Cadian Honour (Volume 2) (Warhammer 40,000)

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The Cadian 101st is among those left in the wider galaxy. Now largely delegated to assisting more numerous groups with their ongoing wars, they continue to campaign in the Emperor's name in spite of growing indignities. The latest among these is assisting the religious fanatics known as the Brotherhood on the world of Potence, a seemingly peaceful world which does not require their presence. Yet the methods used by Chaos to corrupt others are often subtle, and soon Sergeant Minka Lesk is leading her unit into a warzone which is far more hostile than anyone could have imagined. JH: The Cadians held the Cadian Gate for thousands of years, and now it has fallen. ON THEIR WATCH. That’s a huge mental wrench. They have failed, and now they have to make it up, and that’s impossible, because the Imperium has been torn into two.

Let's get the obvious one out of the way first - This isn't Gaunt's Ghosts. Don't deny it, just about all of you thought of them at least briefly during that introduction due to the direction and style of Cadian Honour. While there are some general comparisons which can be drawn up between the two series, they more or less begin and end with "Regiments who have lost their homeworld and are dying out". In the grim dark future, there is only war, but you can't just make it about war, you need interesting characters you get to know and love (or love to hate) to experience the setting. Summary: I will be frank, this book was a severe disappointment to me. Maybe I just came to it with the wrong expectations, maybe I am not really the target for this kind of book. Anyway, the fact remains that there is very little I find memorable in this book. There are no great descriptions, no great characters, no great dialogue, no great prose. The author just throws names and explosions and disjointed scenes with recurring characters that are minimally developed and calls the job done. It tries to paint the very grim picture of Cadia's fall, but somehow it manages to paint all the epic fighting and doomed resistance in an amazingly boring light. I haven’t read this, the third book in the Dawn of Fire series, so I can’t say too much about it. From what I understand though, it changes the focus of the series away from Imperial forces battling Chaos and onto the Space Wolves facing off against the greenskin menace led by the legendary ork warlord Ghazgkhull Thraka.ToW: Are you planning more Cadian/Minka stories after this, or is this the last we’ll see of them from you? From the air, Kasr Derth looked like an intricate angular puzzle. Given the Cadians' mettle and their skills at urban warfare, a kasr could be held street by street, metre by metre, for solar months if not standard years. Unfortunately, given how much praise is leveled at smaller scale combat, you can imagine what we're going to delve into with the next bit.

Basically, we jump from one group of characters to the other with no development whatsoever between battles. And there are a lot of battles. the writing is boring. the characters are flat and banal, from troops, to officers, to commissars, to heretics. they re also stupid. It all depends of what you're looking for with this book. I was looking for info about the fall of Cadia in the 40k lore, interesting characters and a compelling story. I got only the lore part.Prose: The book is written in an astonishingly dry fashion. The author really doesn't spend any time being descriptive. He goes briskly about painting the barest hints of scene, then proceeds onto the events, narrating them with equal briskness. For the first half of the book we are mostly treated to disjointed vignettes of characters used to show us the progress of the war, but again, the author goes about this in a way that feels almost perfunctory, not memorable in the least. 2/5

Amongst them is the indomitable Sergeant Minka Lesk. Sent to the capital world of Potence, Lesk and the Cadian 101st company soon discover that a rot runs through the very heart of the seemingly peaceful world. Lesk knows she must excise this taint of Chaos, for it is not only her life and those of her company at stake, but also the honour of Cadia itself. Cadian society in the 41st Millennium is more martial than civilian, mostly due to the disproportionate ratio of soldiers to citizens in its population. The birth rate and the military recruitment rate are synonymous. Most Cadian children learn to field-strip a Lasgun by the age of ten standard years, and many young Cadians served in the Astra Militarum as Whiteshields. Cadia guarded the only known navigable route to and from the massive Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror, a passage called the Cadian Gate. The world's dangerous proximity to the Eye of Terror made it necessary for the people of Cadia to heavily fortify the planet. Read my review of Ghost Warrior or my Rapid Fire interviews with Gav about Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider. What else?I have the feeling that it was as if Saving Private Ryan had all the character development scenes cut only to keep the battle scenes. Unfortunately, doing it this way is much less compelling for I as a reader, as I didn't care enough for the characters to feel involved in the scenes. Overall, the description of the imperial society and of the life of the regiment were well executed, and the battles were ok, although I did have trouble sometime following who was who in Minka's squad, as they don't have a lot of character development.

Cadia itself was a bleak, merciless and wind-blown planet, where only the strongest survived to adulthood and discipline was learned from the moment a babe took his or her first steps. Cold winds howled across wide, sundered plains where armies trained with live ammunition and every solar day not spent training was believed to be a day wasted. Every Cadian fortress-city, or " Kasr," was a massive citadel, with the streets and buildings fashioned with great tactical cunning by the finest military engineers and siege specialists of the Astra Militarum. Read my interview with Guy Haley talking about both Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy . Cadian Honour is the literary equivalent of a generic action film. There’s a planet under assault, hordes of nameless mooks getting killed, and a feel-good ending. As the third novel I’ve read from this author, I’ve noticed a pattern in the writing style that I consider a weakness: the introduction of new POVs in the middle of the novel. They’re supposed to add diversity to battle scenes but slow down the pacing with the life struggles of unengaging caricatures.

Alas, as the story is recounted by Alpharius himself, can you truly trust everything that comes from the serpent’s mouth? Or is this simply another masterwork in obfuscation from the Lord of the Alpha Legion? JH: Cadia Stands was an attempt to capture a planet-wide battle within one narrative, focusing mainly on a city fight setting. With Cadian Honour I wanted something different – to use a Guard story to flesh out the wider implications to the rest of the Imperium of the Fall of Cadia. The cast is a microcosm of all that’s going on in the Imperial post-Cicatrix Maledictum. When the Cadian 101st arrive on Potence they think they’re getting a cushy deal.