Warhammer 40,000: Xenos
To my American readers: Happy Independence Day!
This review is brought to us by the English language section in one of the local Book-Off stores. As one might expect from a used book store in a country where English is far from the norm, the selection is very small, and very little of it is literature. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I found not one but two Warhammer 40,000 novels at this particular store. (To give you an idea of how small yet random my options are, this store also had a copy of The Day My Butt Went Psycho.)
I’ve never had interest in reading a Warhammer novel, either Fantasy or 40,000. I appreciate Warhammer 40,000 (hereafter referred to as WH40K) for its rich lore, but it is frankly far too grimdark for me to want to immerse myself in actual stories. I prefer to let snarky people like Arch delve into the actual stories and then make entertaining lore videos on YouTube. (Arch’s channel is quite excellent. I highly recommend his series on the War for Bedab, and I am enjoying both his Sabbat Worlds Crusade series and his remastered Siege of Vraks series.)
However, when I saw today’s selection on the shelf, I thought to myself: why not? It was the first book in a trilogy, and the second book was right next to it. I could give the one and try, and if I liked it, I was reasonably confident that I would be able to come back for the other one. (I was right. The second book was still there when I came back a month later. The review for that book will come in August.)
So, as a little side diversion from the grim darkness that is The Empyrean, let’s instead celebrate Independence Day by venturing into the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium.
STATS
Title: Xenos
Series: The Eisenhorn Trilogy (Book 1)
Author(s): Dan Abnett
Genre: Science Fiction (Space Opera)
First Printing: 2001
Publisher: Games Workshop Publishing
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
PREMISE
I actually have a hard copy for this one. On the back cover, beneath a teaser quote from the first action scene of the book, we get the following summary.
The Inquisition moves amongst mankind like an avenging shadow, striking down the enemies of humanity with uncompromising ruthlessness. Inquisitor Eisenhorn faces a vast interstellar cabal and the dark power of dæmons, all racing to recover an arcane text of abominable power - an ancient tome known as the Necroteuch.
Reaction
Much like the premise of The City of Brass, this premise is accurate in the broad strokes but overemphasizes one section of the story. In this case, the overemphasized portion is the back third. The Necroteuch isn’t introduced until page 216 of 314, and it is ultimately an interchangeable MacGuffin. Likewise, there are barely any dæmons in this story. An individual who is obviously a dæmon (technically, a dæmonhost, as we learn in the climax of the story) appears in the prologue, and Eisenhorn has nightmares about this “blank-eyed man” throughout the book, but the first time a dæmon directly impacts the story is page 271 of 314 (and it’s not even the blank-eyed man, just an opportunistic.dæmon who popped out of a man’s corpse).
Title
Why was this book called Xenos?
Don’t get me wrong - there ARE aliens, a race called the saruthi. They play a critical role in the back half of the book. However, the main antagonists (the “vast interstellar cabal”) is a Chaos cult. They are human beings in league with the gods of the Immaterium (which, for those not familiar with WH40K, is the plane of existence you’d get if you fused the Force with hyperspace and then plunged the result deep into the Dark Side). The saruthi don’t even enter the story until the back half.
This gets all the more baffling when one considers the broader lore of WH40K: Eisenhorn is specifically a member of the Ordos Xenos, the order of the Inquisition that prosecutes those who deal with aliens. However, his stumbling upon the saruthi is purely incidental. He spends the first half of this book chasing the Glaw family for reasons wholly disconnected from aliens. Granted, he does have a different character-based reason to be involved in events, but this still feels very misleading. I kept wondering when aliens would actually come into the picture.
(Since reading this book, I have learned that the ordos of the Inquisition aren’t strict jurisdictions, merely specializations and areas of interest. An inquisitor from any ordos could pursue any threat. However, the sequel, Malleus, seems to agree with my initial confusion. The prologue of that book concludes with a member of Ordos Xenos requesting the intervention of Ordos Malleus when he suspects a dæmonhost’s involvement in a case, and Chapter 1 takes time to explain why Eisenhorn’s pursuit of a Chaos witch has alien connections.)
At the end of the day, I’m pretty sure the reason that this book was titled Xenos is because the three books of the Eisenhorn trilogy are named after the three Ordos Majoris of the Inquisition, with Book Two being Malleus and Book Three being Hereticus. I don’t have an issue with this in terms of having a coherent theme to the titles in a series. I just wish that this book had earned its own title by keeping aliens in focus the entire time.
RATING: 6/10
I can’t say that I liked this book. I can’t say that there is anything remarkable about it from an objective literary perspective. However, I also find myself struggling to really say that it is bad.
Like The Fall of Reach, Xenos doesn’t have any ambitions of being more than a tie-in novel. This is a WH40K book written for fans of WH40K. The worst I can say about that is that, unlike The Fall of Reach, it doesn’t offer anything more than that. If you’re looking for a WH40K story about an inquisitor investigating and purging the scum of the Imperium, you will get what you came for. If you are just looking for a sci-fi story, I think your enjoyment will largely hinge of whether you like very dense worldbuilding and the general tone and aesthetic of the setting.
This book was a bit hard for me to rate because it is also the first book where the writing style made it hard for me to connection with the material. Every other book we’ve reviewed thus far, including the abomination that we will continue carving through next week, was at least written in a way that made sense to me. This, though, was a very different animal. I’ll get into this more when we get to the prose. For now, I’ll just say that I went back and forth debating what elements were actually flawed and which ones I just didn’t like.
Ultimately, I reserve ratings of 5 or less for books where I believe that reading it is a waste of one’s time (barring cases where one has a compelling external reason to read it, such as studying the text for examples of what not to do). Xenos doesn’t waste your time. It is honest about what it is.
CONTENT WARNING
This is a WH40K book, which means that everything is terrible, gore is abundant, and brutal violence and disturbing imagery are par for the course. The book opens with a mass murder. There are three sequences of torture, one of which is shown on the page. A threat of rape is made, and sex and prostitution are referenced, with one of Eisenhorn’s associates being a pleasure girl whom he recruits for her psychic talents. I’m honestly surprised that there wasn’t any actual rape on the page, given that the Chaos cult is aligned with Slaanesh, if not actively worshipping her. (If you don’t already know who Slaanesh is, look her up at your own risk. That applies for all of the lore I’m going to brush over in this review, but I cannot emphasize that warning strongly enough in the ccase of Slaanesh.) There is also some swearing in this book, though ironically enough, this is so mild that I think it could fit under a PG-13 rating.
I do find it rather funny to compare this book to The Empyrean. WH40K is (not unfairly) characterized as a haven for anti-social, immature, and needlessly edgy people, yet compared to the self-insert Mary Sue power fantasy written by a Romance author, this book is an icon of restraint and maturity. Obscenities are not merely vomited onto the page. The brutal violence and graphic imagery is always applied purposefully and effectively. There is no pornography. It’s very clear that Abnett knew what he was doing when he utilized mature content. Yarros could learn a thing or two from following his example.
PROSE / TONE / VOICE
Since this had a strong influence on my subjective experience, let’s get it out of the way first.
Outside of the prologue, which is presented as a transcription of a video recording where the blank-eyed man kills an inquisitor, this story is told in 1st Person Past from the perspective of Gregor Eisenhorn. It is written is a very blunt and fast-paced manner that ignores or skims over any details or events that are not immediately relevant to Eisenhorn’s investigation, rushes through key plot developments, and compresses a massive amount of plot into a compact package. In a way, it’s the opposite of The Empyrean. Rather that being a bloated, dull mess, it is so withered yet frenzied that I’m surprised mummified pieces of it aren’t snapping off and flying every which-way.
The thing is … this is obviously deliberate. This is the story as Gregor Eisenhorn himself would tell it. His voice saturates every word. He will go on brief tangents explaining his past (and, in some cases, his future) with the secondary and tertiary characters he interacts with. The times he chooses to be infuriatingly vague or oddly detailed about exposition (more on that later) align with his history and situation. There are times when he will drop in a judgment about whether another character is behaving acceptably and others when he privately admits to feeling vulnerable. If this book is blunt and fast-paced, it is because Eisenhorn himself is a blunt man who doesn’t want to waste time on things he doesn’t find relevant.
This spills over into the tone. Yes, WH40K is the pinnacle of grimdark, yet it never feels forced. You can feel how used Eisenhorn is to this setting. The only time he comes close to wallowing in the grim darkness of it all is on page 24, where he refuses to euthanize a woman with a headshot - not because of any principle, but because he doesn’t want to deal with the legal paperwork that killing her would incur. Even here, he doesn’t linger. He effectively reminds the audience that the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium is the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, makes it clear that he’s at peace with his decision and perspective, and moves the story right along. In short, the grim darkness of the story feels less like an edgy coat of paint and more like a reality that Eisenhorn lives in.
I didn’t enjoy Eisenhorn’s narration, but I do recognize that this is a subjective issue. Perhaps I would have enjoyed this story more if Abnett had dialed back Eisenhorn’s voice and written things more neutrally and with more detail. I doubt that doing this would have improved the objective quality of the story - it would have just made it more palatable for me personally. I will therefore be taking this bias into consideration when evaluating the other aspects of the book.
PLOT
The story opens on the day that Gregor Eisenhorn finally catches up to and kills Eyclone, a man he has been hunting for years. However, he knows that killing Eyclone does not end his mission. Eyclone was a fixer, which means that someone else was giving him orders. Eisenhorn’s efforts to trace Eyclone’s employers takes him, along with his small yet growing retinue, across the stars to investigate the Glaw family, and from there into entanglements with aliens (the saruthi) and Chaos Space Marines (the Emperor’s Children, in this case).
This plot is functional. It’s not spectacular, but if you’re just looking for a romp through the setting of WH40K, it has a little of everything: subterfuge, stealth missions, battles. My main issue with it is how rushed the twists are. There is a twist in the climax that, while true to the characters involved, comes is so abruptly that Abnett didn’t resolve the main plot properly. He just swept the conclusion of the main plot under the rug and fired up the twist. There’s also a false twist at the same time that the MacGuffin is revealed to the audience. Abnett pretends that a betrayal has taken place, only to have Eisenhorn reveal shortly after that it was all part of the plan - but since this person in written in 1st Person, that means Eisenhorn knew all along that the betrayal was false, so the way it was presented amounts to lying to the audience (a topic we will explore in Iron Flame when August rolls around).
One thing I find interesting about this book is that is an example of where Telling instead of Showing actually makes for effective storytelling. There are times when we get blunt exposition about major events - terrorist attacks, Chaos uprisings, battles, etc. - that are happening at the same time as the plot of the book. This is done purely to manipulate the tone of the scenes in which the information is shared. The thing is, it makes sense to not show us these things: Eisenhorn isn’t there to witness them. He is being told about these events. The reason that the tone of those scenes shifts is because hearing the news affects his mood and his decisions. Nothing we are told about alters the narrative, either. At most, they slightly adjust the course the Eisenhorn already planned to pursue.
WORLDBUILDING
This is a WH40K story, set in the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, and it assumes that you already know what that means. This produces mixed results.
Because so many things about the universe are treated as accepted facts, the story has a lived-in feel, not unlike how A New Hope did for Star Wars. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff casually name-dropped that you won’t be able to understand just from reading this book, but the story doesn’t pretend that you need to know all of it. When stuff is genuinely important to the story, such as the difference between puritan and radical inquisitors or what the pariah gene is, it is explained in adequate detail.
However, up until the point where it becomes clear that the important stuff will get in-depth explanations, it’s not clear what is actually important. This produces a confusing mess. I was able to follow along with a lot of it because I know the preexisting lore, but I imagine that someone without prior WH40K knowledge would have a really hard time. For example, when Eisenhorn uses low-level psyker powers to tip the scales of a gunfight, I thought, “Okay. He’s a sanctioned psyker. He must also have survived the Black Ships.” It therefore wasn’t a surprise when Eisenhorn casually mentioned the Black Ships while relaying some of his backstory. If I didn’t know what psykers or the Black Ships were, I would have instead been incredibly confused by the fact that Eisenhorn could perform Jedi mind tricks, and I would have been really annoying that these mysterious Black Ships were being name-dropped as if I was supposed to know or care about them.
One thing I do really like about this book is that it successfully conveys the scale of WH40K. This isn’t like Star Wars, where one can zip across the entire width of the galaxy in a few days. It takes an absurd amount of time to get anywhere. At one point in the book, Eisenhorn and his retinue spend 33 weeks following the Glaws to the next story location. The epilogue confirms that it takes another 40 weeks for everyone to get home after the fact. This is a small detail, and the time is glossed over with montages and quick summaries, yet I feel it was an important one for the audience to fully grasp the nature of this setting.
CHARACTER
The characters are the weakest aspect of Xenos. With the exception of Eisenhorn, who is intimately characterized through the narrative voice, most of the characters are shallow, limited to one or two traits that are either very superficial or would be unnoticeable if Eisenhorn didn’t point them out in his narration. It’s a shame, because the very nature of an inquisitor in WH40K leads to him surrounding himself with a colorful retinue of supporting characters, and Eisenhorn is no exception:
Midas Bentacore, his pilot and sniper
Uber Aemos, his savant
Chastener Fischig, of the Adeptus Arbites
Alizebeth Bequin, a pleasure girl whom Eisenhorn brings on board and has trained as a marksman when he realizes she has the pariah gene (making her not only immune to psyker powers and Chaos magic but able to negate those things in her nearby vicinity)
Tobius Maxilla, a merchant whose ship Eisenhorn more or less commandeers to fly his retinue around the galaxy
Unfortunately, because of how shallow the characterization is, there is very little to any of these people outside of the descriptions I just gave. Maxilla is the only one who gets any development, but that begins with Eisenhorn mistrusting his motives and ends with him acknowledging that Maxillia is a lonely man who’s just happy to have someone on his ship he can talk to. Once that bridge is crossed, Maxilla just becomes Eisenhorn’s Uber driver.
There are only two character arcs in this book. They are rather fascinating. Despite being executed almost identically, one is hollow, while the other is reasonably effective.
First, the hollow one. On page 286, we get this line.about Bequin:
A hard, serious woman had replaced the scatty, selfish pleasure-girl from the Sun-dome, as if she had at last found a calling that suited her.
Upon reading this, I was rather bewildered. We had not been shown any of this. Bequin’s starting point could be implied, but despite surviving three harrowing action sequences and dealing with the massive time skips for travel, there hadn’t been any actual evidence that she’d changed as a character. We didn’t even get scenes to explore her feelings about, say, encountering her first Chaos Space Marine. It honestly seemed as though she is unaffected by everything happening around her.
Contrast this with the collective character arc of the Gudrunite foundees, a fresh-faced regiment of Imperial Guardsmen. When Eisenhorn first arrives on their homeworld to investigate the Glaw family, this regiment was going through ceremonies to celebrate the foundation of their regiment. They then find themselves crashing into Eisenhorn in nearly every action scene after his arrival, eventually joining forces with him. By the climax, Eisenhorn specifically requests that they be deployed alongside him, and they proudly charge into battle with him. This is a faction composed almost entirely of Red Shirts (with the lone exception being Sergeant Enil Jeruss, who isn’t even introduced until page 230), yet there is a sense of meaningful growth.
I think the difference between Bequin in the Gudrunites is a matter of distance and degrees. Bequin is by Eisenhorn’s side for nearly the entire book. We had plenty of chances to explore her evolution, yet aside from learning to shoot, she did not noticeably change. The Gudrunites are kept at an arm’s length, glimpsed only in passing, yet each glimpse shows change. We watch them grow from hotheaded youths with heads filled of dreams of glory to frightened deserters fleeing from Chaos and aliens to hardened veterans ready to go to war alongside an inquisitor.
CONCLUSION
As I said above, Xenos is honest about what it is. There is a niche for it. My biggest gripe about it is the writing style, and even there, I’m happy to admit that the writing style serves an essential and beneficial role to the overall experience. If you are looking for a WH40K or even just like sci-fi with WH40K’s tone and aesthetic, you may enjoy it. For everyone else, I think it’s fine as a book to dip one’s toes into a new setting. Just be braced for the grimdark tone and the shallow characters.
As mentioned up above, I’ve already picked up Malleus from the same Book-Off and have finished reading it. The review will come on August 16th, providing another brief reprieve from Iron Flame series (before we dive into the nightmare that is that book’s climax).
On that note … next week, on July 12th, we head back to the trenches, diving into Chapters 46 through 48 of Iron Flame. I hope to see you all then. Have a Happy Independence Day.
