On the shortcomings of False Gods and Galaxy in Flames

[bluntblade]

This isn't meant to be a rant, but rereading Horus Rising something occurred to me. Abnett put a lot of balls in the air, and while several have been discussed at great length (Horus and Abaddon's sudden shift to authoritarian grumps, Erebus' thundering lack of subtlety) but recently I've noticed a couple more, primarily among the Astartes.

 

Abnett turns his spotlight on three groups within the Luna Wolves: the Mournival, the senior captains in general, and Tenth Company. The lodges are glimpsed briefly and then relegated to Just A Bad Thing in the sequels, but the lost potential with the others pertains more to the divisions that open up among the XVI.

 

That's not just a matter of Torgaddon and Loken being the only major XVI Legion captains on Isstvan making the battles feel smaller. Relationships are set up which ought to play into the narrative, as with Shiban and Torghun in the WS books coming to respect each other, before being pitched into conflict. Ekaddon gains respect for Loken and is then consigned to mentions, where he could have experienced his own conflict over the betrayal. It's mentioned that Loken doesn't deploy to Isstvan with his entire company; that could foreshadow up a confrontation with one of his old sergeants, and we get a sense of how deep the divisions go.

 

These would have given the battles more emotional heft, and rammed home the enormity of what Horus has done. The same could easily be said for Khârn's fleeting appearance in False Gods and the lack of any other WE characters who could then play a part in Galaxy in Flames: there's a lot of potential which is not capitalised on at all.

 

And one final thing for now: why doesn't Horus use his masterful diplomacy on Loken and Torgaddon at least to hide the coming purge a bit better? Abaddon practically threatens Loken, and the latter doesn't take the hint at all, and Horus' cold shoulder doesn't help. We could very easily have had the Abaddon of Horus Rising reminisce about what he first saw in Loken, and pretend that normality is resuming. Let no one doubt that Loken and Torgaddon are valued by their Warmaster. Done.

[Qkhitai]

Admittedly I haven't read Horus Rising or False Gods in a while, since they're quite heavy going at times (Galaxy in Flames is a bit lighter and more action packed), so I can't quite remember the specifics. False Gods I still hold as one of the best in the series though. However no book is perfect of course. To touch upon one point, Abaddon's threatening Loken in Galaxy in Flames, I think it's done quite well, and remains consistent with the series at large. Brother turning on brother is completely unimaginable, so whatever Abaddon's threats, Loken couldn't possibly know what was about to happen - the same when Tarvitz meets Eidolon and Fabius, all the way up until Thiel's censure. And in terms of 'emotional heft', I thought Little Horus really brought that dimension to the story.

 

However, in the interest of fairness I'll add my own gripe, and that is that the three central protagonists, Loken, Tarvitz and Garro, all seemed to be the same person to me. You could swap out one name for another and I wouldn't be able to tell it was a different character. The traitors were always far better characterised and distinguished, and the loyalists all seemed to fit into one mould; quite bland and uninspiring really.

[bluntblade]

I hear you on that with Garro. Loken and Tarvitz had something more in Abnett's hands, I think.

[mc warhammer]

I hear you on that with Garro. Loken and Tarvitz had something more in Abnett's hands, I think.

lucius too. i’ve disliked every portrayal since HR

[Tymell]

Personally I'm of a mind that False Gods is one of the worst books in the series. Not because the prose is particularly bad, but because of how important a book it should be, and how far it falls short. This is where we see Horus (and by extension most of his legion) become the very thing that will define this entire series. In the end, Horus' actual motivations for inspiring this entire series are flimsy and badly explained, and several characters within the book feel like they change radically too quickly or without appropriate development, or just act bizarrely.

 

Everything was set up very nicely with Horus Rising, but to me, False Gods badly fumbled the follow-up and a pivotal moment. I agree with Bluntblade that there were ways the book could have taken what it started with and used it in much smarter and more satisfying ways to build up to a more powerful climax in Galaxy in Flames. The third book was, to me, decent, but it's one of those where this is perhaps more to do with the core subject matter than anything: It's Isstvan III, it's hard to do something that epic badly.

 

In the end, I kind of wish that opening trilogy had been given to a single author, whether it be Dan Abnett or someone else, just to lend it better consistency. But then again, at the time the HH series was a different beast, and who expected it to continue up to this point and beyond? Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20 (and probably heretical too).

Edited October 12, 2017 by Tymell

[JH79]

Very interesting topic. I am no critic and find it hard to bash or bad mouth anything that someone has put time effort and a lot of hard work into, however these two titles in particular do indicate a distinct change in quality from their predecessor.

 

Horus Rising is a great book, far from one of my favourites of the series, but still great. It's tone and characters are completely different to those presented in False Gods & Galaxy In Flames though. Upon my first introduction to the Heresy i didn't really notice this too much, everything was so new and quite frankly, AWESOME!!!

 

It's subsequent read / listen throughs that start to highlight the consistency issues. I have no idea how Abaddon became such a complete and total douch from the end of Horus Rising to his first appearance in False Gods. I found that whole encounter with Loken in the practice cages so jarring as to make me pause and wonder what the hell happened. Obviously nothing happened, thats just how the character is handled in another authors hands, gotta just deal with it...grumble grumble.

 

Like i say, I'm no critic, and cannot describe what i see as failings on the authors's / editors parts effectively, but i do have to remind myself that at the time they were penned the behemoth that has become the Horus Heresy wasn't even a twinkle in the most money minded of Games Workshops owners eyes. I try not to judge the early works against the quality of the series as it has grown and developed.

 

Who knows, maybe one day we'll get a directors cut release of the entire series with every continuity issue ironed out... run's off with wallet and locks in a safe!

[The_son_of_Dorn]

I didnt dislike the books. I was however very annoyed with how easily erebus managed to flip Horus and his legion over.

 

I do think alot of it depends of perspective. When the legion was attacked on davin by nurgles forces for the first time , it made me realise how human the warriors actually were. Despite all their training and enhancements they will just as vulerable as the next human.

[bluntblade]

Regarding "twinkle in the eye" I have shied away from what I thought might be issues raised by the embryonic state of the Heresy. Hence I'm only discussing what was done with the characters.

[Phoebus]

For my part, I found Loken and Garro to be distinct enough characters. Saul Tarvitz, on the other hand, didn't strike me as particularly interesting; more than anything else, he simply wasn't arrogant, decadent, or psychotic like the other Emperor's Children in Fulgrim.

 

Insofar as False Gods is concerned, I agree with most of the posters above. The manner in which Horus and his legion are corrupted seems too convenient - easy, even - and makes for disappointing reading.

 

Galaxy in Flames... was a mixed bag for me. I suspect I would be more critical about it now than I was at the time. Ben Counter got some things better than others, but at the end of the day I thought he handled both the Mournival's final battle and the Loyalists' reaction to Horus's betrayal quite well. It certainly felt more powerful than Isstvan V's depiction in Fulgrim.

[Carach]

the original books all felt pretty awesome at the time (though yes, Horus being turned so easily was a gripe i had back then also) i don't know whether i would feel the same if i read them again. 

 

I'm not sure if this is just me maturing as a reader or whether things being fleshed out in the years afterwards, being spoilt with riches, so to speak, has made them look weaker in the grand scheme?

 

i don't want to re-read them so i can keep the emotional Hayden Christenssen's "What have they done"      feeling that i had when i first read them.

[Xisor]

I've long entertained the idea of a separate account of False Gods. Keep the gist the same, so to speak, but present a different view on it. I'm not sure whose. Maloghurst's?

 

The idea being that the general conceit is proper. In fairness to Graham McNeill - he mentions the right things. Early on in False Gods, you've got Horus bemoaning taxmen from Terra and the Sigillite's orders and such.

 

The problem, in my eyes, is that that was all it amounted to - a mention. It never felt alive. Perhaps that's just something that Graham thought would be filled out in Horus Rising that he could follow-up on (but that may have been omitted at the editing stage, or mentioned early-days by Dan, but then left out in favour of the stuff we really like... who knows. We saw the difficulties and the brilliance managed in The Beast Arises, and that was after about a decade of HH 'practice'!). In any event - it's there in tokenistic elements, but it's insufficient.

 

I think by the time you get to Ben Counter's contribution, the ship has already sailed. (And I'd heard vague murmurings that Ben's initial draft was way out of sync with where McNeill and Dan had went, so needed big re-writes to fit - but that could as easily be from Dan & Graham going off-piste and it not being communicated back to Ben, as much as it could have been Ben going off piste - and that's fifteenth-hand rumours at that!) So, from there, Ben has treachery already in flight. I think he did it really well. It wasn't as epic or illuminating as it's predecessors, but I get the feeling that it stuck to the brief a lot more - for worse, or for better. (My money's on better.)

 

As such, if I was able to do anything, it'd be to have the authors 'Second Edition' grav-chute in some scenes with Horus, Maloghurst, Regulus, the Mournival interacting with edicts from the Council of Terra. If you 'work backwards' from things like The Last Remembrancer, A Thousand Sons, Prospero Burns, Scars, Path of Heaven, and (especially) The Binary Succession, I think you could add in enough interstitial pieces that would make the trilogy fit together absolutely seamlessly.

 

With more 'life', more 'dimension', more... 'feeling' given to Horus' disenfranchisement from rulership of the Imperium (going from joint Left and Right Hand of the Emperor with Malcador, to very much subordinate to everything that is coming from Terra), it'd be lovely to see how that affects everybody in the 61st Expedition - titan crews, remembrancers, captains, sergeants.

 

It's the sort of thing that's been done by a good variety of authors in a few brilliant ways (Guy Hayley's The Beheading, Chris Wraight's The Emperor's Legion, Matt Farrer's entire back catalogue), so theoretically it could just be retconned in.

 

As said: if that disenfranchisement is emphasised and made plausible to the reader, then the whole rest of False Gods and the ensuing Heresy flips from being Horus being spun a story by Erebus-posing-as-Magnus who, when revealed to have been lying all along, Horus just says "Ah, what the hell! Let's go.". Yep, it'd flip to that nonsense with Erebus thinking he'd successfully persuaded Horus, to Erebus having just offered up an entire extra Legion (Word Bearers, and their influence) who surely would have been outwith Horus' reach in a mere 'civil rebellion'. (Indeed, if Horus 'simply' rebelled against Terra, he might only have been able to quickly count on... Angron, Perturabo, Curse and Mortarion? Not all of whom are especially reliable or useful in fighting the big fight.)

 

But you get the idea. What's actually included isn't unsatisfactory or terrible as such, but it could be patched up fairly simply to be absolutely cracking.

 

Similarly, a couple of extra scenes, descriptions, or paragraphs retrofitting what-we-know-now about Cthonian culture onto what existed then... well, we'd be absolutely amazing.

 

----

 

TL;DR

Prior to the Serpent Lodge, we just need a few extra scenes really emphasising the gulf between the 61st Expedition, indeed even all the expeditions, and Terra. A few small pieces here, a few mentions there, a few many comments curtailed with choice "Not now, Private!" or "We'll talk about this later, Sergeant!" would pretty much do the trick.

[bluntblade]

That's largely what I'm driving at, the potential that isn't seized upon.

 

Xisor, you raise the possibility of the writing periods of the novels overlapping. Is that what happened? Because it would explain a lot.

 

I also still find the circumstances that lead to the Mournival fight a little hard to believe, and wish that things had simply come to a head as Abaddon and Aximand stormed the Sirenhold. Isstvan III, for my money, could have done with a "day in the life" chapter or two, giving us more scale and what the Loyalist force really looks and acts like.

[Ogun]

The opening trilogy were all released in 2006 (a slightly perturbing thought...) so I would be surprised if the writing periods did not overlap. 

False Gods was a considerable let down after Horus Rising. Horus' transitions far too readily to moustache twirling villain, for reasons that even now feel largely unexplained. I think I read recently that Laurie Goulding wishes they could have handled the fall of Horus differently. Made the Heresy start out purely as a politically motivated civil war into which Chaos worms its way later on.   

I hope that once the main series is done, they leave the opportunity for authors to go back and tell stories in the setting. One set before and during the opening trilogy, perhaps with Malcador as its focus, charting the growing tensions in the Imperium as the Emperor leaves the crusade. 

[Phoebus]

Xisor, great words. I don’t know how feasible it is to revisit those early entries (and others, besides), but you’ve hit the nail on the head - especially where Horus’s disenfranchisement is concerned.

 

I know I spend a lot of time here criticizing the format and timing of several of the Horus Heresy’s releases, but I will give credit where credit is due: under Laurie’s Goulding’s watchful eye, whatever my subjective impression of the individual titles might be, this series has felt like a much tighter ship. One thing several titles have done better is allude to or lightly involve things that have a great impact on the larger storyline without explicitly mentioning them or making unnecessary reveals. Path of Heaven’s use of the early Golden Throne experiments is, to me, an excellent example of this. That wasn’t the case earlier on though, and it’s something I think really hindered the series.

 

Hindsight being 20-20, readers who have been invested in this setting enough understand that the Emperor’s withdrawal to the Imperial Palace was for the sake of completing the Webway project. His choice to keep all that secret from his Primarchs tragically led Horus to believe he would not be needed in a new order of politicians and bureaucrats. By hardly even alluding to the Emperor’s great works, however, what we basically have is secrecy for the sake of secrecy. Veterans of this and other fora will recall the many, many conversations and debates that had readers bemoaning the Emperor for being out-of-touch and ham-fisted in his dealings with his progeny-creations. On the flip side of that, Horus himself makes cursory mentions of the political situation, but it just feels like a token effort to provide a justification for the corruption of Chaos to seep in.

[ChildofFang]

Horus Rising and False Gods were written with Graham and Dan talking to each other, they refer to this when they did it again with Prospero Burns and Thiusand Sons.

 

There are many references to A Galaxy In Flames having rewrites and inferences a plenty that Graham and/or Dan had some hand in that. Various things but the deaths of certain characters specially.

 

I actually like False Gods, I don’t think that the ‘turning’ of Horus could be handled in a book alongside everything else and not have it be twice as long and maybe the constraints of it being a trilogy hindered that. Or maybe the fact that the first book didn’t even touch on any of that till the final moments.

 

AGIF however just seems below par. The best example of which is Khorne being run over.... it has good points but generally only held up because it was set in the HH and we lapped it up just for that.

[b1soul]

A bit off topic...but which HH novel best captures the character of Horus?

 

It seems after the opening few books, he took a backseat to other legions and characters.

[JH79]

A bit off topic...but which HH novel best captures the character of Horus?

 

It seems after the opening few books, he took a backseat to other legions and characters.

It's not a novel, but i would suggest Warmaster by John French. True it's only a very short story, audio for myself, and it is pre Molech demon upgrade shenanigans, but it's a fascinating piece that keeps on giving no matter how many run throughs I give it.

[Tymell]

A bit off topic...but which HH novel best captures the character of Horus?

 

It seems after the opening few books, he took a backseat to other legions and characters.

 

Pre-Heresy, Horus Rising.

 

Post-Heresy is a bit trickier, he's made a lot of appearances, but not very many stories have actually been focused on him. They're not novels, but both of John French's audios, Warmaster and Dark Compliance, have done a great job of him IMO.

[R_F_D]

Maybe not character, but what he goes on to become- Oll's premonition of the Throne room in Know No Fear (I think)

[bluntblade]

Path of Heaven has a glorious wee appearance by corrupted Horus.