The Serpent and the Saint, and the Magister and the Martyr, by Dan Abnett
3.0 Stars
3-15-2024

what is this, a cross-over episode!?

Our Ithacan Snake Boys are back! It turns out that the earlier Iron Snakes novel was an origin story rather than a series of stand alone vignettes, and now the characters from that book are mixed in with those from Abnett's more grounded and human level series. It's still sort of a high-level campaign, and as usual there's a fair bit of repetitiveness, but there's also a lot to like in these two books. E.g. the basic war stories are fun, the author has a consistent tactical inventiveness and ability to turn the absurdity of WH40K into weirdly belieavable and interesting situations, he does a decent job of representing the post-human space marines, and he does a great job of representing and making oddly sympathetic the traitor marines opposing them. Hmm, what else. There's easily as much body horror as in Ballingrud's work, but as usual with Warhammer it's just thrown in there as a lagniappe rather than being the full deal. There is also, as the title implies, the saint that the entire 20 novel series revolves around. I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect. WH40K has always had this issue that it is nominally satire, but after 20 minutes and a few drinks it forgets about that and devolves into straight faced whatever-40K-is, and then this book folds imperial religion into it, which is kind of also a little bit Catholicism?, and at some point I lose the thread about what exactly this is supposed to be. It kind of works, after all who does not want to follow a Joan of Arc/White Rose figure into battle, but it kind of does not as I got lost in the various thousand folds of imitation and satire and I'm not sure exactly what the text is supposed to be conveying. Is Dan Abnett Catholic? Is he doing a mirror image of what Sanderson is doing, and trying to sneak his religion into a 5000+ page series of fantasy novels? It is a frightening thought.

Oh and I also liked the elderly married couple in their paired Warhound mechs.