Titanicus, by Dan Abnett
3.0 Stars
4-5-2024

Astrobleme; it means star wound

As usual, Abnett does a great job of taking the absurdity of WH40K, and in particular the absurdity of WH40K's 1970-ish mech designs, and somehow turning it into enjoyable and oddly believable stories. So of course you have clashing mechs, but there's also a Byzantine type religious schism about the unitary or divided nature of divinity, culture clashes between the human and mechanicus peoples on the planet, some amusing Skitarii interludes, a plotline that follows a woefully unequipped third line reserve force as they try to navigate the devastation of battle, a mech pilot struggling against mind-interface-rot, and a few other heroic threads at various levels of the conflict. The Chaos forces are largely absent in narrative terms, which I thought was an unusual choice but overall worked fine. And as usual I think these books are about 10-30% too long, but still a very solid effort of creation from an author that was given basically nothing to work with by his predecessors.