Eye of Medusa

[Iron Father Ferrum]

Maybe it's due to the fact that I'm so attached to the old Iron Hands fluff that I can't accept this new stuff, but I found Eye of Medusa barely readable.  The idiocy of some of what goes on is beyond me.

 

Jonathon Green's Iron Hands was bad because the story was meh, the prose was weak, and the characters flat.  Guymer tries hard to not fall into those same traps and in the end, he ends up completely missing the mark.  All this culture you're discussing?  Some of it is well within character for the Chapter, but a lot of it is just stupid.  Take for example the fact that the Adeptus Mechanicus has a seat on the Iron Council.  Without even going any further into it, just sit down and consider the immense power that gives the Mechanicus.  To be clear, though, I'm going to spell it out: they can affect the decision making processes for an entire Adeptus Astartes Chapter (that wording is important).  Now consider that the Voice of Mars can be a tie-breaker, and especially that he casts the votes for Iron Fathers who are not physically able to attend Council meetings.  The Adeptus Mechanicus can now exert direct control over an Adeptus Astartes Chapter.  Now why is my wording so specific and so important?  Because the individual Adepta are not supposed to be integrated in any way.  They're not supposed to be able to control one another.  The last time multiple Adepta were united under a single agency was Goge Vandire and the Reign of Blood!  It's a bad idea.  Plus, remember the Steel Confessors?  You know, the Iron Hands-descended Chapter that owed direct allegiance to the Mechanicus and was controlled by them until the Adeptus Terra found about it and took really stern action to break that particular bond?  This flies fully in the face of that whole debacle!  Why would the Mechanicus need the Confessors if their fingers are already knuckle-deep in the Iron Hands' leadership?  And why would the Imperium tolerate them exerting control over the Iron Hands but not over the Steel Confessors?  It makes no sense.

 

Going in another direction, then, consider the scene where the newly-promoted Initiates induct new aspirants by chopping off their hand.  The old fluff was that the left hand was taken when an aspirant is fully grown, with all the appropriate organs to promote full physical growth already implanted.  The Space Marine is not going to get any larger, so it's safe to take the hand and fit them for the traditional cybernetic.  But doing so when a child is accepted as an aspirant makes no sense logistically because you're going to have to start replacing their prosthetic every few months for the next few decades as the aspirant literally triples in size.  It's a stupid, short-sighted change.  To add insult to injury, there's also the implication that the Battle Company Clans (2nd-5th) pick the aspirants they want rather than the actual 10th Company picking who is to be trained, but now that the Hands follow the codex structure instead of their previous each-clan-is-independent structure, those aspirants who make the rank of full Space Marine aren't going to the Battle Companies that picked them.  They'll go to the 9th Company first to learn Devastator doctrine, then to the 8th to learn Assault tactics.

 

Something else.  The Raukaan literally transfer their land behemoth, their own personal mobile fortress monastery, from Medusa to the battlefield in question.  That is a monumentally idiotic thing to do.  That's the entirety of the Clan Company's gene seed reserves, their Armory (as in, every tank, APC, and Dreadnought they own), all of their relics and all of their spare bionics, all of their serfs.  Losing a fortress monastery is almost a death sentence for a Chapter and that is why they are heavily protected and kept out of harm's way as much as (post-)humanly possible. . . yet these idiot-versions of the Iron Hands deliberately put theirs in harms way.  And I'm not even talking about how Stronos ordered into battle like it was a super-heavy tank, I'm talking about why in the name of the Machine God would they transfer it to an active warzone to begin with?

 

I could go on, but I think my opinion on this novel is clear.

[HeritorA]

Seriously though. That could be a lot of nonsense, but given how dismally received the Clan Raukaan stuff is, and how one of the central tenets of Iron Handedness is in watching weak things break and either watching them be annihilated in the process, or taking the surviving parts that were strong enough and reforming them into something inhumanly stronger...

 

Guymer's managed exactly that, but with a piece of ostensibly dud fluff. He's bolted bionics onto the still-living but otherwise maimed husk of Clan Raukaan and thereby turned it into something absurdly more enduring. (And nowhere near as flawed.)

 

To say I'm excited for his Primarch novel would be understate how much danger I'm in of overhyping it for myself beyond all reasonable expectations...

I do agree that David had a hard job. He was given one of the worst fluff in existence and was able to at least try to do it justice.

It is one of the best Iron Hands books, but definitely not one of the best W40K books

[Iron Father Ferrum]

No it's not. The only good non-Heresy novel about the Iron Hands is Wrath of Iron. This was trash by comparison.

[Xisor]

I think a certain Iron Father needs to revisit his close reading skills; I detect weakness, and weakness must be excised and replaced.

 

Specifically: the Voice of Mars (in the Eye of Medusa/council passage) doesn't affect decisions of an Adeptus Astartes Chapter. Oh no, not at all.

 

The Voice of Mars comprehensively controls them. Stronos sees it, and it's implied he only is aware of it and botbered by it because he's not had his latest clan-to-clan conditioning rites fully enacted. It's said twice in the book: the Voice of Mars speaks for the Iron Fathers who are absent. "I think I know how they will vote" - as long as the council is sufficiently conflicted *and* has sufficient absentees, the Voice of Mars can determine the outcome of any vote. The Voice might not always be able to control what is voted on, but it can "easily" determine the outcome.

 

For varying levels of "easy" - it still has to manage the entire Council and keep them sweet. I suspect that may be a plot point for later in the trilogy.

 

Of course, there's a difference between that specific act of control and *cpmplete* control, but I'd contend it's very much worse than one might expect.

 

Unsurprisingly, the very point and plot of the bloody book is that there is an unseen spiritual war for the soul and essence of the Chapter.

 

I find that utterly fascinating. I also find it fascinating how the depth of the book has sloped people by. It's outright redemption of the Iron Hands being played out as a plot - yet somehow "This was trash by comparison". Of course, I beg to differ.

 

----

 

There's another point in there too. A massive thread of the plot of the book is outrage at inefficiency mingled with hypocrisy and the difficulty of chasing perfection.

 

Not to mention the aspect of unreliable narrators and "not simple" problems.

 

If the Iron Hands have identified that elaborate systematic brutality is efficient, then the cost of replacing a novitiate's hands multiple times is *nothing* compared to weeding out weakness.

 

What is the cost of a million bionic hands compared to the fatal flaws of a weak Space Marine?

Edited August 30, 2017 by Xisor

[HeritorA]

No it's not. The only good non-Heresy novel about the Iron Hands is Wrath of Iron. This was trash by comparison.

As I said not the best W40K - but good IH novel anyway.

 

As Xisor

said: I think a certain Iron Father needs to revisit his close reading skills; I detect weakness, and weakness must be excised and replaced.

[Never_born]

I've just finished this - review here:

 

https://www.trackofwords.com/2017/11/04/the-eye-of-medusa-david-guymer/

 

Overall I enjoyed it, in some respects a lot. I loved the perspectives of Rauth and Melitan, and their view on the Chapter - nice to see Space Marines seen in that light. There's always a risk with Iron Hands that they're *too* defined by their bionics and the integration of the machine, but I thought David handled that really nicely.

 

The Iron Hands are a Chapter I don't know much about though, and I struggled to fully get my head around the internal power struggle and it's implications. I feel like this, more than most BL books, needed a fair bit of prior knowledge to get the best out of it.

 

Plot-wise I thought it ended up a bit disjointed, but I loved spending time with the Iron Hands and learning more about how the Chapter operates. More than enough positives for me to outweigh the negatives.

 

And it's out in paperback now for anyone who doesn't like hardbacks or ebooks!