Horus heresy in order series#

Too often secondary characters are variations on the archetype of their legion and Primarch. There is so little to differentiate many of the characters in the Horus Heresy, and so a lot of them just become… samey. When it gets to the point when you do not remember which one the bloody Librarian is, there is an issue. Happens all the time in, I would say, most of the novels. When you have six battle captains, or sergeants, or bodyguards, or all the crew of a Titan maniple, and whose names are all themed in a similar way (because they are all drawn from the same culture/legion) in the same scene, you constantly find yourself tripping up and having to back track or at least remind yourself… ‘who the hell is this one?’ You have a great many characters whose starting points (usually legionaries) are very similar. At the start of every novel, you get the Dramatis Persona list, citing all the major (and a lot of the minor) characters who will be taking part in the story.

Horus heresy in order series#

The problem becomes acute in the Horus Heresy series because of its massive scope. In fact, I am going to go out on a limb here and say this is something that a great deal of Warhammer fiction trips up on. However, characterisation of characters in the Horus Heresy is not… quite so hot. The universes of Warhammer 40,000 and the Horus Heresy are treated as characters in their own right, and they are good ones – nothing wrong with this approach, and it is one that many science-fiction and fantasy universes use.

There are going to be stories, legions, and characters that you will have to ‘tolerate’, potentially for several novels at a time. I am not citing this as a major problem, as I think it is unavoidable, but it is something to bear in mind if you are contemplating tackling the whole series yourself. The problem is that this creates a road bump whenever you have an entire novel dedicated to one of these legions. Not every legion is going to hit the spot for every reader. However, others… Going through pages and pages of the Iron Hands and Salamanders, I found myself thinking more than once ‘I just don’t care!’ (though, funnily enough, I did quite like Vulkan as a character it is his sons that failed to grab me). The Ultramarines and Blood Angels would also score highly as while I do not have a particular affinity for either legion, I found most of their stories interesting and driving the overall arc of the series.

For my part, I tended to like stories based around the Thousand Sons, Space Wolves (when the story was not getting too self-indulgent), and the Dark Angels (obviously). Some people will obviously gravitate to one legion or another, and be less interested in the rest. However, my focus is really on the series as a whole. I am not going to call any specific author out (partly because they are all good Warhammer writers, and partly because I know some of these guys), but I will cite some specific books here and there. Unusually for fiction, I find I have a few things to say about these books. Fifty-four books, and a smattering of related short stories… and I have finally finished the long-running Horus Heresy series.