Road to Redemption (and Necromunda generally?)

[cheywood]

 

 

I’m also, several days later, still struggling to understand why a character who bore no resemblance, physical or metaphorical to former UK Gordon Brown has a name punning on his.

He wasn't gruff but surprisingly well liked, was he? (GB once patted me on the head as a baby, and was my MP for ages.) Or well known for being very fond of a fairly specific local team?

 

Depending on how the character went I suppose, and if memory serves Gordon Rennie's a Fifer (or thereabouts) - but it's possible Will McDerrmott actually knows GB and GB's a reader. (Or loathes GB, and wants to take even a petty dig at him. Who knows.)

 

Odd though!

 

---

 

I've just picked up SF myself, hoping to do a bit of a Necromunda binge now shortly too - Fleshworks, a proper restart of T:O (as I was enjoying it, but somehow haven't read any since before lockdown), and Road to Redemption as well as Soulless Fury. I'd take McDermott's work with the same expectation as Sandy Mitchells - more pulpy and daft, less grim and despairing. At least in tone and focus.

No clue where McDermott was born precisely, so he could be an expat, but he seems to have lived in the US for quite a while and his work history is largely for American companies based on his website. Makes the Gordon Brown reference all the stranger if that is indeed the case.

[aa.logan]

It’s really odd, as a literal student of UK politics during his time in office, and in particular the Labour Party, I couldn’t spot a single connection or similarity beyond the name.

[aa.logan]

Working through Uprising.

 

Birth of the Hunger, By David Annandale and the first entry in the anthology is horrible in the best way possible. Life in the Corpse Guild is worse than I’d imagined...

[byrd9999]

Has anyone read the Denny Flowers novella "Low Lives"?

 

I just read the related short story, "Hand of Harrow" in Inferno! 4, and I really enjoyed it. I've never been that taken in by the Necromunda setting, but I love a good story. The characterisation of the two main characters was good, there's a genuine rapport developing, which is rare in a 20-page short story. Denny Flowers has an easy, fluid prose style, and it is genuinely funny.

 

I also just read his Blackstone Fortress short, and that too is a good 'un.

 

 

edit: just seen Low Lives is collected in Uprising, which also features another Flowers short. Anyone read them?

Edited October 3, 2020 by byrd9999

[theSpirea]

I've read A Question of Taste and Low Lives - both excellent. The short story actually got me more interested in Necromunda.

[cheywood]

Has anyone read the Denny Flowers novella "Low Lives"?

 

I just read the related short story, "Hand of Harrow" in Inferno! 4, and I really enjoyed it. I've never been that taken in by the Necromunda setting, but I love a good story. The characterisation of the two main characters was good, there's a genuine rapport developing, which is rare in a 20-page short story. Denny Flowers has an easy, fluid prose style, and it is genuinely funny.

 

I also just read his Blackstone Fortress short, and that too is a good 'un.

 

 

edit: just seen Low Lives is collected in Uprising, which also features another Flowers short. Anyone read them?

I enjoyed Low Lives. It carries on nicely from Hand of Harrow in terms of clever plotting and good character development. I think you’ll enjoy it. Flowers has a novel coming at some point as well. I don’t know anything about the other short story though.

[aa.logan]

I tried to like Low Lives when it was published on it's own, it just couldn’t get my teeth into it. I managed to read, and enjoy, it as part of this anthology. Denny does a good job with the story, really well paced and written. But I’m not sure what purpose Caleb serves in the setting- we already have Kal Jericho; reading this I felt it could have featured him just as easily- Necromunda has so few characters, it’s interesting that BL chose to publish one so similar to one of their big guns...

 

The rest of the anthology is good too, as I said, Annandale’s opener is cracking, and the follow-up, His Terrible Visage, is a really nice study in the nature of House Cawdor.

 

Most of the rest of the anthology pales in comparison to the previously published Necromunda titles to be honest. Maybe it’s because I read it in one go, the other stories felt really quite samey. They each had their own strengths- Justin Hill’s is told nicelythrough flashbacks about the Bounty Hunter with a bag on his head, Mike Brooks takes us outside the underhive, but that’s really it- guns and gangs, double-crosses and ambushes dominate the rest, with not all that much to distinguish them. Until Cut and Gut.

 

I’d maybe read it as a prequel to Souless Fury, as it features one of that book’s characters presumably earlier in her career, but it is full of so much colour and incidental detail it felt much longer than it was; Rath paints a really vivid picture andbuilds genuine tension- the characters are well-rounded and I was rooting, illogically, for *everyone* in the story.

 

In short, read Underhive, Sinner’s Bounty, Overkill and Road to Redemption before this.

[Xisor]

I really liked Low Lives too. As with much of Necromunda, the style is somewhat similar to other things - the difference with Kal, IMHO, is that it's not Kal.

 

A wise-cracking smartass scraping along on his wits is as much John Grammaticus from the Heresy as it is Bronislaw Czevak, Inquisitor, as it is Nathan from Misfits, or Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.

 

I think in Necromunda, proximity to Kal - who's already larger than life and hogging the limelight - is what's troubling. (But that's more an issue with Kal than with Low Lives, IMHO.)

 

But it's far from the multiplicity you get in the Heresy with Garviel Tarvitz Garro, and other identically bland characters.

Edited October 6, 2020 by Xisor

[Master Ciaphas]

Hail

 

I am just working my way through the Necromunda: Uprising anthology, and enjoying it so far. I have read The Last Voyage of Elissa Harrow, A Question of Taste and Dead Drop also, and all have been lovely. Once I have finished the anthology, I will look into getting The Hand of Harrow eshort, since I like the Calab and Iktomi antics...

 

Annadales opening The Birth of Hunger was dark and really good! 

[Roomsky]

Kal Jericho: Sinner’s Bounty – Josh Reynolds

 

This was a decent read, but unfortunately also helped me put my finger on my occasional issues with Reynolds’ books. Much as we’ve lamented in the past the content that’s been cut out of his works, Sinner’s Bounty reads like it wasn’t edited at all, and in my opinion it suffers for it.

 

The books starts and ends very well. Reynolds is really good at introducing the reader to characters both new and established, I felt I knew all of them very well despite not reading any of the previous Jericho novels. Likewise, there’s a satisfying conclusion for all of them and despite the book setting up a sequel we’re likely never to get at this point, it has a strong conclusion all the same. The issue is that it’s a very long goal-oriented story with close to no character development for the main cast. Each mercenary band stumbles through varied challenges for no reason beyond “Hive Primus is dangerous but wacky.” Cutting a hundred pages out of this would have done nothing but improve it. Until a good halfway through the climax I had sort of checked out, to be honest.

 

That said it has Reynolds’ usual hallmarks of quality. The prose is good, and the characters are well-sketched despite being largely static. Scabbs and Zoon are the exceptions, and remain the most compelling throughout, but Reynolds remains skilled at writing a varied cast and they were all memorable.

 

It's a fun trip through the Underhive, someone just needed to take a razor to the draft. I don’t think Fulgrim being Reynolds’ best work and also quite short is a coincidence.

 

6/10

To Taste

[DarkChaplain]

I wonder what the brief for Sinner's Bounty actually was, to be honest. As in, how much action and themepark feel would've been mandated, or whether he had truly full reign over the cast, seeing how it's a semi-reboot of a classic series. Seeing Will McDermott back writing Necromunda also makes me wonder if he'll be picking up Kal Jerico again, or if his return might have been something that kept Josh from potentially "messing" with the characters.

 

Would truly love to get some inside baseball on the matter, both from Josh and the editing staff, as well as Will. Seems potentially pretty messy.

[DukeLeto69]

@Roomsky I agree with you most of you review on Sinners Bounty, particularly the 100 page shorter thing. See here what I said couple of weeks back...

 

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/357734-kal-jericho-by-reynolds/?do=findComment&comment=5619369

[Petitioner's City]

So has anyone else read Spark of Revolution yet? It's told entirely from the perspective of a Jotunn Ogryn Servitor working for a House Goliath factory; it is not Orwell, but makes a good quick read and one that opens eyes about ogryns and the industrial system of a house. It also has a diverse ogryn cast.

[Sandlemad]

So has anyone else read Spark of Revolution yet? It's told entirely from the perspective of a Jotunn Ogryn Servitor working for a House Goliath factory; it is not Orwell, but makes a good quick read and one that opens eyes about ogryns and the industrial system of a house. It also has a diverse ogryn cast.

 

Just finished it and yeah, it's good! I suspect ogryns are tricky to write, you want to walk a fine line between purely jokey big guys who talk like dis and, well, something else. Particularly when the ogryn is your main character, particularly when it's a story of emancipation and revolution. You get the new risk of writing your ogryn as a sort of tragic, Lennie from Of Mice and Men character, endearing and sweet but again liable to just be a different sort of joke in a 40k context.

 

I think this manages to dodge those potential pitfalls nicely. Breaker Brass is a good character. His voice is well done, both early on and when he comes to greater intelligence (and class consciousness, kind of), never quite cute and then later somewhat embittered. He doesn't have amazing grammar or a large vocabulary but he's not comic relief. His are interesting eyes to look through. Early on there's so much he doesn't understand or can't contextualise, so he just passively lets it go, later on he curses himself for not seeing what's no obvious. Torque, the ogryn healer, is a solid character too. The conversations between her (and hey, a female ogryn, that is indeed strides in a diverse cast), Breaker Brass and the engineer who 'elevates' them are very well done, you (and they) slowly realise that they're operating on very different assumptions about their own intelligence.

 

I liked the angle that ogryns are hyper-focused, good at doing one thing at once no matter how difficult or repetitive, just not at doing that task while talking or thinking deeply or whatever. Breaker Brass can question how much of this is innate and how much of it is down to conditioning by their Goliath masters but he can still 'use it' to his advantage, so to speak.

 

It's also a tiny bit more nuanced than you might expect from a sort of Spartacus narrative. Potential allies are shown to still have some of the same prejudices and aims of other non-ogryns. There's Goliaths that are relatively good or bad in how their treat their ogryn workers but Breaker Brass can recognise that they're all part of the same system and even if he learns decent lessons from well-meaning Goliath bosses (e.g. if your boss is a snake and treats you like dirt, overthrow him) it's only incidental and he's taking it far further than they ever meant it to apply. Ogryns are shown as, I'm going to say, human. Abhuman, whatever, but throughout they're referred to not just as 'ogryns' but as men and women and youths and juves. The implanted memories from the BONEHEAD unit highlight that ogryns can have/be brothers, little sisters.

 

I'll put my favourite bit of the novella in spoiler tags.

 

The bit where we get a glimpse of the crashed cargo ship was brilliant. I'm just going to have to quote the whole thing, it's one of the most pithy and effective scenes I've read in a BL book in a long while. Those last few lines.

 

 

The wind moaned around the shattered hull of the transport, swirling black smoke. The noxious stench of it made his eyes water, and the other ogryns were hacking, their lungs burning with contaminants. They should move, but the humans had ordered them to stay and–

 

‘This it?’ The human woman wore a mask, but he could hear her clearly as she strode by.

 

‘All that’s left,’ he heard the man beside her say. ‘The rest died in the crash.’

 

‘Just as well. We lost most of the rations. But we need muscle.’ The woman shook her head. ‘We’ll make do. Pick out the ones that can carry a transport pod and send them to the cargomaster.’ 

 

‘The others?’ the man asked.

 

He watched the woman stare at the wasteland surrounding them. ‘We leave our enemies nothing. Put them back in the ship.’

 

And that’s what they did. He carried his brother with the shattered leg back, set his little sister with him, told her to quiet her questions. The humans knew best. Then he went with the others to the cargomaster, took his load and started across the sandy waste, following the humans who were carrying stretchers loaded with their wounded. He walked, thinking of those left behind, until the humans told him to stop. He stared at the distant dot of the wreck, resting beneath its tower of smoke, and saw it disappear behind a brilliant burst of light. His eyes slammed shut, and he was blind when the shock wave hit, almost knocking him off his feet. He caught himself and forced his eyes open. The wreck was a brilliant ball of orange and red, pouring black smoke into the sky. He blinked at the fire, and inside his guts shifted. 

 

‘It hurts,’ he heard the woman say. She was holding a control in her hands. She sighed and threw it down to the ground. ‘Losing a ship. It’s like losing family.’ The man beside her nodded, and they walked away, and the line started moving again. All except the ogryns, staring back silently at the rising smoke.