However, characterisation of characters in the Horus Heresy is not… quite so hot.
The universes of Warhammer 40,000 and the Horus Heresy are treated as characters in their own right, and they are good ones – nothing wrong with this approach, and it is one that many science-fiction and fantasy universes use. There are going to be stories, legions, and characters that you will have to ‘tolerate’, potentially for several novels at a time.
Horus heresy series series#
I am not citing this as a major problem, as I think it is unavoidable, but it is something to bear in mind if you are contemplating tackling the whole series yourself. The problem is that this creates a road bump whenever you have an entire novel dedicated to one of these legions. Not every legion is going to hit the spot for every reader. However, others… Going through pages and pages of the Iron Hands and Salamanders, I found myself thinking more than once ‘I just don’t care!’ (though, funnily enough, I did quite like Vulkan as a character it is his sons that failed to grab me). The Ultramarines and Blood Angels would also score highly as while I do not have a particular affinity for either legion, I found most of their stories interesting and driving the overall arc of the series. For my part, I tended to like stories based around the Thousand Sons, Space Wolves (when the story was not getting too self-indulgent), and the Dark Angels (obviously). Some people will obviously gravitate to one legion or another, and be less interested in the rest. However, my focus is really on the series as a whole. I am not going to call any specific author out (partly because they are all good Warhammer writers, and partly because I know some of these guys), but I will cite some specific books here and there. Unusually for fiction, I find I have a few things to say about these books.
Fifty-four books, and a smattering of related short stories… and I have finally finished the long-running Horus Heresy series.