I read the Warhammer 40,000 book Blood of Iax by Robbie MacNiven, and couldn't put it down. This is my review, with minor spoilers, most of which appear in the description on the back of the book.
In Blood of Iax, the planet Ikara is under an ork assault. It's just a random ork assault, the kind of thing that happens sometimes to a world of the Imperium. The Imperial Guard is deployed to fight and, when it's evident that they're over-powered, Strike Force Fulminata is sent in to intervene. The Fulminata is a demi-company of Ultramarines with the single mission of saving Ikara.
The arrival of the Fulminata does indeed turn the tide of war. In very little time, the Space Marines manage to drive the orks from the city of Shebat Alpha, and establish headquarters within an important cathedral. Everything's fine. Until an ork warlord shows up and displays some surprisingly cunning behaviour.
I won't spoil the cunning plans of the ork warlord, but it's really good. The whole book is good, I couldn't stop reading it. I think I read the entire thing in 2 days, and 244 pages in 2 days is unusual for me.
One thing about Blood of Iax is that it there are basically only 2 characters you need to remember: Chaplain Kastor and Apothecary Polixis. They're the main characters of the book, and the perspective of the book frequently changes between the two, in clearly labeled sections.
If you've read any Warhammer 40,000 fiction, you know that this is not exactly common. Warhammer authors love to introduce new characters throughout the book, and then some die and you wonder why you ever bothered trying to keep track of their storyline, and others don't die but then there are too many living characters to keep track of. It can be overwhelming, and if I'm honest it can make it hard to connect with the book. Regardless of how much I might have enjoyed Ferrus Manus, for example, I could barely keep track of all the Space Marines in the book, much less which legion they each one was with (and that's a key component of the story.)
Admittedly, Blood of Iax has surplus characters, and many do disappear as one force or another moves around on the battlefield. However, all those extra characters come across as extra characters. You understand that they're not the main characters, because Kastor and Polixis are given the bulk of the story.
Back in 2017, Games Workshop noticed that the Space Marine models were pretty small. This was weird because Space Marines were supposed to be big super soldiers, in the lore of Warhammer 40,000, but over the years models had sort of gotten scaled up and up from their original 28mm (from foot to eyeline) to something more like 32mm. They decided they needed to do new Space Marine models. As they were already re-sculpting the models, they decided to incorporate the visual change into the lore, and it became canon that a new breed of Space Marines had been developed by the powerful and controversial Arch Magos Belisarius Cawl. This new breed was called Primaris.
The main characters of Blood of Iax, Kastor and Polixis, are both Primaris. I think the rest of the Fulminata is, too, but I'm not sure. Either way, they're Primaris, and you can tell that this is one of the books easing us into the world of the fancy new Space Marines. There's a lot of descriptions about all the servos in the power armour that automatically react to external forces. There are descriptions of the HUD in the helmet, and how it reacts to scrolls and blink-clicks and blink-deletes. It all sounds very modern, and sometimes a little too uncomfortably like something out of an Iron Man movie.
Then again, I have to admit I never minded hearing about how cool and tough the new Space Marine armour is, and the Space Marines themselves are. I don't like the models (I use Horus Heresy models in Mark VI armour), but I guess I actually do like them in lore. I don't know whether I love what it means for the lore. Warhammer 40,000 is supposed to be stagnate. Its world has been basically the same for something like 20,000 years or more. That's not exactly believable, but neither are orks and space elves. I like the lack of development in the lore. And yet I also admit that I don't mind hearing about some tech that feels like it's not from the 1980s. Maybe it's a matter of temperance, and I guess Games Workshop has shown a lot of restraint historically, so maybe that's why I'm not overly bothered.
My own conflicted feelings aside, the Space Marines in this book are proper Space Marines, but moreso. And also less so, in a good way. There's a lot of introspection in this book about what it means to be post-human, what it means to be human, what it means to have "brothers", what it means to be from a different world than the rest of your company, about religion and faith, and about science (such as it is, in the 41st millennium). It brings the main characters very close to you, as a reader, and it's just good character development. I feel like I know Kastor and Polixis as well as I know Garviel Loken from Horus Heresy, and I've only spent 244 pages with them.
It sometimes astonishes me just how much story Black Library authors can tell about a single battle. You just feel like at some point, the battle would have to be over, and you'd see characters relaxing in the canteen or something. But in the 41st millennium, there is only war, and so that's the backdrop of nearly every scenario in this book. That's impressive in a way, but you can also ignore it because, to be fair, at some point the battle does just become the backdrop of the story. Gun sounds and artillery blasts may as well be the clinking of spoons and tea cups. It's the background noise, and it gets blurry once you get used to it.
What's interesting to me is how the background story takes shape into the Ikaran campaign. If you gave me a map of Ikara, I could sketch out the path of the orks and the Imperium. I could explain the different strategies they came to the battle with, and how those strategies developed as necessary. I feel like the third main character of the book is the Ikaran campaign, from the perspectives of the Space Marines, the orks, and even the Imperial Guard. That it is so clearly communicated is, I think, a real achievement, especially given that a significant portion of the book's audience are tabletop wargamers. These are, in part, the kinds of details that inspire games.
This is really good Warhammer 40,000. It's got an exciting story, a clear campaign and, most importantly, compelling main characters. It's worth a read, whether you're a fan of Ultramarines or Primaris or not. This one does a great job of making the universe of Warhammer 40,000 feel real and genuine, and also, of course, absolutely horrible and terrifying.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.