The Horus Heresy - A Retrospective?

[Nagashsnee]

4 hours ago, Petitioner's City said:

 

It was Goulding who edited and I think commissioned it!

 

 

I am familiar with that afterword, its the basis for the 'vampiric leeching of better potential' part of my post. Tho i had forgotten Goulding had any part in it.  I am glad you posted it, re reading it again reminds me of how much of what was wrong with the HH is contained in that afterword. Imagine KNOWING who the first (and for most of the heresy only) primarch to die is, and then waiting 40 odd books before thinking, 'hey! maybe we ought to do a book about these guys' only for the solution to be 'its too late now, smash it into the third Salamander book'.  Imagine being 40 odd books into the most marine centric of GW products in a setting with a set 18 flavors of marines,  and thinking 'what must we now do before the end?' and your answer being DOUBLE DOWN on treating certain of the 18 legions like the unwanted guest at a wedding.

 

I just deleted a huge rant and will simply end with this, at this point in the HH BL should have been COMMISSIONING stories, and if the existing authors were not willing to write them, finding new ones. Not asking everyone what they fancied and then suggesting if its not too much trouble if they would not mind also writing a little bit about the things they still haven't covered.  Writing tie in fiction is a job, people do said job all the time, yes its a creative process and there will be author input and wiggle room, but a vision and direction needs to DICTATED.  And afterwords like this just cement my long standing view that there is FAR too much nepotism in the giant friend group of BL and far too little actual management.  

 

 

 

 

[DarkChaplain]

Keep in mind that it most assuredly wasn't Laurie Goulding's idea to suddenly shut down the Iron Tenth and bum-rushing to the Siege. Yes, he was in charge during a lot of that time, but it was also the timeframe when GW was meddlesome as all hell, coming in with mandates, which also brought forth a lot of limited edition novellas, and can be taken as the source for the padding phase.

 

....and that stuff ticked people off. How many times did I read in comment sections and forums that they were milking the heresy, that they were supposed to get to the Siege already, that the second White Scars novel was unnecessary filler (which just comes to show that a lot of those comments came from people who didn't even read the series anyway), that the anthologies were cashgrabs and much worse.

 

So there was pressure from corporate and impatience from the target audience / wider fanbase, right in a time when the series slowed to a crawl. There's a clear point around The Path of Heaven & Angels of Caliban when gears were shifted and every plotline was getting wrapped up or pointed firmly towards Terra. That also resulted in a bunch of anthologies like Corax, Tallarn, Garro and the short story ones, all of which were wrapping up and bundling things in preparation of Terra.

 

It's honestly a miracle we even got the Shattered Legions anthology at all - and I believe the reason for that is that it didn't start that way, but as a limited thing, which they then updated with one or two additional stories down the line, and then reprinted as a numbered anthology. Shadrak Meduson only became such an interesting character because they commissioned Abnett to write a headliner story for another overpriced limited anthology, and the Either got a McNeill audio drama (which if I remember correctly was also limited with the book at first?).

 

I doubt The Iron Tenth was axed without need to do so. I still greatly dislike that it was rolled into the Vulkan arc - it deserved to be its own thing. But at the time the decision was made, it's pretty clear to me that everything was being consolidated both on internal demands and external audience clamoring. In a way, I think it's our collective own fault as well, that some aspects of the series remained undercooked or got aborted halfway.

 

.....and now I just remembered how much of a pain The Crimson King was - that book appeared in the mid-40s, but really it had been delayed so many times, for untold years, it'd have probably been a good 15 books earlier if it had been written when intended. Like, shortly after Vengeful Spirit. Instead it got pushed back for ages, didn't match French's Ahriman in some aspects, and also consolidated multiple plotlines.... AND STRANDED LUCIUS FOR THE NEXT TWENTY PLUS BOOKS, ARGHHHHHHHHHH

[wecanhaveallthree]

Quote

I still greatly dislike that it was rolled into the Vulkan arc

 

I generally disagree with this. Like it or not, every 'cool character' needs or needed a moment where they were recognised as such by a Primarch, and Shadrak effectively given the nod by Vulkan (even a distracted and disinterested-in-getting-involved Vulkan) is part of getting him 'over', to use the wrestling lingo. That's a big part of what makes his end so freakin' sad and so effective as a literary device. Shadrak is turning things around in this book. He's got momentum. He's almost got the clans on his side. And he even gets the nod from a Primarch. He is, at this point, an outright hero of the conflict. If he'd survived the HH, or gone down literally any other way, the Iron Hands would still be singing his praises now. His star can literally rise no higher. And as we know, a great height precedes a fall - and that the attention of the 'big players' of the setting and their heedless, world-altering actions have terrible consequences for their 'lessers'.

 

Vulkan is not playing the same game as Shadrak. He has no consideration for the IH's internal politics. They are not of any meaning to him. He is not engaged with them. All he sees is a mockery of his brother, and so, he destroys that mockery and continues on his way to leave the mortals to pick up the pieces.

 

And Shadrak has to wear that. Terminally.

 

Primarchs are great beings who move through the lives of others like gods. They are mythic, legendary - bringers of doom. Shadrak's 'rise' is defined by filling the void left by one such legend. He has, until this point, been fighting a mortal war, with mortal concerns, in mortal fashion: grit and bolts and chainswords and logistics. But Vulkan's arc is deliberately mythic, immortal, unnatural. He quite literally moves through the 'underworld' to get there in the first place. The Ferrus-thing is an appropriately mythic icon, a quite literal religious icon, a blasphemy that Vulkan must destroy. And Shradak's 'fall' is then defined by the actions of another Primarch. He struggled, he fought, he did his damned best - but in the end, his success and his failure were at the whims of the Primarchs, after all.

[EverythingIsGreat]

Counterpoint.

 

As far as we know, Primarchs are lab-created entities. The probable ingredients are a mixture of organic and synthetic elements, maybe warp raw/processed stuff. All coded in an unknown (to readers) language that has(?) some similarity to DNA, including perhaps portions of the Emperor’s code. The delicate process is also unknown: advanced (and secret) genetic engineering, perhaps alien-process additions, probably non-physical processes involving warp energy or processes. In the last ingredient is likely (because they exhibited it) included a capacity to generate and react to emotion, a faculty to be further shaped by the correct enviromental factors after they leave their vats. No test results are available during their creation, or what kind of tesing was done in any level. We also don’t know of failed or modified prototypes.

 

Somehow, the result was supposed to largely conform with their intended function, but that can be vigorously disputed by in-universe history.

 

Unlike their creation and implementation, the propaganda surrounding them was flawless and monolithic. Everybody was to be convinced of their mythic, benevolent nature (or at least their necessity). Except the VERY few people who knew/suspected the existence of process flaws and/or questioned whether the balance sheet of their intended application was pointing to a profitable long term outcome. One view was that the fate of humanity was risked on an experiment.

 

The Space Marines were obviously more familiar, being genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with a human baseline. Apart from their engineered heredity (via undefined portions of Primarch code), they were indoctrinated to worship, an indoctrination that was constantly reinforced. Most of them were never able  (nor were they supposed) to shake the blind obedience and admiration of Primarchs, and of course NONE was able to overcome their awe of them.

 

The Primarchs are not human. They do exhibit (or can craftily, even unconsciously -per their coded instructions - simulate) seemingly “spontaneous” attributes like emotional responses. They can do everything Space Marines do, and more, much better and faster. They can grasp concepts with tremendous levels of detail and understanding. Their brain hardware is orders of magnitude above.Their vat-grown sensors can give them awareness of space and time far beyond of even Space Marines, in this dimension and others. But they are still too-complicated machines liable to catastrophic malfunction. The issue of “betrayal” is moot. Because of their unpredictability and lethality, they have all betrayed the original objective.

 

I am tending towards an alternate take, one where Basilio Fo is on Titan, exposed but allowed to live so that his crowning achievement is finished: a Primarch kill-switch that takes advantage of latent code in whatever wetware runs them to destroy them at the most fundamental level, below even their non-physical programming. The Inquisition manages to do this in less than 1000 years. And WH40K happily trots along without them. But this is not happening, so more GW/BL acrobatics are to be expected. They could have preserved the mystery, what?

[Krelious]

On 4/18/2024 at 8:59 PM, DarkChaplain said:

 

 

.....and now I just remembered how much of a pain The Crimson King was - that book appeared in the mid-40s, but really it had been delayed so many times, for untold years, it'd have probably been a good 15 books earlier if it had been written when intended. Like, shortly after Vengeful Spirit. Instead it got pushed back for ages, didn't match French's Ahriman in some aspects, and also consolidated multiple plotlines.... AND STRANDED LUCIUS FOR THE NEXT TWENTY PLUS BOOKS, ARGHHHHHHHHHH

What even happened to Lucius after that book?