Shadowsun: The Patient Hunter

[Roomsky]

Shadowsun: Requiring a Patient Reader - Phil Kelly

 

Well, this is definitely a Phil Kelly book. Ironically, considering the subject matter, I think my issue with this and all of his works is they feel too sterile. The character development is always extremely thin; we don't really get introspection, and Kelly's not skilled enough to make characters compelling through their dialogue and actions alone (though I do appreciate the attempt.) Conversely, the action is easy to follow and Kelly moves the story quickly and strikes a tolerable balance of action and everything else.

 

Being honest, to anyone with a modicum of love for Star Wars: Kelly's Tau are just a (much) worse version of Zhan's Thrawn Ascendancy books. I implore you to go read those instead.

 

I went into this hoping it would be a step up from Farsight, and I guess it was in that nothing outright sucked, but I also feel like Farsight was more interesting. That book had the fun Tau propaganda at the start, the impetus of the story being an expedition is less cliched than a "hold this world" plot, and I liked the Scar Lords as the enemy loyalist astartes (contrast these Death Guard, who are as stock Death Guard as I've ever read.) The only thing that really stands out in this book is the Kroot because its more alien worldview forces Shadowsun to have conversations that aren't the same Tau-to-Tau conversation Kelly populates all of his books with. If I HAD to commission a Kelly Tau book, I'd ensure it was about a ragtag squad of Tau, Humans, and Kroot constantly butting heads while fighting a unified enemy - I think that would FORCE Kelly to write something more interesting (and that KIND OF happens towards the end, here.)

 

And all this blandness is indicative the biggest issue with the book: Shadowsun herself. Despite my issues with Helbrecht and Huron, and their portrayals within, I at least got a good picture of who they were as individuals. Shadowsun reads like Farsight reads like all of Kelly's Fire Caste Tau. I want to like Shadowsun, she's my favourite Tau going by model and codex entries, but there's really not much to her here. The best we get is a 3-ish page flashback where she's in Puretide's Training From Hell, and that's still limited to Shadowsun reacting to things happening to her. Does she have a private life? What are her interests, her hobbies, her hopes, dreams, and fears? Dunno, she's got Death Guard to shoot. Why would she take the idea of the Tau'Va as a diety even remotely seriously? Dunno, she's got Death Guard to shoot.

 

Sundry Cons:

• Kelly's Ethereals still suck, though this book's character is not as bad as his Aun'Va. I don't need them to be saints; mind control is probably the most evil ability ever - but you'd think if they forced the species into such an advanced state they'd make a well-informed decision every once in a while.
• Kelly's version of Tau having difficulty with Chaos still boils down to "That gun should have killed them! Big monster!" Yawn.

 

Sundry Pros:

• The maggots and flies dotting the Death Guard pages were a fun touch. If things like this and the blood splatter in the Angron book are cheap to produce, I'd love to see more!
• The possibility that the warp may have affected the 4th expansionary fleet Tau's psyche is barely tapped BUT is a much better reason for Tau panic than the aforementioned "hey these guys are impossibly tough." I like it and want to see more.

 

4.5/10, I cannot in good conscience give this book a pass when it fails to define Shadowsun in any meaningful way. Dark Chaplain stay away.

 

I beg for literally anyone else to write about her.

[DarkChaplain]

Welp, my biggest takeaway now is that I should probably go bump up the Thrawn Ascendancy trilogy on my list. I enjoyed the new Thrawn trilogy, and the Chiss in book three, so might as well.

 

But yeah, Kelly's Shadowsun has never been good. She was bland and with little to no personal depth from the beginning; I cursed his novella coming first in the Damocles SMB anthology. And then he got an entire novel to follow up on that.... and he even dragged Sicarius in there. Few people know this at this point, but yes, Phil Kelly wrote about Sergeant Cato Sicarius (Blades of Damocles, Death Knell, some audio drama too). I honestly much prefer Nick Kyme's version by a long shot.

 

Heck, even the Puretide flashbacks are nothing new. He went into those training lessons even in his Damocles novella, and even more in Blades of Damocles. It's all so by the numbers, and nothing in your review, Roomsky, makes me think that this novel would be any different. I was genuinely hoping that maybe, maybe after all this time, O'Shaserra could be a person in her own right.

 

But it sounds like after all these stories about her, most of which were written by Kelly, Shadowsun is still less of a compelling character than the Tau in Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels. At least El'Hassai and co were intriguing characters. And looking at what Fehervari did with them in Fire Caste or The Greater Evil is probably something unattainable for Kelly.

 

 

[wecanhaveallthree]

Last of Kiru's Line remains far and away the best Tau book, and certainly the best characterisation of Shadowsun, and I think a lot of my perception of Kelly's work is coloured by the fact it feels like I already know who she is, and quite intimately, from that work. I don't feel as though I need a refresher: there's already a crystalised picture of our madlass in my mind, and I feel Shadowsun continues this admirably.

 

What truly works for me in this book is how flexible she is. She makes mistakes, but she also makes up for them. She asks questions, and doesn't always get the best answers. Throughout this novel we see Shadowsun make decisions, get it wrong, get it right, be acted upon by powers way beyond her, be caught up in momentous events, continue to be primarily wielded as a blunt weapon by the Ethereals (which, again, is a representation of them I like: they don't want the Fire Caste to be flexible free-thinkers, they want peerless warriors who never questions orders - that was the point of the Engrams, and the larger social engineering), and continue to strain against that. She is dynamic. She struggles. She overcomes. She falls short. And all this is necessarily good. I want my characters to strive and not always, immediately succeed, or even succeed in the long term. I want conflict! I want chaos, with a small c! I want to see turmoil, trepidation, and characters following their characterisation even if it's not always the best possible move.

 

I feel like I really get that out of this book. The addition of the mob squad and the drones provide excellent colour, as does contrast Shadowsun herself with more radical Fourth Expansion Sphere guys and more by-the-book Fire Warriors. Shadowsun, as usual, is trying her best to be both the exemplar that she's expected to be and true to her own beliefs. We've had so many teases, so many brushes with the weird and crazy magic of 40K - consider Arthas Moloch and Farsight - but this is the first time the Empire has really run smack bang into it in a way that can't just be explained away.

 

And they are, frankly, not coping well. Whoda thunk that a rigid system would have trouble processing new data? So they are, understandably, wigged out. They're killing their own auxiliaries because they're doing stuff they don't understand. They're fumbling around the edges of it. The Ethereals know a lot more than what they're saying, but they're totally happy to let the Tau just die - and die horribly - rather than spill the beans at large. That's cool. I like that. I know I'm at loggerheads with people who don't, but I like our blue space fascists, and this is how oppressive regimes work: they control information, strictly, even if it means people die because of it. No, they're not the Imperium. They're naughty in a different, more subtle way.

 

This is where the book works best for me and where it showcases Shadowsun to her fullest. She tries to come to grips with this New Thing as soon as she can. She doesn't know exactly how it works, she doesn't know exactly why, but she can sort-of-maybe bootstrap it into helping her and the Empire - and so she does. That's quintessential Tau, for me. Coming at these old problems from a new angle, grappling with them, and making them work. They don't have all the galactic baggage holding them back. It's the classic Star Trek formula, where [your captain and crew of choice] stumble onto a situation, make mistakes, study what they know, then brain their way out of it. Shadowsun does. She improvises, she adapts, and ultimately overcomes. That's awesome. Feeding your enemies to a giant hole in the void you got a bunch of other people to pray into existence is pretty neat.

 

Will it come back to bite them? Oh, I have absolutely no doubt of that, and I think that's something people are generally overlooking when it comes to this new Warp entity. It's a Warp entity. We get some really alarming insight here that it's picked Shadowsun, found her susceptible to its influence and advantageous to its goals, and very possibly saved her from death having seen that she'd be instrumental to getting it fed down the line.

 

The Tau are going to get a crash-course in what it means to bargain with the eldritch powers of the setting, something they've been very fortunate to avoid - until now. Dun dun dunnn!

 

I liked this one, Shadowsun is best girl, and I continue to appreciate the direction Kelly is going in.

[Roomsky]

I appreciate that viewpoint Wecan, and God I wish I got as much out of it as you did.

 

What you describe as flexibility I can only read as "Shadowsun does what Kelly wants her to do to advance the plot." A supremely flexible character without compelling pathos is no character at all, in my esteem.

 

Also, Helbrecht got a great establishing scene in Helsreach, and Huron got the same in Blood Reaver (and probably Cawkwell's work, and probably Tyrant of the Hollow Worlds) - but their books in the character series still gave me something to chew on. If it's being advertised as "the Shadowsun book" I need more than "this is payoff for that short story most people don't know exist."

[wecanhaveallthree]

I genuinely do believe it comes to that old adage: de gustibus non est disputandum. Kelly's vision of the Tau colours an appreciation for his work. I think it's great, so perhaps I'm much more willing to accept and see positive aspects of a work that others might not. As you very adroitly point out, one wechat's flexibility is another's roomsky's authorial ex machina. 

 

More personally, I believe it's a significantly squeaky wheel begging for grease. Kelly keeps getting the green light to write these, so much like Dawn of Fire, someone out there is buying them! Now, if you'll excuse me, I must retire to my palatial estate built entirely from copies of Ghost Warrior. 

[DarkChaplain]

I still recall Tau fans getting quite upset when Phil Kelly's works contradicted a bunch of things from Kiru's Line, or at least opened up inconsistencies.

 

Personally, I don't think "Braden Campbell did Shadowsun already in his novella back in 2013 so this is good enough" works when we're talking about this Characters series with fancy limited editions, all of which are supposed to give the reader a well-rounded understanding of who the character is - even though the methods obviously differ from author to author.

 

If Kelly can't give Shadowsun a character-defining piece that can stand well on its own, without having read the other stuff, then he's not only falling behind the baseline set by all the other authors who've written in the characters series so far, but the book also has no justification to be in this series. It'd mean he failed the brief.

 

I was very familiar with who Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka was, but I still had both a hell of a blast with Crowley's entry - and wish he could've kept planned scenes in! - and felt like I got out of it with a much deeper understanding of him as a character. And bloody hell am I excited for French's Cypher. Even Gav's Luther novel for the Heresy, which stretches into present day in the framing plotline, had real insights in who this guy is, how he ticks, why he ticks.

 

And as for Shadowsun's flexibility.... Kelly had her surfing on a thunderhawk wing back in his Damocles novella. It was ludicrous, not simply in how it happened, but in how it was executed. Especially considering how much his stories tend to read like battle reports at times (heck, his Sigmar's Blood novella back in the day, which would later turn out to be a prequel to The End Times, was basically a chain of battle reports held together through some dialogue scenes), his works don't transition well to scenes like that. It just ends up feeling comical more often than not.

That particular instance had me think Shadowsun was a rookie way out of her depth, not at all what she's played up to be, for instance. Didn't help that she kept mumbling about Farsight.

[wecanhaveallthree]

I think you misunderstand (or, more likely, I haven't done a very good job of explaining!) - I'm saying that I already have that image crystalised in my mind, which made Kelly's Shadowsun very easy for me to enjoy. That's why I use the word 'coloured', in that my perception of Shadowsun already matches with what Kelly presents. I think the characterisation is congruent with what I already know. Like being familiar with a previous entry where a character appears makes it easy to get right back into that character next time they show up. It's not that Kelly doesn't make her cool, it's that it's easy for me to vibe with his presentation. I'm admitting my bias, in short. It could certainly be different for others.

 

Quote

Kelly had her surfing on a thunderhawk wing back in his Damocles novella. It was ludicrous

 

I see how it is. When Sevatar does it, people fall all over themselves to praise ADB, but when Kelly does it...

 

When it comes to 'out of her depth' and 'mumbling about Farsight', I really do have to call DE GUSTIBUS again. Puretide really screwed those kids up. That's the arc as I see it. The only reason they survived his insane training regime and came out the other side of what is explicitly a super soldier program is that they had each other, and their extremely complicated relationship that comes out of that. They've all been damaged by Puretide, by the Empire, and by the social and military expectations placed upon them. It's made them extremely effective in particular ways, but utterly stunted them in others. Their dynamic is fascinating, particularly with how Kais completes the love-hate triangle in War of Secrets. Farsight is getting jacked by a demon blade and possibly has Khorne looking over his shoulder. Shadowsun has been stamped by a Warp entity and press-ganged (knowingly or not) into service. Kais has been driven functionally insane and even his fellow Tau don't see him as one of them any more - and are afraid of what's going to happen when he really snaps. 

 

Shadowsun is great because of how naturally Kelly writes her as a continuation of established characters and themes. Yes, she is out of her depth on occasion, especially here because they're dealing with something completely outside of what they've been trained to deal with. The Fourth Expansion Sphere as a whole has gone kooky trying to handle it, which is another element that Tau basically never have to deal with (what happens when you can't trust your fellow Tau?). She makes mistakes here. She doesn't get good advice from the Ethereals. She works on incomplete information from her allies. But she perseveres, she pushes through, she 'puts it together' and effectively solves the problem. She does everything she, as a character, is supposed to do while being far more than Farsight-lite while still being parallel to him. Shadowsun isn't lesser or weaker than Farsight. Their relationship is incredibly complicated, their dynamic is complicated, and the feelings between them are complicated and I am 100% here for that. Shadowsun's commitment to the Empire isn't free of doubt, but it's a personal, considered decision with its own dimensions that shows places where she's stronger than Farsight - and where she falls short as well.

 

Again, I think people just see the negatives, the parts where Shadowsun falls short, and don't see those as good writing that gives a character depth and complexity. They just see negatives.

 

Or maybe I'm just still in mourning over the Ynnari and will die on the hill of what's left of good xenos fiction.