Confession time: I loathe Warhammer 40k. I always have. I’d like to tell you I have a good reason for it, but honestly, it just boils down to the fact that I don’t like grimdark as a mood, or setting. I remember in Highschool that I joked that if I wanted to read something and be depressed, I’d just read a newspaper, a joke that remains accurate to this day.
This raises an obvious question: If I loathe this setting, why on earth did I bother to read 200+ plus pages of tie-in novel? Two reasons. First, as much as I loathe 40k, I do kinda enjoy orks. And second, I wanted to run a quick sorta fact check on a video I’d watched about Orks, that seemed to quoting a lot of it’s info from Brutal Kunnin.
It was mostly this fact checking that made me spend the $10 to grab this, and spend a few hours on it. There are 3-ish points of view in the book, and sadly only one of them is an Ork. The other two are a member of the human-computer mars people, and corrupted human-computer mars people. (Adeptus Mechanicus, and Heretek Adeptus Mechanicus).
Look, this isn’t really a book you can read for the plot. In order for a lot of things to make sense, you already need to be at least mildly familiar with the setting, and the action itself is a series of fights. Instead, this is a book you read because you’re curious about how these characters think, or what they prioritize, more then anything else.
Speaking of how characters think, lets return to that “reading this for fact checking” thing I mentioned earlier. I was a bit disappointed to learn that this video I’d enjoyed just kind of ripped a lot of it’s point about “how Orks think” in 40K straight from the primary Ork point of view character. I found this kind of annoying, because there are a few specific examples that seem exclusive to this POV character, and not really exhaustive of the species. Anyway, this is my particular brand of being an annoyed pedant.
Did I enjoy this book? Mostly, in a sort of turn your brain off, and be amused by the incredibly stupidity of the people in this setting. Shockingly, the most idiotic decisions are not in fact made by the green sentient mushroom people made for battle with zero self-preservation instincts, but by the human-computer mars people.
Do I recommend it? Not really. I don’t know enough about 40k to say if it’s a good 40k book, and I don’t think it would be much fun to anyone who doesn’t at least have an interest in 40k.
Will I think about it ever again? Probably not until I’m stuck on a bus or something, and decided to re-read it out of boredom.
Possibly this has melted my brain enough that I will try to read Dungeon Crawler Carl at some point in the future.