Of Space Marines and God Emperors
There exists a fifty-plus-book series based on a British tabletop game from the 1980s? Sounds like fun. Horus Rising does not disappoint: Dan Abnett takes the archetypes that make space marines perennially interesting and gives them an engaging military science-fiction plot. There is probably something comforting to the male psyche about spending a few hundred pages inside a space marine’s head. I am not immune.
Not every character earns the attention, and not every plotline is interesting. But Abnett treats fundamentally unserious source material with uncommon seriousness. There are enough ethical questions to make this more than an extended demonstration of what happens when heavily armored men meet something they can shoot. The attraction is not that the premise becomes respectable, but that the book finds things worth thinking inside it.
Since we do not live under a god-emperor, I can enjoy the imperial nightmare stress-free. The distance helps. I don’t expect to make it through all fifty-plus novels, ten seems plausible.