Titanicus

[miteyheroes]

Just finished reading Titanicus. It was awesome.

I did feel the two different bands of soldiers trapped between enemy lines was possibly over-kill, I'd have been happy with just one. But the titan-on-titan action was great, and the Mechanicus political shenanigans were intense. And all the Grimdark gothic architecture stuff was as fun as always.

I want to be a princeps when I grow up...

[Grotzooka]

Abnet is the greatest.:D

[miteyheroes]

It was so much better than the Horus Heresy Mechanicus book- Gods that one was disappointing.

[zealot]

You thought Mechanicus was disappointing? damn, I better read Titanicus then..

I thought Mechanicus was a little on the let-down side with the dragon and things, but overall I thought it had a lot of good moments and some decent characters.

[rkiviman]

It is an excellent book!! Abnett does an outstanding job of weaving a story as usual!! The way he presents the Titans from deployment to combat and the tactics employed is great!!! Look forward to his upcoming novels. Mechanicus was alright. A little slow in developing, but it got better. All in all quite a mess on Mars(to say the least).

[The Apathetic Despot]

I have to say I'm surprised, I read Titanicus and hated it. The book was supposed to sweep from planetwide strategy to individual soldiers, but it wound up failing at both levels. As you said, there were no less than two small squads of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, and even with two tries the book didn't manage to give a sense of them being tiny humans trying to survive a war of god machines, and really wasn't that the point? As for the political and stratgic side of the story, well, there wasn't one. The book seemed to go out of it's way to avoid giving the reader any broad sense of how the war was progressing. Even simple questions like "how many titans are there?", "how big and effctive are the opposing side's conventional forces?" and "Who's winning?" go entirely unanswered, mostly bcause the author never bothered to decide in the first place, I suspect. The political aspcts of the story can literally be summed up in two lines, and we are more or less forgotten. We never even hear what in the warp that book that sparked a civil war by it's discovery actually said! Then there's the climactic "battle", where the imperials crush a vastly superior chaos force off screen, I've seen rushed endings, but I'd never seen the author just lose intrest and wander off like that. Honestly after reading Titanicus I came away with the feeling that the author didn't really care and was just going through the motions, it's the book that convinced me to stop reading non-Ciaphas Cain (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!) 40k books.

[jeffersonian000]

Wow, definitely not the same story I read. Titanicus was awesome. It showed us a war between gods and their minions where mere mortals literal had no place while also being the only ones capable of ending the war by simply being at the wrong at the wrong time. I especially love the tie-in with Abnet's Titan comic strip in the old Warhammer Monthly comic book, which also showed a 300 year jump between the comic story line and events in Titanicus. The whole question of the Emperor's divinity was just great. Excellent read.

SJ

[Cryl]

I enjoyed Titanicus. I suspect it's suffering a little bit from being expected to be brilliant, it's very good but as it's not '100% perfect brilliant' it won't live up to expectation. One of the better BL books imo just for the entirely different viewpoint on the imperiums battles (i.e. it's not marines or guard for a change!)

[miteyheroes]

Yeah, I was so worried when I saw the cover had Salamanders on...

[Grotzooka]

We never even hear what in the warp that book that sparked a civil war by it's discovery actually said!

Um... Yes we do. It said that the Emperor and the Machine God were not the same thing.

On a related note, was anyone else thinking that that book was the one stolen from Mars in Mechanicus?

[miteyheroes]

Incidentally, can anyone recommend other books with a large Adeptus Mechanicus presence? The only ones I know of are Dark Apostle, Mechanicum and Titanicus. Would love to read more. Especially stuff with the Dark Mechanicus.

[Gotthammer]

Dead Sky Black sun features the Dark Mechanicus a fair bit, though they are not the focus by any means.

[Just_Me]

We never even hear what in the warp that book that sparked a civil war by it's discovery actually said!

I actually liked that, he simply alludes to the contentious nature of what was in the text, without trying to create it. We don't need to know word for word what the text said, it is enough that we know it very strongly implies a separation of the Emperor and the Machine God. In fact I feel like any attempt the actually generate the specific text would either a) fall well short of the mark and be a disappointment, or b) be so archaic as to be uninteresting. Adnett is a clever enough author to know when things don't actually need to be said or shown.

By the same token, I am not sure how you can say that the political elements were missing, the book gives us some great insights into the internal politics of the Mechanicus (which we have rarely seen) and of how that organization interacts with the Imperium. The big secret of what the book said was also one of the most intelligent and believable threats to the stability of the entire Imperium that I have ever read. The Imperium is so vast and has so much inertia that it is usually hard to believe that any one thing could be a threat to the whole. The potential reveal and resulting schism was entirely believable, plausible, and in keeping with the political fissures within the Imperium.

As for the rest of what you said about the book, well suffice it to say I disagree on all counts. I really enjoyed it, but that is a matter of personal preference so I will not try to argue the point, to each their own as they say...


Incidentally, can anyone recommend other books with a large Adeptus Mechanicus presence? The only ones I know of are Dark Apostle, Mechanicum and Titanicus. Would love to read more. Especially stuff with the Dark Mechanicus.

Dark Adeptus is a good one, plenty about fallen Mechanicus