours of the Horus Heresy, when the Emporer took the
fight to Horus and nearly paid with his life…
It took two pages…
There was nothing wrong with that bit of fiction, it was tight, sharp,
and encompassed all the things it needed to do, it conveyed all the emotion
that was going on and the gravity of the situation, it conveyed the end of a
struggle that had been waged across a galaxy…
It took two pages…
As of right now, the Horus Heresy saga spans 13093 pages, not all of
which is immediately related to the events of the Heresy, some of the books
deal with minor incidents out in the middle of nowhere, some of them deal with
events that had no apparent (as of now) bearing on the events of the heresy,
and some of them are very relevant to the heresy, but take a while to get to
the point. In all, there’s a number of
other books planned, and most of the GW employees that I’ve spoken to either
have no clue when it’s going to be finished, or aren’t allowed to tell people
when it’s going to be finished (much in the same way that you can’t refer to
mark 6 armour as womble armour anymore), so it’s going to keep rolling till
they announce that the next book is going to be the last.
And you can be sure that it’ll be written by Dan Abnett, which is a
good thing.
But I can’t help but feel that this could have been done tighter,
sharper, and then the books could have moved on to other, newer fiction, on
subjects that we don’t know about, maybe even…
Something original…
Which brings me to the other piece of fiction in this issue, Inquisitor
Kryptman by Lindsey D Le Doux Paton, which detailed Kryptmans encounter with
something that resembled a Grabber Slasher (as they used to be known), and the
final moment of the story, where they make contact with the Scythes of the
Emporer, and the contact is too much…
“Warn them, WARN THEM, the tyranids are coming, THE TYRANIDS ARE
COMING…”
More emotion packed into one statement than the rest of the story put
together, and it’s things like that that stay with you when you read, I’ve
never forgotten either of those stories, nor the artwork that went with them,
and they mean more to me than all thirty of the novels that have been brought
out since, because they resonated
with me, and since that point, I sought to make my writing more like that,
because words are like anything else, a small number of the right ones will
make up for any number of the wrong ones…
And I believe that with all my heart, if people spent more time doing
new, original things, and inspiring people to buy them because they were interesting and new, the world would be a better
place, and stagnation would be a thing of the past, it’s not as easy as making
something 6547 times longer than the original story, but it works better…
Rant over…
The other thing about this episode though, is the featured store in the
front cover, and a man I was to come to know well…
Although I’m not sure about the hairstyle, reckon he looks better now :)
