Kavinay
This is a nearly perfect space marine novel. First Claw and the Night Lords are profoundly interesting compared to their thin-blooded loyalist brethren. The Blood Reaver himself is the Tyrant of Badab (which is such a love-lettter to old geeks like me who still have their 40k Compendiums). Much comes to a head but even more seeds are sown for the final book in the trilogy.
It sounds dumb, but stuff happens and characters develop! This is actually quite rare in much franchise fiction and especially when dealing with the bad guys. Dembski-Bowden has you ending up empathizing with monsters.
GW should have used this story for their animated project instead of Ultramarines.
Good but weird short story. Read it, didn't listen to the audio book. Curze/Night Haunter is just such a weirdo that it's hard to really make sense of him.
A “Sopranos” turn.
For several books and short stories, Dembski-Bowden has had you empathizing with monsters. This book quickly reverses that exposes all the despair and depravity that the Night Lords and Talos himself suffer.
A fantastic ending that brings us full-circle... with an epilogue that I anticipated from the last short story and found immensely satisfying.
I enjoyed this far more than the original Legacy book. Shame this storyline had to end due to the Disney new canon. It really would have been interesting to get more of Bechko's “future history” of Star Wars.
I have no idea. You figure a Phoenix Lord would be distinctive. I'm not sure you'll learn or care about anything in this fluff.
There's the really weird sense of banal nihilism that pervades most of Millar's work. It's just always there, even in this precursor to the Kingsman movie. In fact, the entire evil plan of the book's villain is so straightforward that it succeeds in horrifying where a spandex villain couldn't. It's a very clever narrative trick that would otherwise have made The Secret Service just another Bond wannabe.
BTW, if anything this book points out how impressive the Kingsman adaption was. It somehow keeps Millar's basic feel but also adds a human element (particularly Colin Firth's analogue to Uncle Jack) that helps the story from coming across as bleak as this original.
It's not often that the new Marvel canon novels or comics have completely swung and missed. This book is unfortunately one of those cases.
Frankly, the epilogue and a short flashback to Windu's apprenticeship are far more interesting than 90% of the comic. It just leads to a story that pales in comparison to the standards set by Soule or Gillon. What makes it worse is that Windu and a Clone Wars era story are ripe for the picking. Instead, we get a straight-up Clone Wars episode that ultimately conveys very little.
A good book. I feel it's weighed down a bit with having resolve a lot of connective tissue before getting on with the Black Legion proper. For example, the first four chapters might have been better as a short story, or maybe the entire series could have been a true anthology from more than just Khayon's perspective.
Still, the payoff is there with Sigismund. Dembski-Bowden seems to have a knack for really exposing the loyalist Astartes as twits.
Primari$ $pace Marine$
The sad part is that there are interesting nuggets–imperial creed, Calgar's demotion, Cawl's trustworthiness–but the product placement is so over the top that it trumps the narrative.
The bad guys in Battletech are just always more fascinating than the factions the developers actually encouraged us to empathize with.
Charrette and Thurston are basically the best writers of BT fiction. My only knock on this book that Book 2 and on starts to get really fragmented with a vast array of other Inner Sphere plot threads being touched upon.
NERD ALERT! T-85 X-wing with cloaking device. NERD ALERT!
It probably isn't until the final third of the novel that I started to enjoy Fry's adaptation of the film. Little things like filling in the last-ditch speeder plan on Krait (take out the cables used to tug the canon) are what make novelizations of the films' enjoyable.
My only wish is that there was more of this throughout the novel. Much like all the other post OT novels in the Disney era, the opportunity to flesh out canon is rarely taken up for fear of stepping on the toes of the next movie. Ironically, this wasn't the case during the prequel movie period when you actually had the sense that writers were given ancillary characters and topics to fully flesh out.
It's a shame that Fry didn't really get the leash removed as he probably could have done an even better job filling in the blanks for hardcore fans.
There's something psychotically absurd about Clan society and Blaine Pardoe does a great job seeding this not just in the tale of the Wolverines but also in our understanding of Nicholas Kerensky and his direction of the clans.
My only complaint is that there's so much in this story that could have justified a longer series. Pre-Operation Revival Clan stories are just so intriguing because the authors need to lay groundwork for how fascist, warrior dictatorship doesn't collapse under it's own craziness. In a way, I wish this book had been fleshed out even more and was the foil for an excellent sourcebook like Wars of Reaving.
Everyone thinks The Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns are subversive deconstructions of the superhero genre. Frankly, neither holds a candle to John Ridley's masterful approach to setting golden and now silver-age characters in a world that isn't colourblind. Stunning stuff, both for how topical it is in an era of racist pushback but also for how it inevitably calls out how comics are rarely ever “woke” in any meaningful sense.
This book should not have been this bad. Purple prose and inactive characters contribute to a surprisingly underwhelming narrative for a subject matter (Clan Sea Fox) that should have been profoundly interesting.
I'm genuinely stunned at how good Greg Keyes is. He took a simple movie tie-in and actually made supporting characters more compelling than they would be in the subsequent movie.
He also found clever ways of giving us Kaiju vs Jaegar porn without positing a new breach. Really smart decisions to make a story that's interesting in it's own right, especially in regards to Jinhai's parents.
The only flaws are really beyond Keyes' control. The fate of Raleigh and what happens when you chuck a Kaiju into a volcano actually contradict Uprising. Not horribly so, but enough that you get the sense the Keyes did not benefit from a tight story group that would approve and endorse his take on canon.
Singer is a unicorn among philosophers: capable of writing coherently AND staking and supporting moral claims. There's really no else who can touch on topics like sex scandals and cheating in sports with the some analytical rigour and context as Singer does for his more notable work on the ethical treatment of animals.
You don't have to agree with his positions–meat, yum!–to appreciate that Singer's popular essays are the sort of thoughtful and contrarian writing that's ultimately worth your time compared to the partisan polemics or vacuous TED talks that usually stunt these topics.
There's a lot going on, but I'm just in it for the Cybertronians. The second half gets better with a hint at a better, larger Transformer plot. Hopefully it gets better from here.
Not bad as a jumping on point for new readers. Nothing in the story is particularly novel or even surprising. But it moves the ball along and sets the stage for what is hopefully a great and solid continuation of the excellent earlier Batman Beyond cartoon and comic universe.
Out of 18 stories. 2 are worth your time: a surprisngly engaging one about a young Kerensky and the other a wonderful Joanna story from Robert Thurston.
Honestly, I just could not get into many of the other stories. I tried. They're just all over the place. Even Blaine Pardoe's bit about the final moments of the Fedcom Civil War... sigh. Just a disappointing collection when you consider how many pieces of sourcebook fluff work well.
The Emperor is a bit of a dick.
Custodians and mechanicus make up the majority of this book. A few rare close up dialogues with the Emperor are pretty cool–but they leave you with a sense of him as a complete utilitarian monster.
Theoretical: the stick up Guilliman's ass prevents him from engaging in the emo and drama queen tirades of his brother primarchs.
Practical: nope.