Warhammer, the sword and sorcery tabletop miniature game and it's far future equivalent Warhammer 40000 hold little to no appeal for me. I have nothing against them, or the people who play them, but they just aren't my cup of tea. However, for the last couple of years I have been getting really rather hooked on the range of novels that are set in and around the world of the games.
My first encounter didn't go well. The Blackguards by Nathan Long. Not recommended. At all. After that though, I decided a second chance was in order so I went with the Horus Heresy series. The Horus Heresy is actually set 10000 years before the Warhammer 40000 game/novels. It purports to tell the tale of how the pretty bloody shitty, universe in chaos, perpetual civil war, demons running rampant state of affairs in Warhammer 40000 came about, by chronicling the events surrounding Horus Lupercal, Warmaster and right hand man to the beloved Emperor, as he is corrupted by evil and leads a bloody revolt against the Emperor.
I have read a number of these books now and I have to say that it is a strange series to get your head around, at least at first. A number of authors work on the series and while there is a definite 'house style' if you like, you can still see the influences that the different writers bring to the table, so the books all read slightly differently. I read the first three, which were a fairly tightly plotted trilogy, back to back and it definitely felt jarring as I went from one book to another. After that initial trilogy another thing occurred that threw one a little at first. The books began to shift around. Some would propel the story forward, some would backtrack yet further and some would show us events we'd already seen but through the eyes of a different set of characters. The series is as non linear as you're likely to get and yet the sense is definitely there of a plan, a framework that everyone is working to. Once I grasped what was happening (and I'm not so dense that it took me that long) I really embraced the method.
So anyway, Mechanicum is the title of the latest Horus Heresy book I've read and it concerns the titular organization being courted by Horus to join his rebellion. The Mechanicum are, as their name suggests, the technical wizards of this future setting, who have elevated machinery to the level of a religion. They are not in fact one organization but rather a loose alliance of separate 'Forges'; essentially factions that argue and compete amongst themselves but are united in their worship of machinery. Their main function in the story is to provide weapons and ships to the Emperors Great Crusade (he wants to wipe out all alien life and claim the universe for Man basically) and Horus wants them onside so that when the rebellion happens he is equipped and the loyalists won't be. Simple really.
Of course, all does not go to plan and the Mechanicum split down the middle, conveniently allowing both sides in the civil war to have weapons and ammo (otherwise it would be a short series). This outcome is inevitable really, for the reason given, so the book needed to have something else to become a truly essential addition to the series. Whether it has that something is, to be honest, debatable. An aspect I've seen talked about elsewhere is that it is the first in the series not to focus on people or groups actively involved in the Great Crusade. While this is true, I'll be honest with you here and say that a lot of the people we follow in this book, in terms of motivations, character traits and lifestyles are pretty much indistinguishable from the Space Marines et cetera that we've seen in previous books. We are told that they are allies of the Emperor, rather than being under his command, but you'd never know it from the way they live. So for a long time player of the games I imagine this book would be simply a necessary building block in the series, setting the pieces on the board where they need to be for future developments but not necessarily particularly thrilling in it's own right.
For me personally, however, Mechanicum scores very highly in a way that it probably doesn't for these long time fans. And it's for a reason that is going to sound a little strange, given the title and setting of the book. One of my main beefs with the series has always been the over reliance on tech porn. That is, the long, lingering explanations of every piece of weaponry, every inch of battle armour, every rivet and plate on the ships. For those who came to the books from the games, this obsession with tech is probably a big part of the attraction, seeing as how a large part of their hobby is in the construction of incredibly elaborate models of these very ships and bits of kit. For me though, who came for story, they can be laborious and really pull me out of the story. This is not something I can complain about; the gamers are, after all, the primary market for these books and I am the outsider.
Mechanicum is different though. It is the first book in the series to really be about characters over technology and the first book where the smaller characters (characters like Horus and his contemporaries have always been well drawn) have felt like anything other than pawns. It's odd, I know, that a book about technical geniuses who worship machinery should be the book least reliant on technology in it's story but somehow that is what we have here and to my mind, it is much the better for it. Graham McNeill, kudos.
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