Ciaphas Cain, Books #2-999 
2.0 Stars
5-25-2025
Meh. These books are fine, but they all share the primary flaw of picking from a weird combination of thematic flavors. Too much Gaunt's Ghosts, not enough Wodehouse or Flashman.
The series is notable primarily for a deeply affecting scene in Book 3, in which one of my most dearly beloved warframes, a Desolator Class Chaos Battleship, is destroyed while on approach to the Imperial planet of Adumbria. Among discerning Battlefleet captain's the Desolator is known as the galaxy's premiered and feared laser boat, a ship with a wonderfully clear sighted and elegant design in a galaxy filled with compromises and poor naval design decisions. The Desolator has some modest secondary armaments (a bow mounted bank of heavy Lancer turrets, as well as a sizable torpedo spread which we will talk more about later), but the heart and soul of the ship are the massed ranks of extra long range, extra heavy Lancer batteries mounted along its broadside. Right out of the box these weapons have 1.5x to 2x the range of most armaments, allowing the Desolator to fire while outside the effective range of most enemy ships. A Slaanesh feat allows this range to be extended by 5000Km, and a Captain's feat adds another 5000 KM. Adding this up, the Lancer batteries have a max range of 30,000KM, and since they are beam weapons they have a perfect hit rate regardless of range. In a universe filled with ships that prefer to engage at 0 - 15000 KM, the Desolator is 100% effective at 30,000 KM, and is able to lay down massive and perfectly accurate barrages of fire long before most enemies can even begin targeting. Lancer weapons have the additional bonus of being armor piercing, so even when facing the super-heavy bow armor of an Imperial battleship, the Desolator's weapons have enough punch to pierce through the armorand do respectable damage. So just with its broadside, the Desolator is already a premier long range duelist, surpassing anything except some of the Eldari battleships in long range weaponry. Unlike the Eldari though, the Desolator has battleship level void shields, allowing it to absorb a ton of damage before the hull becomes vulnerable, and the shields have a quick enough recharge that there are only modest windows when the voids are down and standard weapon damage can reach the hull. Oh, and that hull is *titanic*. It can absorb truly massive amounts of damage, as much as any other main-line battleship, with the only possible complaint being that the Desolator has standard heavy armor rather than the super-heavy armor that some battleships equip. So while the Eldari ships are taking hull damage and losing systems right from the first exchange of fire, the Desolator first has lose its void shields, and only then is it vulnerable to taking hull damage and losing laser batteries, shield systems, engines, etc. Because of its heavy shields, the Desolator also has the option to break off and re-engage, or to destroy one enemy group before moving to another, allowing its shields to completely recharge between engagements. An Eldari Battleship on the other hand only has its relatively modest pool of hull points, which only grow smaller over repeated exchanges. And if its engines or holofield projector are ever damaged by incoming fire, the Eldari ship immediately becomes a pinata soaked in chum in a shark tank, as all of its ability to dodge incoming fire instantly evaporates. Basically, the Eldari battleships are glass cannons that are prone to being quickly crippled and killed, while the Desolator mounts equivalent or better armament while still being an absolute water-buffalo of a beast of a slugger. Also it is arguably more useful to have the main weapons mounted on the broadside, like the Desolator does, rather than on the bow, like the Eldari do, since it is preferable to circle-strafe enemy ships while trying to maintain the range, rather than to try and dart in and out, like the Eldari do. The "in" part of the Eldari tactic works fine, but the "out" part where the Eldari ship is retreating, and its bow weapon systems cannot fire, and its crucial engine systems are exposed to enemy fire, is a killer.
I can tell from the gleam in your eye that you're already sold on the Desolator. But wait, there's more! If the Desolator is picked as the flagship of a fleet, then it can be kitted out with a Chaos blessing, and this is where an excellent ship becomes a true object of wonder. Adding Slaanesh's blessing means that every time the ship's weapons touch an enemy hull, the enemy takes a small amount of bonus morale damage in addition to any other weapon effects. Now multiply this effect by the Desolator's countless Lancer batteries that all have a 100% hit rate at extreme range, and the combined effect is that a targeted ship's morale just melts away after it has been focused by a Desolator, leading to the target breaking into mutiny, turning tail, and running. You can see where this is going. The Desolator is a supreme long range duelist, so enemy ships want to close on it. As they do, they start taking fire, which both does tons of damage and breaks their morale. The broken ships stop firing, their void shield's regeneration is disabled, and they turn tail and run away from the Desolator, both increasing the engagement range and exposing the fleeing ship's engines. And engine damage is nearly fatal when up against a Desolator, since it removes any ability to affect the range of the engagement. Putting all this together, and you basically need 3 enemy battleships to charge 1 Desolator, so that at least one of the Battleships can close to within range to bring the Desolator into something approaching an even fight. And nowwwwwww we circle back to Desolator's bow mounted torpedoes that I mentioned before. The Desolator still has one feat left, and there is a Slaaneshi feat that adds a massive amount of morale damage when one of their torpedoes hits an enemy ship. Combine the Slaanesh blessed torpedoes with Slaanesh's Psychic Scream ability, which disables enemy ships in a short range cone for 5 seconds, and you are nearly guaranteed to be able to land a full spread of 8 torpedoes on a target ship, delivering a large amount of physical damage and a huge amount of morale damage, and almost certainly breaking the targeted ship's morale. So in the scenario from before, where 3 enemy battleships charge the Desolator, and 2 of the battleships are left drifting in space with engine damage so that the third ship can get into close battle, well the third ship just got stunned, torpedoed, and psychically broken, leading it to flee as well. Whew! Wrapping this all up, a Slaanesh blessed Desolator battleship is basically the most important thing on the battlefield, the equivalent of a miniature Blackstone Fortress. Absent some special tactic to destroy it, the Desolator will gradually but inevitably slag everything else on the battlefield. Really the only thing it has to worry about is A) being dived on by a group of Eldari battleships on a suicide run or B) being ambushed by a cloaked group of Tyrannid heavy cruisers, and then mauled, bounced, and boarded to death in extreme close range combat. Everything else in space is just so much target practice for the Desolator. Well, so long as it has its supporting scout ships.
With all that being said, you can understand why I was so, so, so very upset about the events in Book 3, where the Imperial defenders of the planet Adumbria manage to destroy a Desolator. The Desolator in that case was dedicated to Khorne, and not Slaanesh, and about the best thing I can say to that decision is that it is only the second worst choice of blessing you could make and not the absolute worst choice. (the worst would be Nurgle, which gives a very modest boost to extreme close range combat, which is the one place a Desolator should never be). Additionally, due to larger strategic/ritual reasons, the battleship *had* to quickly close on the planet in order to launch drop pods, and so it had to rush to within close range of the planet's defensive fleet. So it was about the worst strategic situation possible for a Desolator. Even then, the situation recounted in the Imperial annals seems improbable in the extreme. In the story an Imperial heavy cruiser manages to A) land a torpedo hit at extreme long range, which B) disabled the Desolator's bow mounts and its own torpedo spread. I barely even need to state how unlikely this result is; long range torpedo hits are vanishingly rare, and even if a torpedo came within range the ships PD should have taken care of it. Additionally, after closing on the planet, the Desolator is destroyed by massed freighter fire, which while not technically impossible, would in reality run aground on the fact that each of the freighters would take morale damage each time one of their number is destroyed, which would be about every 3 seconds. So in reality the freighters would collectively break and flee after just a few salvos were exchanged, as the compounding morale damage of their losses destroyed their fleet's morale. I think the conclusion is obvious; the Desolator was actually destroyed by other means than what was described in the story, and for whatever reason the Imperials are covering up the true nature of the void battle that occurred around Adumbria.
Rites of Passage
3.0 Stars
5-15-2025
Better! A decent enough action-investigation, and in particular I liked the ending where the Navigator is forced to Navigate in decidedly more personal terms. I also liked that the author eventually answered the question of "Why does this horribly effective ritual not happen more often?" by saying that "attempting to learn the ritual requires extreme qualifications, and even then the learning process kills 99% of the attemptees.". Ok, your lore checks out.
Ciaphas Cain, Book #1
3.0 Stars
5-11-2025
Better! Maybe I should have started with the first book in the series, rather than just checking out book #15. On the downside, these 2 data points do seem to indicate that the series gets worse and not better as it goes on. I think it also helped that I adjusted my expectations; rather than a Flashman type series, it is really more of a an adventure story with light comedic elements.
Hellstrom's Hive, Frank Herbert
4.0 Stars
5-8-2025
Very unpleasant, but the ideas were interesting (for the time) and noticeably influenced a lot of later sci-fi works (e.g. Alpha Centauri). So like a lot of Herbert's books really. The main strength of the book is also its main conceit, the horrifying human hive that Hellstrom runs. It takes a while, but the eventual tour of the hive is effectively and memorably creepy? terrifying? unsettling? offensive? in a way that many other authors are never really able to achieve. Everything else around the hive itself is so-so; the scenario is set in the present-day of the 70's, but it also chooses to give the Hivers like 6 different types of hyper-technology. It ends up being a weird choice, like if you had a story with Gypsies, but then you also gave the Gypsies nanites and psychic powers and time travel. Not exactly fair, and raises the question of whether it would have been better to tell the story in a sci-fi universe rather than in the modern day. Speaking of the modern day, it is so weird to go back to a time before ubiquitous cellphones, surveillance, etc. The 3 letter agencies really had to work for it back then.
Awakenings
2.0 Stars
4-30-2025
I'm starting to believe that not every WH40K book is a work of great literature. This one was another 3rd tier effort; it seemed kind of cut and paste, and what the author intended to be mystery and conspiracy basically immediately passed into satire as the MC is left wondering who she is, what has happened, who every one else is, what they are trying to do, and what she is trying to do. It's like she's been shoved onto the stage with no idea what the dialog or the plot is supposed to be. This would be amusing if intentional, but here it's just the author feeling their way through writing their first novel, and leaning way too heavily into trying to make things noir and cloak and dagger.
Ciaphas Cain : The Greater Good, Book #15
2.0 Stars
4-28-2025
I was expecting WH40K's version of Flashman, a comedic and ego-centric rogue who survives interesting times through a combination of low cunning, extreme luck, and a complete lack of morals. The author though did not understand the assignment, and instead made the main character genuinely heroic and enormously skilled. The narration keeps making the same joke, over and over, that Ciaphas really is not trying to be heroic and is trying to stay out of the line of fire, but his actions constantly bely that. He consistently works hard, makes solid decisions, gives good advice, manages the people around him well, fights superbly, etc. etc. The story isn't the worst thing ever, but it does rely on the same bit pieces over and over and doesn't really deliver on the premise. There were a few enjoyable bits; the long-suffering editor who critiques and fills in bits of the narration, and an Aliens-esque perfect killing machine getting itself tangled up in an inflatable tent.
The Bookkeeper's Skull
4.0 Stars
4-28-2025
A fun little novella. Takes a common campfire tale, transposes it to WH40K, and bam, a perfectly fine new (gruesome, horrific) story. I have one moderate criticism, but even alluding to it would be a bit of a spoiler, and so I must remain silent.
Nostromo
2.0 Stars
4-20-2025
Yet another in the raft of prequel entries for this IP. To be honest I am not sure why they keep making these prequels, perhaps it is because of contractual obligations, like with Sony and the Spiderman franchise? In any case this book explains one more bit of a back story that never needed to be explained at all, and fills in one more bit of background in a painting that was already a complete and self-sufficient work of art. The content of this prequel is just as much of a dog's breakfast as it initial motivation; we are shown scenes and characters and different viewpoints, but it takes like 70% of the book before they ever resolve into anything approaching a story. I was left asking: who are the MC's? What is the plot supposed to be? Are we supposed to care about these characters, or be scornful of them? These seem like basic questions when writing a novel, but the author did not seem overly concerned with them. For much of the narration I had this feeling of "why are you telling me these things?" Which, again is a weird feeling to have when listening to a story. The audiobook narrator did not do the story any favors either; his reading was rapid, and seemingly irritable? irate? scornful? And again it had me questioning what is even going on here? If you dislike this activity so much, why not find a different occupation? Audiobook narration can't pay that well, can it? Because of the narration, passages that might be have been luxurious, or moving, or gently ironic, instead marched along this odd line of barely subdued hostility and judgement.
About 70% of the way through the book events finally started to cohere, and the novel reaches its climax of three men in a boat. The three men are each wildly different, and spend a perfectly dark and still night out on the water. This was ... ok, and reaching towards good. However the men were each very silly in their own way, and this kept the extended passage from being genuinely great. Which brings us to the isms. One of the men on the boat is Jewish, and oh boy does the author go to town on him. This is another theme through out the novel, with plenty of lines being tossed off about the quality of women's thought and the nature of the South American or of the Englishman. I looked up the author and it turns out he is Polish, so I feel like he is throwing a lot of shade for someone who is within slur distance.
Anyway, this was a novel. I'm not sure about the point of it, and I would not recommend it.
Robert E Lee and Me
4.0 Stars
4-20-2025
I went into this book with low expectations, since the basic idea of the book (The CSA was shitty) is a very easy historical and rhetorical target, and what more really needs to be said about it at this point? Also, the idea of being a Southerner/American/Blanco/Dude/Hominid and coming to terms with the layers and layers of bones that make up your history is again, something that we should all be pretty familiar with at this point. The author surprised me though. For one, he actually did have an early life that goes *right* down the line of white supremacy. E.g. going through one prep school/college/social group after another named after Lee, in a way that only a 100? 200? people a year ever do. So he really can speak from the experience of being raised right smack dab in the middle of white-supremacy culture. The book also had a number of interesting historical anecdotes (e.g. Lee accepting a promotion three weeks before quitting to join the CSA, boooo, even I have more honor than that), and roasts of the Southerners that various army bases were named after. It also supplied at least a few historical details about a phenomena that I've read about online, but had not actually read the details of, where politicians in the 1900's traded southern votes for progressive economic policies in exchange for bringing the Lost Cause culture back into the fold. E.g. stuff like FDR gaining some votes for social security or what not, in exchange for giving Southern Senators an army base name or allowing Confederate dead to be buried in Arlington.
Other modest factors that resulted in me liking this book: it is short (200 pages), and the author, a historian who I expected to be a David Brookish nebbish dough-ball, instead looks like a grizzled army ranger straight out of central casting. Maybe you don't need a continual supply of highly concentrated carbs in order to have a thinking mind? Curious. Anyway his head shot did make me like him better. So not a world-changing book, but still brief enough and interesting enough to be worth reading.
The Hollow Places, Kingfisher
3.0 Stars
4-15-2025
In this novel a non-union employee falls down and bangs her knee on concrete while working overtime at her job. Unable to take sick days or vacation days, and having neither health insurance nor worker's comp nor a living wage, her untreated and unrested bruise/sprain cascades into a crippling knee injury and leaves her to face a lifetime of pain, debilitation, and economic and gait precarity. A searing indictment of late-stage capitalism in America.
Kingfisher does Annihilation/Control/Stephen King. This is fine, the world building is fine+, but the MC's patter started to wear on me by about the half-way point in the book.
Long Live Evil
3.0 Stars
4-1-2025
This is an isekai novel (wait! wait! stay with me) about a lady who, on her deathbed, is transported into the grim fantasy world of the hit novel, Time of Iron. She is promised that if she can get the McGuffin from the Royal Arbor in 30 days she will be returned to her world and healed, otherwise ... ? The author immediately takes this in 4 or 5 interesting directions, e.g. our MC has been placed in the shoes of a character who is to be executed in ~24 hours for her villainy, she has only vague memories of the plot events of this fantasy novel, her own interventions in the plot immediately send any previously established plot wildly off the rails, characters that she thought she knew take on different aspects in light of new developments, and questions are raised about who exactly is a real person and who is a character and what is the nature of the reality shared between her world and the fantasy world.
In many ways I liked this. There was frequent, fun, patter, sort of the stuff you might find in a detective novel but more silly. I liked how the author communicated the general plot of the original Time of Iron, filling in the made-up fantasy world in small doses so that we could understand what is going on/who these people are as well as understand how the original novel is being subverted. I liked many of the characters, both in the original and modified form, and I liked the author's willingness to have things lurch wildly off the rails at regular intervals. It reminded me a bit of those BBC comedies, where a stage crew tries to soldier on with a production of A Christmas Carol while everything careens off the rails. And the plotting is not all comical, i.e. some of the schemes are crafty and turn out to be genuinely interesting reveals.
On the downside, the book never fully decides what it is going to be. Is it going to dive into the infinite depths of meta-ness, like Philip Palmer would do? Is it going to settle down with one interpretation of its world, and then use that as a foundation to build up characters that are fleshed out and that we really care about? Eh. It kind of picks some from both paths, and ends up not entirely succeeding at either. Or to put it another way, the book is a bit of a mess. A cheerful mess, but still. Sometimes characters are well written, other times they sink to stock roles and lines. Sometimes the author wants to make the point say that all of these characters matter, and that they each have their own lives and individuality and should be cherished as such, and then other times she will have several dozen people die for a minor joke. There's numerous speeches about the way "evil" or "criminal" is a social construct defined by those in power, but they don't really go anywhere. People make yet more speeches about actually being evil, but then do not do anything even slightly evil. There are numerous talks about how there are unfair and hypocritical double standards for men and women's sexual behavior, but I'm not sure how relevant these talks are outside of medieval/conservative circles. Anyway! As mentioned, a cheerful mess.
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
3.0 Stars
3-25-2025
This is fine. I've never been *entirely* in love with a Kingfisher book, and this entry continues the tradition. In this case I wasn't all that excited about the main MC (she lacks too much autonomy through too much of the book), I'm rarely a fan of the English class-system or this sort of middle-class American rendering of it, I never fully connected with the noblewoman/nobleman ensemble that formed, etc. etc. [Edit: reading some of the tags on this book later on, they have the tag "Found Family". But the MC isn't finding family with the servants of the story. And the happy ending is that the MC is promoted to full on gentry. Why her? Why not her chambermaid? Why doesn't the chambermaid get to become a real person? Why is it cute when the butler gets to pretend for a minute that he is a real human being and can talk to the other characters like real and equal human beings? etc. etc.] The book has OK bits; the magic and horror of the setting expands as the book goes on in a sort of Dracula-esque fashion, geese are always good, ditto with playing a game to sound someone out, and there's some perfectly workmanlike instances of wit or humor. Anyway. Go further Kingfisher! Don't just be a Robert Jordan who takes the Star Wars and the Dunes and the other common influences of the day and mashes them together to produce slurry. Make something that is more your own, something that could not be produced just as well by 100 other fan-fic writers.
Oh right, and if you wanted to you could read this as part of the Camilia Bruce extended universe? There's a weirdly large amount of shared concepts between the two of them; a witch, a witch-horse, the witch being hoisted by her own witch-horse, a botched early engagement leading to bad feelings and serial killings, additional marriages with an eye towards widowhood and monetary gain, and children with a somewhat antagonistic relationship towards their mother.
A Murder of Quality
5.0 Stars
3-20-2025
Another early, delightful, Le Carre book. This is sort of the Post Captain of the series, as it takes familiar characters and transposes them to a different genre. In this case you have your spy people, but they are sent off to a murder-mystery, as they try to figure out who killed the wife of a professor at a posh British school. Suspects abound, and they are all intensely horrible in the way that only the British could truly produce, a combination of intelligence and education that has been disfigured and compressed by class/social strictures/gray climate into a truly curdled and malignant but also subtle form. Great stuff.
A Call for the Dead
4.0 Stars
3-15-2025
Filling in some of the early Le Carre stories that I missed the first time through. I'd heard that his earlier stuff is not that great, but that was a misapprehension! Even his first stories are 1-2 tiers above the common author, filled with structural complexity and enjoyable psychological portraits. There's a few mis-steps, but even in his first book he has scenes of a quality that most authors never reach. I suppose my joy in these is a bit like the joy of staring at a face, they are these endlessly fascinating objects that have so much depth and detail to key off of.
Perilous Times
2.0 Stars
3-10-2025
DNF. I enjoyed the start well enough, but after that it devolves into something that has the affect of an extremely unproductive online discussion/argument, as the members of an eco-action group argue with each other about what to do next. *Vietnam flashbacks* I feel like if you're going to have a post-apocalyptic novel, it should be upbeat like Barn 8, or downbeat like The Road, but it shouldn't recreate the feel of a mid 2010's forum argument amongst D tier online people. Also has the signposts problem.
In the Garden of Spite, Camilla Bruce
3.0 Stars
2-25-2024
Big Trouble in Little Brunhilde /
America is meant for people like you /
Put this author on a watch list /
That's an RIR
This is Camilla Bruce's first novel, and it shows both for good and for ill. The story is more straight forward, and told in cruder and brighter colors, and lacks the ambiguity and structural complexity of her later novels. So it's not as intellectual as her other work, but it does have better pacing, less gray, and more vivid emotion. The story is another one of Camilla Bruce's dark and murderous tales, as she re-imagines the life of the notorious historical murderess, Belle Gunness. The lady in question rambles through all the various sins, from Pride and Wrath and Greed and Gluttony and Lust to the final sin of Insurance Fraud, while occasionally guided and advised by a devilish man with a mustache. It's an acceptable story, *very dark*, occasionally dismal, well written. The real lesson from this story though is don't let this author come to America! Her interests are waaaay too specific; keep her in Norway and away from us good, soft, god-fearing American men.
The Butcher of the Forest, Preeme Mohamed
4.0 Stars
2-15-2024
In some ways this is a perfect book for me; it's just the right size (150 pages, if an author says they need more pages than that they are lying), it's about the correct subject matter (a trackless, wondrous, deadly, horrifying, fae forest/Area X), and it's well written and creative and directly feeds into D&D adventure building. The book did not quite stick the landing, but otherwise a really great job. Mother Mohamed, provide more.
All the Blood We Share, Camilla Bruce
3.0 Stars
2-15-2024
I can fix her
Classic story of a plucky immigrant family that heads West to achieve the American Dream (cannibalizing society in order to fatten yourself and your wallet). This is the first Camilla Bruce novel that does not have a double narrative, and I like it! The pacing is much better when the author is not constantly trying to Rashomon everything. Instead we have a single narrative, told from multiple PoVs, as an It'sAlwaysSunny type family of varied fuck-ups try to settle into the cursed soil of Kansas. It's very dark, yet also ~30% less unpleasant than her other novels, as it has less of the charity-less griping that so marks her other stories. And as always she's a solid good writer.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated
2.0 Stars
2-10-2024
DNF, due to a combination of A) this book is more about the dry science of archeology than it is about providing a history lesson, and B) what history that is built up seems based on the thinnest of reeds, and the narrative assembled seems so fragmentary and speculative that it's difficult to really pull anything remotely actionable from it and C) archeology professors apparently have the same sense of humor that computer science professors have, i.e. bad. It's been months? years? since I've heard jokes as tepid as those in this book. On the one hand it is impressive that we can say anything at all about civilizations and politics from 3500 years ago, on the other hand what we can say is really only a few pages, not an entire book.
Red Rabbit
3.0 Stars
1-27-2024
A dark, gothic, western, weird, adventure story. The first ~50% of the book is propulsive and really enjoyable, as gamblers, gunslingers, bandits, ghouls, lycanthropes, witches, witch-hunters, ghosts, devils, and school teachers variously chase, flee, ally, and betray each other across the cursed land of Kansas. This first half is pleasingly morbid, with plenty of gory and inventive death, but without crossing over into Laird Barron or Ballingrud horror-depressiveness. It also does a good job of developing the characters both backwards and forwards in time, steadily revealing new bits of history that put current struggles in new lights. Unfortunately the book doesn't really nail the landing. What should be a climactic finish instead gets drawn out and over-explained, and the pacing slows down to a crawl. As a finale the author then re-tells the story in abbreviated form, not once but twice, reviewing and reflecting on the past actions from 2 additional viewpoints. It didn't work for me! Listening to this on audio-book, there was a solid one-hour period where I was in bewilderment and repeatedly asking myself "why hasn't this book ended yet?!". As a final quibble, the ending doesn't really have a supportable moral viewpoint with regard to the witches. The various witches are first portrayed as a threat, then as misunderstood but basically good and enlightened people who are unfairly persecuted by benighted yokels. The yokels were right though! Or at least they have the right idea, even if their particular grievances are kind of silly. The witches in the story were way too dangerous and way too careless with power to be around civilians, and this made it difficult to accept the pro-witch ending that was offered.
Oh! I almost forgot. The audiobook does have 2 genuinely nice renditions of Western trail songs. So that is one additional positive thing that the book did. Not enough to reach 4 stars though. Ad tres astra per aspera.