So let’s start with this: it’s probably fair to say that some things in the Warhammer universe are a little harder to write than others. If your book’s villains are Tyranids, for example, you probably aren’t expending a lot of brainpower trying to come up with deep motivations and believable dialogue for them.
Now to be clear, that isn’t to say that writing anything for the Black Library is simple or easy. Sure there are some stories where the ‘nids are essentially story fodder, mowed down like a pack of Zerg in StarCraft, but then you get some truly atmospheric crafting which does full justice to the horror of it all (for instance, Victoria Hayward in Deathworlder, or Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Long and Dark Road in the recently-reviewed Blood of the Imperium Anthology).
But Astra Militarum stories are, in effect, war stories with normal, everyday people. A writer adept at crafting tales of combat and heroism in World War II could probably make the jump to these without a great deal of recalibration. Compare that with the significant amount of research author Noah Van Nguyen had to do two write the T’au for his most recent novel, Elemental Council.
All this is to say that I found myself appreciating the ambitious choice Jonathan D. Beer made in opting to tackle the Adeptus Mechanicus for only his second Black Library novel (the first being 2023’s Warhammer Crime offering, The King of the Spoil). The AdMech not only require a host of lore knowledge to make their portrayal setting-realistic, but their entire mode of thinking is markedly different.
Lots of things to get right for a writer.
This might sound like I’m trying to temper expectations for a newer author’s sophomore effort, but there’s no need. Beer absolutely nailed the assignment.
Putting in the Work
I’m sure authors have a more technical term or concept for this, but I call it “putting in the work.”
By this I mean a writer does the necessary building-up to make the emotional beats of a story land. For instance, if you want me to worry about certain characters or feel a certain kind of way when they’re threatened, you can’t have introduced them a few paragraphs earlier.
Don’t get me wrong, this is grimdark science fiction, redshirt-style deaths abound. But not every death is meant to be a big emotional moment. To have a character death to really land with the reader, you need to give them reasons to care about that character.
Development arcs work in the same fashion. If your character has a crisis of faith on page 300, it doesn’t work as well if that’s the first time we’ve seen the character experience that sort of vulnerability.
It’s a bit like Chekov’s gun, but in reverse. If a gun goes off in the third act, I’d like to have seen it in the first.
Dominion Genesis worked as well as it did precisely because Beer did the work. This was evident in two parts of the book: background character development and the main character arc.
Getting to Know You
Soldiers at wartime, I am reliably told, spend a great deal of time bored. Sure if you’re dropped into an Ork-infested hotspot you might wish you had the luxury of being bored at any point in your fifteen-hour lifespan, but in general this fact explains a lot of the mischief that soldiers get up to in between bouts of bowel-clenching terror.
That’s why it’s so surprising to me that a lot of the Imperial Guard stories don’t weave this in as much as they could. Scenes of soldiers cutting loose and being people is eminently relatable, giving the reader a chance to connect with another side of the characters the writer wants them to care about. As far as low-hanging fruit goes, it’s almost touching the ground. This was an issue I highlighted in my recent review of Leontus: Lord Solar as well, where I noted the lack of even a “fireside chat” scene that would have deepend our engagement with Lord Solar’s troupe of heroes.
While Dominion Genesis is an AdMech tale at heart, just as with Leontus: Lord Solar the hero was supported by a variety of secondary characters ranging from Guardsmen (Vostroyan Blackbloods, specifically) to a Knight Armiger pilot.
Beer helps here with an excellent scene with a high-stakes game of regicide that takes place in a makeshift cantina in the ship’s hold, where the Blackbloods go to drink, gamble, and all the other things soldiers do to blow off steam. There are some memorable interactions between his Guard commander and the Knight that go a long way towards filling them both out as well (“Get your own dinner.”)
By the time truly unfortunate things start happening to them towards the back nine of the book (this is Warhammer 40K, after all), you’re invested. These aren’t just filler characters. Beer did the work.
The Hero’s Journey
The same and more goes for the story’s protagonist, Explorator Talin Sherax. This is a tale of someone who has endured unthinkable trauma- the death of her world, Gryphonne IV- and tries to cope and process it throughout the length of the book. All too often in the Black Library this means writing in a few scenes of self-doubt, but again Beer puts in the work here and it really pays off.
Beer’s Sherax has grown sullen and withdrawn after the destruction of Gryphonne IV, and given to impatience where once she might have taken a more collaborative approach with her subordinates. And they know it, commiserating their frustration with one another (but being hierarchically-minded AdMech never pushing back too much). More interestingly, Sherax does too:
“She knew their minds, the actions that awoke their doubts. Their anxieties arose from rational concerns; Sherax was not so detached from who she had once been to be ignorant of her altered behavior.”
Oh, she wonders at one point if perhaps her crew deserved a better leader, but essentially just shrugs her shoulders. She’s the one they’ve got, and besides the objective that sees them chasing an alien artifact is far too important for such distractions.
The result? No cardboard cutout here, but rather a complicated, authentic main character with considerable depth with a throughline of trauma that threads through the pages without distracting from the narrative. Bravo. When we get to the point in the book where everything in her life has gone pear-shaped and she contemplates simply giving up, it doesn’t feel the least bit shoehorned in. Rather, you can see the entire book has been leading up to it, it makes sense for the character Beer has illustrated.
Room to Improve
That isn’t to say that Dominion Genesis is a flawless book. Beer spends so much time giving depth and space to his story that when it changes pace at the end it has the effect of feeling a bit rushed and unfocused. An entire new xeno group gets introduced that probably could have been left on the editing room floor without missing a beat.
Not only that, but Beer tips his hand fairly early to reveal the book’s primary antagonist with interludes at the end of some of the acts. In more kinetic, action-oriented stories that can work well, giving us another narrative thread to follow as we brace for the impact of the inevitable collision. But Dominion Genesis is a slower uncoiling of a book, and I’d have liked to have seen our antagonists more wreathed in suspense.
Ultimately, Dominion Genesis is an excellent sophomore effort from one of the Black Library’s newer talents. Beer takes one of the more challenging factions to write well and not only weaves in the finer details but also manages to strike the perfect balance between humanizing her and establishing her differences.
If it stumbles a bit towards the end, it doesn’t detract from how solid a read this is leading up to it. I’m definitely looking forward to the author’s next one.
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