Eisenhorn novels, 1-4, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
7-15-2024

Thorn 4 T(zeentch), rising

alternately

What are you going to do, shoot me?

Who watches the watchers? In WH40K's Inquisition, every watcher is responsible for watching every other watcher, which is good, since they inevitably go bad. Also good because they're being gradually infiltrated and replaced by a centuries old Illuminati operation. Also good because if you find that a fellow Inquistor has been corrupted, you might be able to take their stuff before they are thrown on the pyre, and the vile, seething tome that they were keeping hidden probably won't corrupt you like it did its previous owner.

This series follows several centuries of investigations by the Inquistor Eisenhorn, as he tries to expunge chaos plots, warp contamination, alien kissing, and worse. While these books are never truly great, they are consistently good, and the setting/structure of the stories allows them to showcase one the best features of WH40K, i.e. its operatic nature and its massive breadth of thingies. So for example the stories range widely in location, from 3 Body Problem type systems where the population spends years in icy hibernation until their orbit brings them back into the temperate zones, to titanic hive cities, to Jeffersonian farm worlds, to UV-blasted hyper-farm worlds, to dying and left behind rust-belt industrial worlds, to alien relic worlds that bend time and space and reality, to beach-heads of the Warp into reality and beach-heads of reality into the Warp. This isn't quite Ted Chiang levels of world building, but Abnett does put some solid thinking into how these different places operate, and what/why/how you get a cyclopian city of strange angles and how you would train your combat team to operate there. As with locations, so with characters and narrative. The investigations are far ranging in space and time, and the Inquistitors have near limitless powers on what they can requisition for their operations, so you end up with teams of pilots and starship captains, rogues and rambos, spies, psykers, natural anti-psychers, power armored warriors, giant mechs, magical swords, magical staffs, magical chain saws, orbital bombardments, augmented humans, partial cyborgs, full brain-in-a-metal-shell cyborgs, a dozen different types of uplifted trans-humans, AIs, aliens, alien jewelry, sorcerors, demons, demon-hosts, etc. etc. It's perhaps not quite as wild as something that Adrian Tchaikovsky would do, but the setting still has a ton of variety when it's allowed to stretch its legs.

Finally, I liked that the final boss of the series was a fearless and searching moral inventory, asking the MC to reflect back on his stories and examine his own actions and motivations over the centuries. Actually wait I also liked the hapless, Vandermeer-ish biologist who's life gets ruined every 10 years or so by his involvement in these matters. Wait wait I also liked the Rambo character, who leans heavily into his stock role and has great fun with it and eventually makes its own. Like you often know what he is going to do and how he will play out in the narrative, but he still has great fun doing it. Also enjoyed that, in order to mystify any evesdroppers, Eisenhorn and his band use a form of connotative Beat-poetry in order convey messages on the battlefield. Also a big fan of the audio book reader, who like the story allows himself to stretch and luxuriate in all sorts of different roles and voices.