Lets talk about this old book

[Nagashsnee]

Specifically HH9  Mechanicum by Graham Mcneill

 

This is one of those books i come back to every now and then. It is for me one of the best HH books (gasps, shrieks of rage!) in the entire series. And i will tell you why. It is one of the few HH books to REMEMBER that the HH is suppose to be a tragedy. That 30k is not suppose to be 40k with 5% less skulls.

 

Mechanicum sets out a Red Planet that is both instantly warhammer (tech priests, skitarii, hover skulls, titans, etc etc), but also clearly NOT 40K.  We keep seeing people use NEW TECH, discuss new discoveries and recoveries from the expeditionary fleets, and characters laying out their plans to MAKE THINGS BETTER. But it doesnt throw out the 40k baby with the bathwater. Our main character was going to be executed for improving tech, the Mechanicum still has laws and social taboos about outright inventing. 

 

What the book does is show a version of Mars/Mechanicum/Imperium that is smart enough to realise that going full zealout is counter productive, but FULLY knows that just letting people tinker with tech in warhammer is a very very very bad idea.  So you get a delightfully and super realistic setting where rules exists, but there are clear ways to work around them with everyone of note fully understanding whats going on. 

 

But back to what makes it one of the better heresy books, this is a book that shows what the heresy COST humanity, in way of knowledge, culture and a stolen future. A book that shows that the Emperors Imperium while being a bad bad murder empire WAS ALSO leading humanity down a path to a better future. DId the path need that many dead bodies, xenocides and opression? Who knows but it sure beats old night and what came before. And the average tech priest KNOWS THIS.

 

Its one of the very very very few heresy books that has characters smart enough to call out the traitors for their hypocrisy. Oh Horus is fit to lead humanity down a better path because.....he lead his fathers armies, his fathers fleets, used the galactic level logistical network set up by his uncle while leading legions of supermen in the best tech available which his father created, set up and gave him...for a few decades once all the hard work was done...truly he is better then his father....truly

 

Oh wait the Emperor is a super evil tyrant cause he wont let us into the Vaults of Morevec...which were already forbidden before he united terra and mars? Cause he wont let us do AI research....which is one of the Mechanicums founding beliefs? Cause he wont let us make new tech while we pump out new things every day and the crusade begs for more?

 

And while the book doesnt really focus on it, it shows how WEAK Kelbor Halls position and argument that war and rebellion is the better move truky is, by having him not rally supporters, not adress the martian synod and lay out his case, not use his position as head of the Mechanicum to lead it into justified rebellion. But by plotting a pre emptive strike on his own people in a effort to kill enough that resistance to his coup will be non viable.... by dealing in secret and in the dark one whisper at a time.  By staging a false flag attack and then hunting down the confused survivors. 

 

Mechanicum shows a Martian Mechanicum at the height of its power, knowledge and influence looking towards a horizon that is ever brighter and then rug pulls it out from under us, because in the grim darkness of the far future there can be only war. 

 

Now this is not going to win any writing awards, and allot of what i say is  only in the backround of the book. But it IS THERE. The world building is there. The characters are there. Mars FEELS big , it FEELS alive, it FEELS like the beating heart of a Empire.  And while i would never vote for it to be book of the year, i would VOTE for it to be in the top 10 HH books. 

 

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 01:31 PM by Nagashsnee

[Shadowtracks]

So, is it worth a read?

[Nagashsnee]

12 minutes ago, Shadowtracks said:

So, is it worth a read?

 

Yes unless you just want Chaos Marine boltering Loyalist Marine who bolters him back.  Maybe some !!!BROTHERS!!! Thrown in here and there.

 

But as i put it in the top 10 HH books would be kinda silly if i said no DONT read it haha. 

Edited Thursday at 11:02 AM by Nagashsnee

[Tawnis]

One of my favourites as well, I would also put it in the top 10. It's actually one of the books I used to get a friend of mine into the setting because you didn't really need all that much primer on the setting beyond Mars to read it. I'm also a sucker for how it dips into cosmic horror near the end there for a bit. 

[wecanhaveallthree]

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A book that shows that the Emperors Imperium while being a bad bad murder empire WAS ALSO leading humanity down a path to a better future. 

 

Yes. I think a lot of people misunderstand that the Great Crusade Imperium, aspects like the Treaty of Olympus or the Edict of Nikea or the Imperium Truth or the Webway Project were transitional endeavours. They were stepping stones. And they weren't exciting stepping stones. I know I belabour this point constantly here and elsewhere, but the Webway Project wasn't some sexy fallout shelter or hideaway or mystic source of power. It was a reliable logistics hub. You can't run an empire without reliable communications and logistics. You can't enforce the Emperor's Imperial culture/identity with so much distance between worlds. Logistics and culture aren't sexy, but that's how the biggest empires stuck around for so long.

 

McNeill is the one of the few writers who is at all concerned with culture. I wrote a big screed in the Necromancy thread about this in Outcast Dead where he shows in close detail the Imperium's painful transition. It's this teeming human soup. He shows how the Unification Wars are already rewritten, the rough edges sanded off, the necessary sacrifices papered over ('MEMBER ARIK TARANIS?). It is not pleasant. It is not nice for the soup. But we also see the great ideas, the orbital plates, the infrastructure in development, etc. And I don't think we see 'culture' any clearer than in Mechanicum.

 

We see a whole bunch of competing personalities. You can see how the Emperor was grooming the next generation of the Mechanicum leadership, how he favoured people like Land or Zeth, how the Martian landscape would have been impossibly different in a bare hundred years or so. Mars rocks, and it rocks because you have a whole bunch of healthy competition, competing ideas and big personalities in it for the love of the game. 

 

This is, as Naga says, the crux and true betrayal of Kelbor Hal. It shows how hollow and weak he is as a person. He doesn't rebel because he has some righteous moral cause, he doesn't rally allies with his philosophies and beliefs. He doesn't have the courage for that - more exactly, he knows, in his heart, that he can't stand against the 'next generation'. They're more active, more vital, more progressive. One of the things that Cawl does best in his books is challenge people. He challenges everyone, all the time, and he constantly rises to challenges himself. He engineers the confrontation in Genefather to have that debate where he can lay out his beliefs to the reader- er, I mean, his erstwhile allies. He challenges allies and enemies to rise to his example - something even Bile appreciates, and something Bile fails to do. Cawl's speech about how friendship is goddamn magic is goddamn magic. And he's constantly rewarded for this in a setting that usually punishes belief and faith and good intentions. Cawl is an exemplar of what the 30K Mechanicum was becoming. Hell, he is a Mechanicum Magos out of time. 

 

That's what the Mechanicum was. It was being carefully nurtured, tactfully guided in a way that was shedding literally thousands of years of fanatical dogma in a few short centuries. If there's a success story for the Imperial Truth, it's in 30K's Mars.

 

It is also a blunt example of the Emperor's hypocrisy and ends justifying the means. Because he is manipulating Mars. He set up the core of the belief system he's cashing in on. He engineered those thousands of years of fanatical dogma and all the ruin that followed, and now he strolls in to reap the rewards. The Emperor is not nice. The Emperor's plan for humanity is not gentle. There is untold and uncounted suffering, and the book does not shy away from it, just as Outcast Dead refuses to blink away from the agonies of change on Terra. But the book asks you to consider: is this necessary, in a setting where humanity nearly wiped itself out with AI (and if that isn't particularly poignant right now, eh)? What freedoms will you give up for safety and progress? 

 

There is light at the end of the tunnel. We see it here. We see the shining, golden idea of it. We see what could be, what could have been. But there's still a lot of dark left to walk to get there, over god knows how many bodies... 

 

McNeill understood 30K in a way few other authors did. There are better stories in the Heresy, perhaps, but I don't think anybody did more for the setting than McNeill did. 

Edited Thursday at 04:59 PM by wecanhaveallthree
LET ME SPEAK TO THE PEOPLE, NEREVAR! LET ME SPEAK!

[Roomsky]

It's great. McNeill really did seem to be the only one who remembered the human cost needed to be something other than a B-Plot, for a while.

[wecanhaveallthree]

There is a running theme in discussions elsewhere - particularly over on Reddit - of the 'human cost' books being pilloried.

 

There's also a reason why the Dark Compliance is relegated I think almost entirely to anthology stories and the Shattered Legion guff. It's all 'human cost'. 

 

Damnation is a particular bugbear, because it's the 'human cost' book of the series. It's 30K Space Marines trying to deal with a 40K reality (that is, that the human refugees they're trying (and failing (and dying)) to protect are the chief and central cause of all their problems), while the Iron Hands wring their (iron) hands going 'okay look we get it, you guys lost your Primarch and so you're overcompensating, and we lost our Primarch and we're overcompensating, but please maybe we can find some kind of balance here?' (and failing (and dying)). When people talk about it at all, it's the bad dinosaur book. It turns out your average reader finds human interest stories and deeper examinations of identity and culture less engaging that spaceman punchytime. Who knew?

 

Quote

What about Deathfire?

 

NO, DEATHFIRE SUCKS.

 

Speaking of conversations elsewhere, people still argue that the Noctis Labyrinth in Mechanicum isn't a Tesseract Labyrinth. Lord, what fools these mortals be! And they disagree that the Emperor used the Webway to get the Void Dragon back into its cage! Corrr, the nerve of some people.

[Shadowtracks]

A lot of passionate viewpoints…. I’ve actually read it it, a few years ago, but perhaps early days in the hobby for me. I missed a lot of what you guys. Are saying. Will need to have another go

[Nagashsnee]

23 hours ago, Tawnis said:

One of my favourites as well, I would also put it in the top 10. It's actually one of the books I used to get a friend of mine into the setting because you didn't really need all that much primer on the setting beyond Mars to read it. I'm also a sucker for how it dips into cosmic horror near the end there for a bit. 

It has a solid ammount of action, politics, wider heresy plot, mechanicum, mystery and one of the very few glimpses of the Emperor using his brain and powers to bring over entire planets peacfully. It never rains on Mars...unless he wills it to. The whole opening alone is peak HH. 

 

20 hours ago, wecanhaveallthree said:

 

 

McNeill understood 30K in a way few other authors did. There are better stories in the Heresy, perhaps, but I don't think anybody did more for the setting than McNeill did. 

The only other book that rivals Mechanicum for showing what is truly being lost is Know no Fear, Abnett takes the time and SHOWS us what is being built in the 500 worlds. And it is a vision of a new era of peace, culture and prosperity. Before the traitors start dropping baneblades on museums. 

20 hours ago, Roomsky said:

It's great. McNeill really did seem to be the only one who remembered the human cost needed to be something other than a B-Plot, for a while.

To much of the heresy ignores any cost but dramatic cost. Sure gives us book aftetr book about marine bros being forced apart.....but it IS  a galactic scale civil war kicking off at the moment the Imperium is actually feeling secure and kinda starting to relax.  Maybe its not just Bro drama. 

 

18 hours ago, Shadowtracks said:

A lot of passionate viewpoints…. I’ve actually read it it, a few years ago, but perhaps early days in the hobby for me. I missed a lot of what you guys. Are saying. Will need to have another go

 

Allot of it is reading between the lines. Things like various organasations in the mechanicum trying to broker talks and peace between factions combined with the size of the loaylist forces (both those surviving but also those stated to be taken out ) shows just how small the traitor power base is, and why a all or nothing sneak attack was realistically their only option. 

[DukeLeto69]

After all these years how do you guys actually remember???? I have more of a “feeling” about the HH series and that tells me that several of those earlier books were indeed excellent AND more distinctly 30k than proto 40k. Before the bloat kicked in. Before the ever increasing author stable diluted the focus and discipline to keep HH feeling like its own thing. And yep I feel like Mechanicum was one of the good ones!

[darkhorse0607]

Just in case anyone wants to circle back around to it (not that I am downloading it again because its been a while), Mechanicum is $3 on audible right now

[wecanhaveallthree]

Quote

After all these years how do you guys actually remember???? 

 

I don't actually remember; I'm an LLM following instructions to praise McNeill and destroy Roomsky.

[Nagashsnee]

12 hours ago, DukeLeto69 said:

After all these years how do you guys actually remember????

Dont you know? The Mechanicum never deletes anything .

 

On a more serious note, to me there are 2 HH series. The actual 50+whatever book series that i would never re read or reccomend in its entire.

 

And the "actual" HH series. A far smaller selection of the HH works that to me is the " real" HH series. Those i have read multiple times and i have a pretty solid memory of.

 

Just like i can quote the entirity of Nick Kymes Salamanders work, "FIRE, ANVIL, VULKAN. HAMMER,BROTHER, ANVIL, FIRE, LIVES, BROTHER, HAMMER,FIRE, LIVES, VULKAN, ANVIL, HAMMER" Being the opening of Deathfire of course.

Edited 6 hours ago by Nagashsnee

[Ubiquitous1984]

15 hours ago, DukeLeto69 said:

After all these years how do you guys actually remember???? I have more of a “feeling” about the HH series and that tells me that several of those earlier books were indeed excellent AND more distinctly 30k than proto 40k. Before the bloat kicked in. Before the ever increasing author stable diluted the focus and discipline to keep HH feeling like its own thing. And yep I feel like Mechanicum was one of the good ones!

Same here - I’ve read the entire HH and I can’t remember much about this book other than the fact I liked it!  I’m in awe of people who can recall plot points and themes many years later.  Some great posters on this website!