Erik's Reviews > The Uriel Ventris Chronicles: Volume One

In the Empire of Man in the WH40K universe, there’s two tiers of soldiers: the elite Space Marines - and everyone else.

Space Marines are genetically-modified, trained-from-birth super soldiers encased in power-armor and loaded to the gills with cybernetics. Their weapon of choice is the bolter, essentially an automatic grenade launcher. And they sometimes wield a sword because why not?! Swords are cool.

Despite the similarities of their creation, Space Marines are not one monolithic force, oh no. They’re organized into Chapters (a good analogy would be a Roman Legion), whose battle tactics and overall philosophy can vary wildly. Seriously, there are hundreds if not thousands of different Chapters.

The most righteous, jingoistic Chapter of them all are the Ultramarines. Praise the Emperor this, praise the Emperor that, and, oh, beware the Corruption of Chaos! Catechisms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, these books follow Uriel Ventris, a Captain of the Ultramarines.

This hefty tome, in fact, comprises three different books, each featuring a different setting and different foe.

The first book, Nightbringer, follows Uriel Ventris in his first major campaign as Captain and features Dark Eldar - basically sci-fi dark elves with a splash of Giger - as well as the Nightbringer (whoever that may be…) and your usual coterie of corrupt humans. It’s that last inclusion that elevates this first book above the others.

I’m sure I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know when I say that human beings practice extreme levels of species prejudice. Only humans have souls, not animals. Only humans have free will, not animals. The vast majority of human beings will only start caring about the mass extinction event we’re currently causing when human beings start to suffer. Obviously there are exceptions but point is, human beings find human affairs most interesting and worthy of attention. That’s why in The Walking Dead, the actual walking dead merely serve as a backdrop for human conflict.

Same here in Nightbringer. Yeah there’s aliens, there’s Old Gods… but the human politics and human conflicts serve as the core of the story. And the story is better for it.

By contrast, the second book Warriors of Ultramar features Uriel Ventris leading a solar system defense against an invasion of Tyranids who are, basically, the Zerg (or vice versa): a Hive Mind species who use rapid and extreme genetic modification to creature ORGANIC weapons and soldiers. Here, though, human politics and conflicts do NOT serve as the core of the story. Not to say there isn’t some. It’s just not the main conflict. And the story is less compelling as a result.

The last book, Dead Sky, Black Sun, involves the exodus of Uriel Ventris (and his best friend Pasanius) to a Chaos-infested HELLPLANET. Its endless descriptions of torture and body horror and such reminded me of that movie Event Horizon, as well as the original Quake games. Dead Sky, Black Sun was, by far, my least favorite book and, for the foreseeable future (indeed, perhaps forever) the last WH40K book that I’ll read.

All of these books are action-packed with dialogue won’t win any awards but feels natural to the characters and description that helps expand the impressive WH40K milieu. It’s just… for this type of story, writing is not the best medium. I loathe the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words” but it’s the perfect critique of these books.

Dead Sky, Black Sun, for example, contains A LOT of description… and yet I could tell you vastly more about the environs of Quake 2, a game I haven’t played in decades. Video games, film, animation - these are all much better media for telling these types of stories, in which objective description takes precedence over subjective description.

In fact, that’s something a lot of authors don’t seem to grasp: good description should always be a form of characterization. An author is never going to out-describe a video game or a film. Ever. But what a novel can do that a film or video game can’t is customize the perception on the basis of the character. In a film or a video game, a tree is a tree. But in a novel, a druid or an industrialist or a peasant will look at a tree and describe it in vastly different terms. That’s huge. That’s what makes novels so great at exploring diverse mindsets and building empathy. The Chronicles of Uriel Ventris is not going to be strengthening your empathy muscles.

So, yeah, it’s not capital-L Literature, but then OBVIOUSLY it isn’t. So it might seem churlish of me to make this criticism of the book. And I might agree - except I’ve also read the Eisenhorn trilogy from WH40K. Which also isn’t capital-L Literature but is nevertheless vastly superior to these because they remain FIRMLY centered on human conflict and FIRMLY anchored within the perspective of Eisenhorn himself. Every description is flavored by his own unique personality. So those books have all the action, all that fun WH40K lore and flavor… but they never lose sight of the human element either.