Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1413630 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Not impressed
Like the others here, I thought this book was wordy to the point of boredom. 40k books are, in my opinion, renowned for their lean writing and dynamic pacing. Green seems to do better with his short stories, but here I got the impression he was being verbose for the sake of filling pages. I do not plan on buying his next book, Iron Hands.

Overwritten
I have to chime in and say that I agree with a former reviewer that said the book was over-written. Terribly overwritten is what I would say, with descriptions out of control in many cases. The story itself, as mentioned, isn't bad, but it's a slog to get through the prose.

Crusade for Interest
Let me preface this with two things:

1) I am a big fan of the W40K universe, and have picked up every piece of fiction for it since Ian Watson's first books.
2) I also really appreciate well crafted writing.

If you are only looking for a book set in the 40K universe or are using it as source material, and thus don't care much about the quality of your prose, then by all means, buy this book. There is a wealth of background information, including Legion/Chapter/Regiment names for much of the Armageddon conflict.

If, however, you are looking for writing at least adequate to the task of suspension of disbelief, look alsewhere. Many sentences look like a trip to the thesaurus, and the same grandiose descriptions show up time and time again with different words. The editing, sadly, is not transparent, with missing words, dangling prepositions, and sentences that don't start with a capital letter.
The charactes are hackneyed (while that's not necessarily the the kiss of death in a 40K novel, where certain stereotypes are expected, I like a little originality), single dimensional, given to bouts of extreme emotion without apparent provocation, and "think" things they could not possibly know for the sake of exposition.
The story-line is actually not bad (if you can get through the writing), and different perspectives give you an interesting look at the conflict from various angles.
This wasn't enough to save it for me, however, and a quarter of the way into it I was wondering how I was going to choke down the remainder.