Some Warhammer 40,000 & a bit of Judge Dredd, for good measure

I have to admit that when I first decided to read some of the WARHAMMER 40,000 (WH-4K) novels I didn’t really know what to expect. Previously, I’d only read a couple of the trade paperback collections of stories from the WARHAMMER MONTHLY magazine. I guess that I expected all the novels to have a similar sensibility. Stories filled with hard-boiled Space Marines dedicated to killing orcs and bashing each other, in their off-hours, all in the name of the Emperor. To my surprise each of the first three novels I’ve ready had very different takes on the WH-4K universe.

Each book in the Black Library series opens with a page giving you an overview of the WH-4K world. The page is the same in each book, so you can skip it after the first time you’ve read it, although it does remind you of just what it is that drives the individuals, besides their own survival. Overall, it is a dark and gloomy place with little room for the leisure time activities we take for granted. These folks, by and large, are just trying to get by day to day. While as with any space opera, you’ll get various types of worlds (frozen wastelands, deserts and planets covered in dense rain-forest, etc,) for the most part the major cities resemble the Los Angeles of BLADE RUNNER with the citizens strictly fixed in by class and social rank. Pity the poor ‘hive-dwellers’ (as the poorest of the urban citizens are called) who live in the lower most sections of the metropolis.

The first WH-4K novel I read was Ravenor by Dan Abnett, (which I reviewed in greater detail earlier) turned out to be more a thriller of the Tom Clancy “Covert-One’ variety than I had expected. Inquisitor Ravenor leads a team of Imperial agents in trying to track down criminals smuggling in an alien narcotic. Abnett is one of Black Library’s most popular writers and he’s also becoming known for his stint writing comics here in the U.S. for DC. Ravenor is a psychic of enormous power, but his physical body was almost destroyed in an earlier book. He is now encased in a featureless metal shell, only able to experience ‘physical’ sensations when he takes over the body of another person. The book is a good introduction to the WH world and the philosophy/religion which governs it.

The Traitor’s Hand by Sandy Mitchell, on the other hand is much more light-hearted in tone. Commissar Ciaphas Cain is featured in a series of books, which supposedly contain his memoirs of his years with the Imperial Guard; the book is ‘edited’ by an Inquisitor and one time paramour of Cain’s. Cain is not what he appears to be on the surface, but rather is a survivor who has gotten to be where he is by a series of unfortunate accidents. Cain reminds me of “Harry Flashman” the title character in a series of books by George MacDonald Fraser. {Harry was the school bully in Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes. The adult Harry was just as much a rascal, if not as cruel, in Fraser’s books.) While not a coward by any means, Cain would much rather ‘lead from the rear’ of the action but often finds himself pushed to the forward position in the conflicts, much to his great frustration. With his weakness for games of chance & liquid refreshment, the Commissar would have found himself right at home with Hawkeye and Trapper. In this particular book, Cain finds himself caught on a planet about to be invaded by the forces of Chaos (an alien/other-dimensional force which crops up in all the WH books to some degree or other).

Mitchell Scanlon’s Fifteen Hours could almost be called the “All Quiet on the Western Front” of the Black Library series. Scanlon tells us the story of a young man, raised on a farming planet, who finds himself conscripted into the Imperial Guard. We witness his time in basic training and his first assignment with his comrades. To say that this is anti-war is an understatement. If Scanlon placed his young hero in the trenches of WWI or in Iraq today, the day-to-day suffering and problems with military hierarchy would be pretty much the same. Brilliant!

After reading three of the WH-4K books in a row I decided to take a break from the series. Still it’s not a total departure from the dystopian future genre, since it’s a prose adaptation of a Judge Dredd story from 2000 A.D.

Swine Fever by Andrew Cartmel doesn’t star the well-known Judge, but rather Psi-Judge Zandonella. As her title implies, Zandonella has a special gift which she utilizes on behalf of her fellow judges. Not to give too much away, but Zandonella's gift allows her to 'jump' into the body of the last individual who was beside someone who has died. She does this by touching the deceased. If you’re not familiar with the Judge or his world, just imagine an entire police force of Dirty Harry types armed with explosive ammo and riding jet-propelled motorcycles. (Since I’m one of the few folks who rather enjoyed the Sylvester Stallone film, my judgment {pardon the expression} is probably questionable anyway.) As the good Judge is known to say, “I am the Law!”

In this particular story, there’s a growing underground market in pork and the Judges mean to put a stop to it. To complicate matters (and things in Judge Dredd stories are never simple) it turns out that the pigs being ‘farmed’ are mutations and a bit smarter than your average swine. Imagine Arnold Ziffle, only smarter. Cartmel, with whom I’m not familiar, does a nice job of making you care for Zandonella and her fellow judges, while going about the typical dark humor and ultra-violence for which the Dredd series is known.