The Possession of Natalie Glasgow 
4.0 Stars
11-15-2025
A nice, short, crunchy, horror novella. It's only a few dozen pages, but you get paranormal investigations, tests for demon possession vs other possession, a variety of scary phenomena, family history, attempted necromancy, and a history of slaughter.
Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire
3.0 Stars
11-05-2025
I had a potted-history of Assyria in my head, and I wanted to be able to open up and share that potted-history, but I wasn't all that confident in the freshness and accuracy of my information. Hence this book, so that I could educate myself and be a little more confident that I would look a little less of a fool if I spoke about the time period. I shouldn't have worried though.
The book itself, pretty basic. The empire itself, pretty basic. Assyria was a sort of ur-conservative society, with all power concentrated in a king, brutal hierarchies, mass violence and aggression and repression. Predictably it all collapsed in a welter of blood and ruin. Some of the various causes; being hated by all their neighbors, a bad king or two, and the steady decline of the rainfall which was necessary for the system of agriculture used by the Assyrian core. We managed to recover a relatively large amount of the Assyria's writing, since they commonly wrote on baked clay tablets, which don't rot or burn and so can survive basically forever. Impressively, the Assyrians managed to go 2300 years without writing anything interesting. What we do know about them of course is very fragmentary, and we're only guessing about many periods of their history. In the bad times in particular little was written/survived, and so there is just silence about much of it. As with other books on ancient history, it is impressive that we can tell anything at all about a society that existed 4000 years ago, but also much of what we think we know about them is based on the thinnest of reeds.
Edit: OK, to be fair, the Assyrians did help give us any number of mythological monsters. I.e. I'm listening to this history book and they are talking about Nergal, while in the same week I am deeply enjoying my Nurgle play through of Total Warhammer 3.
Soon I Will be Invincible
4.0 Stars
9-23-2025
"Who?"
Part of the early 2000's wave of media that asked "What if super-heroes, but realistic and grounded in the actual world of waiting on hold while trying to talk to customer service?" Unlike some of the other entries in the genre (Venture Brothers, Invincible, The Boys), this is less crass, less zany, less cynical, and more melancholic, more introspective. There's still comedy, there's still some surprisingly well crafted fight scenes, but the overall tone of the story is one of reflection and memory, as these oddities of nature look backwards in the Autumn years of their lives. Not a great book, not a spectacular book, but a quietly enjoyable book about the bits of life in between the giant robots and the laser battles.
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
4.0 Stars
9-23-2025
Blue Berry the Bear is a metaphor for Christ. Discuss.
An extra-ordinarily silly book, more of fan-fiction++ than the usual fine literature that I read. It's flaws are common flaws; a story that goes on too long, a requisite romance that is not well supported by the text, a level of writing that is fine but not stellar. Despite those flaws, I am giving this novel four stars, as we need more monster-fucker representation in the world. Sure, we have made great strides in the last few decades in normalizing the vampire-romance of the werewolf-romance or the fae-romance, but outside of these standard and well trod pathways there's still a lot of fear and prejudice towards the scalies, the taurs, and the melties. Hopefully this book can help erode these prejudices, open minds, and guide people towards a brighter and more enlightened future.
A Drop of Corruption
5.0 Stars
9-15-2025
Please don't bully the transhumans, they have sensory issues
"Give it a suck, boy" - Ana Dolabra
More of the same, which is great. We keep the two core characters and their dynamic, and add in a new ensemble of richly drawn allies and villains. As before the allies are extremely lovable, and in this case the book starts by giving the straightman of the story a straightman of his own, a delightful, undersized, sturdy, bowl-cutted, laconic, half-barbaric, swamp-sheriff who leads our MC into the mires of this new mystery. The initial setup is that there has been a locked-room murder near the bio-punk version of the TSMC, a strategically vital location where kaiju bodies are harvested and processed into the basic reagents that fuel the rest of the empire's biopunk advancements. Complicating matters is that, due to the migration patterns and massive size of the ocean going kaiju, the best location for the TSMC is a bay right next to a swampy and barbaric kingdom that the empire has been in the process of annexing for the last few decades. Various political, religious, cultural, and bureaucratic complications ensue.
In terms of story this is a perfectly solid and well constructed mystery, where I never felt either lost or bored with the unfolding of the various strands of the mystery. The villain is great, the gradually recognized patterning of the crimes is great, the action scenes are great. It reminded me of the puzzles of the original Legend of Grimrock, neither too easy nor too difficult, but just right for me. If there is one small criticism I would make of the plotting, it is that the supposedly genius insight that finally resolves things is one that readers have probably seen coming from a good distance away. The setting is also solid and delightful, ranging from jungle canals and smoky barbaric castles, to the spreadsheets and bank vaults and logistics of fueling an empire, to the endlessly complex processors and clean rooms where one alien biology is grappled with, broken down, and refined into another and slightly less alien biology.
All that aside, what I'd really like to focus on though is the surprising sci-fi ness of the story. This story didn't need to have ideas in it; ideas aren't really required for a fantasy or for a mystery, and often ideas aren't even in the stories that have the trappings of sci-fi. This book though brings in any number of previous sci-fi ideas, mostly related to the difficulties of designing a better human. It turns out to have any number of pitfalls; it's the same problem that fictional AI creators have, how do you make something that is greater than yourself and exists on an entirely higher mental plane, while still trying to bind it to the meanings and goals that you have?
E.g. maybe you make something with vastly improved mental and sensory capabilities, but it is just interested in appreciating and categorizing beetles, since it appreciates beetles at a level about 10,000x your own. Maybe Lovecraft and Ursuppe were right, maybe our minds are really only meant to exist within relatively narrow confines of thought and psychology, and outside of that is just monsters and insanity? So, some examples from the book. You have the Kaiju themselves, who very well might have been begun as humans and, over centuries of modifications, self-assembled into the giant and enormously complex beasts they are today. Maybe they constantly eat not because they are monsters per-se, but because the tasting and digestion grants them a wealth of data and experience far beyond anything we can imagine? Sort of like us going down a wiki-hole or a TV-tropes-hole, but with more gnashing of teeth and stomach juices. Then you have the legendary Kahnum, the founders of the Empire, who went extinct because they preferred self-modification and self-elevation and enjoying higher and higher realms of thought, rather than breeding. Then you have the various lesser augments and sublimes of the Empire, who have some small fraction of the Khanum's abilities, but even that costs them in terms of psychology and years off their life. Then you have the higher sublimes like those that populate the TSMC, who have to carefully regulate their informational and sensory inputs in order to neither starve nor flood their massive information processing engines. This also applies to one of our main investigators, who has to zealously guard the inputs that she allows her mind to feed on in order to fall neither to despair nor fascination. Still it is difficult for her, she solves most mysteries almost out of hand, but is almost inevitably disappointed by how common the motives usually are. Anyway! I'm not sure this book stakes out any truly new sci-fi ideas, but it does a tour of any number of previous sci-fi ideas in a way that I really wasn't expecting.
As before, one small ding for the Garlandism of the book. If anything the post-script notes by the author made me like the story slightly less; the author views the book as a stab against the idea of Kings, but I'm not sure putting an Empire in place of a King as a load-bearing idea is really much of an improvement. His stories have a bit of the same problem as the Culture books in terms of practical political theory, i.e. saying that you can make a just and utopian human society so long as it is led by benevolent AIs/enlightened transhumans doesn't really help much in practical terms, you might as well put a demi-god in there if you're assuming such things.
Despite this quibble I really enjoyed the book and am awarding it the coveted 5 stars. The book isn't genius, and I did not *quite* love it, but it was *extremely* solid in every aspect and is just an all around good listen.
The Tainted Cup
5.0 Stars
8-25-2025
Could have worms - You Apoths always think it's worms - That's because so many people have so many worms
A Hugo winner, and you can see why. Reading this reminded me a bit of Teshs' Incandescent, in that it is just the full package of writing/plotting/world building/action/description/character. It also reminded me a bit of Korean Starcraft players. Unlike their American counter-parts, who are self-trained and tended to be wildly uneven in their various qualities, the Korean players would congregate together in temples with professional coaches and mentors to help manage their 14 hours a day of training, and these temples would reliably turn out players who were, at a minimum, a solid 8 in every relevant aspect of the game. It might be that as a global culture we now simply have enough readers and writers with the needed time and education and experience that we can maintain a cadre of absolutely solid authors, people who can create one high quality work of fiction after another. Great news if you are a reader, but kind of terrifying if you ever wanted to write any fiction of your own. Anyway! Onwards to a few various comments on the book:
Despite some superficial Roman theming, this story takes place in more of a Cyberpunk setting, though with biology in place of computing technology. E.g. there are plenty of normal people, but there are also people who have biological grafts and infusions which variously grant them improved size and strength, or vastly improved senses, or super-human ability with logic/numbers/spatial configurations, or in the case of the MC, Engraving, the ability to perfectly memorize and recall their sense impressions for a time. The MC is part of an investigative team, with their perfect memory acting as court admissible evidence, and they participate in crime scene investigations and witness interviews. The other half of the investigative team has their own, more shadowy improvements, which allow them to navigate the strands of evidence, logic, and lies with a feline grace and precision. People who are more into mystery books say that they form a Nero Wolf/Archie Goodwin pairing, with the MC being the more active and adventuresome part of the team, and his boss being the one who collates and analyses the evidence from their bed and then convenes a dinner party to reveal who the murderer is. I liked this! I liked that the main investigator prefers thinking in terms of physical evidence rather than in terms of psychological theory; I both agree with her and it is kind of a bug-a-boo of mine these mystery stories that try to navigate through the murks of human psychology and self reporting rather than pinning things down with timelines and hard evidence. Another thing I liked about this book is that I liked the characters. I know, I know, insightful. Really though that is 97% of writing a good book, make me like the characters and like spending time with them, and after that the author is basically home free. The MC is pleasantly earnest and untried and serious, with an understated but formidable wit and bravery and morality. His partner is pleasantly insane, and the other main characters we interact with cover a range from charmingly idealistic to paternally/maternally gruff to appropriately villainous. One advantage of having likable characters is that, if you like character A and you like character B, it makes perfect sense when A and B like each other and start a romance. All too often these romances feel shoe horned into the story, rather than arising as something organic and natural to the events. And then on the opposite side of the likable characters, the Corpos feel appropriately threatening and formidable and psychotically brittle, e.g. when the MC needs to interview a half dozen or so Corpos, with their cold shark eyes and all juiced to the gills with various top of the line mental and physical enhancements, you really feel for the MC and the disadvantage he is at.
Oh! And I really enjoyed the way that one killer reveals themself, which I cannot talk about due to spoilers, but which was quite fun/clever. There's also a ton of other stuff here, like the extensive biopunk worldbuilding, or like the extra-wide Kaiju that threaten the Empire, and that may have once been human, or the High Lords of the Empire, who themselves grow to monstrous sizes and ages through their enhancements. There's also plenty of Cyberpunk themes of the cost of these enhancements, as they tend to break/warp/rapidly wear out the human bodies and minds which were not meant to function at this level. E.g. the Engravers ability to not forget is both blessing and curse; their brains gradually fill up with the bloody evidence of case after case, they get lost in perfect and indelible memories, they gradually start to have bleed through from their vast library of stored experience into their current day stream of thought. Or the weirdness of when two Engravers transmit memories to each other, like two human sized USB sticks.
And now a few tiny, tiny criticisms; the MacGuffin that much of the book rotates around is not actually a MacGuffin, at best it would be a piece of a supporting evidence rather than the pure and conclusive proof that the book treats it as. Also I didn't like the Merrick Garlandism of the book, that we just need to trust the process, as while this is probably appealing to many Hugo voters it doesn't seem all that accurate to life. Anyway, I would recommend this to anyone who A) likes a good mystery and B) is open to a having a few gallons of sci-fi world building in their stories.
Grim Repast
3.0 Stars
8-15-2025
A rough-hewn novel, but it stuck the landing and so I ended up liking it by the finish. This story takes place a few tiers down from the usual WH40K story, with the MC being a street level detective. It leans heavily into the noir; the main character is beaten and scarred up, worn down by the job, the administration, the corruption, and the relentless cold of being a minor pawn in a mega-city on a slowly dying ice world. You will notice that in the previous sentence, I "told" rather than "showed" what the MC's life is like. The author likes doing that too, it is apparently something they teach at WH40K writing school. Large portions of the start of the book involve the author batting you about the head with statements about what the setting is, rather than showing you what the setting is. There are several points in this book where someone is beaten with a heavy-caliber pistol, and as a reader you get that experience too, as the author belabors his points with dozens and dozens and dozens of lines of gruff noir stylings.
But. Despite the clumsiness, the first two thirds of the book have enough interesting tidbits to keep things moving. I liked that this book has an inordinate amount of lore; just based on the setting and the extensive back stories and previous cases that are referenced I assumed this was the second book in the series. Nope! This is actually the first book in the series (plus one brief prequel short story), but the world has been built out enough that I assumed that it was the second book. I also liked the mentor's notebook; the MC's mentor served in the same role as him, but the decades of exposure to the worst of the city's crimes gradually drove his mentor stark raving mad. The MC though still has his mentor's hundreds of casebooks, and they act as a sort of Tome of the Damned, something that can be delved into for information and inspiration, but also something that probably isn't good for your long term sanity. I thought it was a neat and well-grounded-in-the-story example of a cursed artifact. Speaking of inspiration, the MC is also a very-low-level psyker, giving him a sort of Poker Face like insight into the immediate reactions of people. It's a small enough talent, but it is enough to give him an edge in his cases as well as make him suspicious and odd to most of his co-workers. (small side note; I like how this is not an ability that the MC uses, but rather an intrusive knowledge/belief that is forced upon him. It is frequently unpleasant, and he's not even 100% sure this is an actual talent rather than just a minor mental illness.) Anyway, those are the highlights of the first 70% of the novel. The low lights include a case that doesn't make that much sense, character actions that don't go anywhere, and just a general lack of actual detectiving. It has the beats of a noir detective story, but they don't really hang together into a cohesive plotline. In the last section though the story picks up, kicking off with a really fun and extended and extensively creepy interview with a very low level cannibal cultist. From there things just continue to escalate, and it has a action-horror movie energy where things just keep getting more and more dire to the point of giddiness. It's a great way to end a novel, and also does a great job of making the reader feel just how absolutely fucked it would be, as a normal person, to have to confront the kind of numinous evil that is tossed off so lightly in so many other WH40K novels.
The Looking Glass War, Le Carre
5.0 Stars
8-1-2025
I can see why the BBC keeps making abridged and poorly performed adaptations of this book; the full and complete version is a nuclear bomb aimed at post-war Britain. Better to neuter the story and hope no one ever notices the full version. While superficially a spy novel, this is really more of a horror story, as empty and damned people stumble through the forms of life on the worst island on earth. At various points it reminded me of The Rehearsal, with its extreme instances of cringe and social awkwardness, of Killers of a Flower Moon, as one branch of the civil service inexorably puts the finishing touches on its extermination of a rival branch of the civil service, and Blade Runner, or at least the bits of it where the MC is left wondering who, if anyone, is a real human being and not a malevolent android. Like Le Carre's A Murder of Quality, this packs a stunning amount of curdled malice into a relatively short book.
If I have one quibble with Le Carre's early work it is that people keep breaking out into love poetry at the climax of his books, which doesn't seem entirely true to the characters.
Some Desperate Glory, Tesh
3.0 Stars
7-15-2025
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise
The story of four-to-five young lions who fail, time after time, to complete the relatively simple mission given to them by space-ISIS. A potent and well written warning about the dangers of messing around with Warpcraft, though the narrative severely drags at the end as the gang goes through yet-another-try to complete the mission. Really giving 11th Battle of Isonzo vibes. From WH40K this steals the concept of the Greater Good (the Greater Good), Warp Spider Commandos, and the many surprising complications that arise from human genetic tampering.
The Incandescent, Tesh
4.0 Stars
7-5-2025
The pandering is pretty thick with this prime piece of Hugo-bait. The author is clearly looking to win some awards in the most basic way possible, by combining sharp writing, interesting world building, a variety of well drawn and likable characters, flowing dialog, narrative hairpin turns, occasional action set-pieces, and some light romance. And as despicable as it is, I'm afraid it works, and the resulting fiction is something that is going to be enjoyable and compelling for a huge chunk of speculative fiction readers.
A few general and unrelated notes, mostly positive. The story takes place in a magical boarding school (common), but from the perspective of a teacher/admin (less common). The MC has some of the somewhat annoying traits that you find in academia, and initially I was worried that this book was going to be pandering to post-grads in the same way that the early Cory Doctorow books pandered to IT admins. Fortunately that was not the case; the author is more aware than that and as the story goes on the author gradually prises apart the MC's quirks of communication and how other characters perceive her. Which leads into another quality of the author, a sense of control. This was my first Tesh, and so I was sort of feeling her out, and I think one of her fine qualities is a well founded confidence in the story she wants to tell. She's happy to have her narrative break from common story paths, she has a wealth of practical observations to draw from, and she has a healthy sense of the psychology of her characters that lets them avoid just being common tropes.
For the world building, I couldn't help but notice that she lifted her cosmology directly from WH40K? Rude. So you have a a prime material plane, with England and trams and boarding schools and such, but there's also a plane of magic (the Warp), filled with entities of pure magic/thought. These entities range from the minuscule to the titanic, they all love to feed on/absorb each other, and they gradually accrete more sentience and personality and intelligence as they grow in size and power. When possible these entities love to come to our dimension, since here they A) aren't constantly being hunted by their compatriots and B) can feed on/experience things that are completely absent in their dimension, things such as light, sound, physics, human ideas, human minds, etc. etc. These entities/demons don't have a society of their own, since they are born through thaumogenesis, and since they generally don't have interactions with each other beyond hunting/fleeing in an endless sea of magic, and so they have to learn/be taught all sorts of human concepts. At this point I feel like the author missed out on a few parallels; e.g. the difficulty of learning human communication between both the MC and the demons (ok, this element is in there a little bit, but it's not really leaned on), the sociopathy of both demons and small kids, and the rapacity of the demonic ecosystem vs the unfairness of class/capitalism in England. The author left all of these on the floor however, perhaps feeling that they are too common place. One thing I was worried about briefly in the story is that there's active magical research on demons, since demons are able to perform magic as easily as fish swim through water, and so human researchers want to learn from them. The worry though is that the demons would also learn from the humans, and be able to bring our social structures over to their own world rather than existing in a continual state of predatory anarchy. i.e. demons discover capitalism. Terrifying stuff. Also terrifying, the idea of intelligent possession, and I wish the author had explored how dangerous/horrifying that could be. Really, it's the same issue I have with the WH40K novels and their failure to explore this sort of The Thing/Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. Also, I did have some slight objections to the world building here, as I can't see how you can have both A) normal Western civilization and B) powerful magic talents that are not sharply controlled. E.g in the WH40K universe, psykers are either A) immediately killed/sacrificed or B) brutally conditioned to act as living magical weapons until they grow too unstable and have to be A). As this book notes, talented magicians are in the worst case potential nuclear bombs, so it's not clear how you treat them as half-way normal members of society without losing a city every time one of them has a bad day.
Anyway! Even if I'd quibble a tiny bit with the world building, I'm very much looking forward to checking out Tesh's other books.
Ciaphas Cain, collected short stories
3.0 Stars
6-25-2025
Closer to what the series should have been. The ideal of this form is the first half of story #14, where Ciaphas's friend has an extra ticket to a show. This is because the friend was intending to ask his crush to the show, but she had been found to be implanted with a Tyranid control tumor as part of the Hive Mind's infiltration campaign, and so she had to be incinerated in the planet wide purge of Tyrannid influence. That's rough buddy. Ciphas doesn't really want to go to the show, but he does anyway to help his friend feel better. I feel like there's a ton of unexplored humor to be had here, of standard human situations and stories juxtaposed with the insanity of a universe that has magpied every single action movie/space-opera trope into it. Also a fan of the brief detective stories, which are each like 20 pages long and have you, the reader, figure out the mystery within a sentence or two of when the characters do. This is ideal for a mystery; don't have a narratively aware reader figure things out 20% of the way through the story, and then the characters only catch up at the 80% mark.
Also, the stories are shorter and faster paced and sharper, which is always a good thing. They're still not quote as clever as you'd need to earn a coveted 4 star rating, but they do at least have the occasional chuckle, snort, or gasp.
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. Also has a moderate flaw that the enemy in many of the stories is the Tyranids, who in their pure bug form are lacking in narrative heft (e.g. they are a more or less interchangeable hive mind; which doesn't lend itself to strong villains or plot lines), and then in their subversive form the author doesn't really make full use of the potential of their invasion-of-the-body-snatchers abilities. This should be an area which dramatic reversals and reveals, but the author never really leans into that. Anyway!
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 armor and 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 Tyranid 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 nannites 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
21.0 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, who everyone else is, what has happened, what she is trying to do, and what the others are trying to do. It's like she's been shoved onto the stage of a community theater with no idea what the dialog or the plot of the play 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 without in any way actually creating that world or those affects.
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.