You know, I’ve really enjoyed doing these deep look reviews at classic Black Library Novels. The Night Hunters and the Dark Coil were both series dripping with Chaos, madness, evil and feelings – so I was a little emotionally worn out after the two of them. After finishing up the Night Lords, I asked Jay “Lorehunter” Kirkman to decide what I should dive into next, and he came up with something very different – the Forges of Mars Trilogy by Graham McNeill, a decidedly adventurous, Mechanicum-focused voyage into the back of beyond, a series that aims to do something very different to those I’ve previously talked about here and, though it doesn’t pull them off, it gives it a bloody good go.
Forges, Priests and Gods
Forges of Mars comprises Priests, Lords, and Gods of Mars (released 2012-2014), and the accompanying short story Zero-Day Exploit. It’s only easily available in eBook and audiobook now, but is one of those classic Black Library series that will end up getting a paperback rerelease at some point, even if only in print on demand format. I have a bit of a rocky relationship with Forges of Mars – and Graham McNeill’s Mechanicum stuff more generally. I could not get on with Mechanicum at all, the shining figure of Robot Maria ending up a kind of eye candy in a story that I felt never quite got to where it wanted to be. I read the books that make up the Forges series as they came out, and didn’t particularly enjoy them, slotting them into the “ok but….” mental category along with the Expanse and the majority of the Riftwar.
So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I picked them up again at Jay’s suggestion. Not because I thought they’d be a bad read but because writing about things I’m not enthused about is tough, and bending a lot of attention to them for a deeper dive is annoying. Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying the series, dragged into an adventure story that was structured in a familiar and highly competent manner.
Let’s flip the usual structure a bit and focus on what doesn’t quite come together in the saga of Magos Kotov and the Heretek Telok, and do it quickly so we can talk about more interesting things. Forges is pretty well known for relying on a couple of different words almost as much as Abnett used “wet leopard growl” in Prospero Burns. Hexamathic, binaric/binharic, crystalline and “thor’s balls!” will be burned into your brain before the end of the first book. The universal characters of McNeill’s work – the attractive genius woman, heroic swashbuckler, wise underdog and hubris tempting know-it-all – all crop up in procession (no bad thing to have a style, at all, it’s just a funny one to note every time it comes up), and there’s occasionally some very weird statements either in narration or dialogue (“a fiery colt in the body of an aging stallion” is one so good I put it in my notebook). The worst bit is that there’s so much Mechanicum and meta-Mechanicum nonsense in there that I think the idea was to be overwhelmed by the raw technological singularity, like the final emergence of Wintermute in Neuromancer; but that very rarely works, and this is no exception. To top that off, it’s a three book series where not an awful lot happens for the majority of it as the Speranza and its fleet slowly journeys beyond the Halo Scar. The transition between the first and second book just happens at a fairly arbitrary point and there are some long-running plot points that add nothing beyond texture so unnecessary you could rename it ultra-thinned astrogranite.
But you know what? I admire a story – and an author – when they take a big swing, even when it ends up a miss. There was a period in the Black Library’s history when it felt like, with the exception of a few stalwarts, they were just cranking out books called THING HAPPENS, and Forges released right in the middle of those doldrums. But the thing with McNeill is that he’s never afraid to wind the bat up and try to whack it over backwards square leg. Whatever this is, it isn’t a story that thinks small.
It thinks big. Far, far too big. After reading it I was struggling with the tone for this review but this is a voyage story, a story about a long and dangerous journey in a ship far, far from home. So I turned on the TV.
Voyager 40,000
Forges is very much a 40k story, but it’s also a classic story of a journey that explores that hoary old trope through the structures and narratives of Science Fiction classics – most particularly Star Trek. The key beats of the Voyage story have been clear for as long as people have written stories – We set the scene, move into another world, find fascinating things and strange new worlds, are beset by frustrations and issues, there’s a threatening and terrifying climax, and then the triumphant and thrilling return. The end of the Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, The Great Outdoor Fight, Aubrey-Maturin’s Round the World Cycle – and Forges of Mars. It’s a classic story structure for a reason, and is used really well here to take us to the limits of the Imperium and beyond.
Forges gets through the first three (with some added peril) in Book One, seeks out new life and new civilisations accompanying frustrations in Book Two, then compresses the climax of every plot thread and the triumphant end in Book Three. Sticking to that structure necessitates an escalating series of climactic moments at the end of each book – from not particularly world-shattering in Book One, to a tension-heavy cliffhanger in Two and then a book-long denouement in Three. Adhering to it presents problems when the books are sold a year apart – one of the reasons I found them a meh read on release – but works much better when you’re reading the omnibus as the return relies on 99% of the plotlines in the series coming together.
McNeill reminds us that this is a voyage story throughout by drawing from well known voyages either in dialogue, description or names. Kotov shares his name with Oleg Kotov, one of the most experienced long-duration mission Cosmonauts. Telok is a navigational term in Malay (as well as cropping up in Farscape and Star Trek). Roboute Surcouf is a sufficiently Ultramar-inflected version of Robert Surcouf, French privateer, slaver and explorer who wreaked merry hell “beyond the edge of the world” in the Indian Ocean during the Napoleonic Period. Kotov meets Telok with one of the most classic explorer lines of all – “Archmagos Telok, I presume?” and pilots his ship through the wheel of HMS Victory, salvaged from a “great victory at Taraf al-Gharb.” The series is liberally studded with references to voyages of exploration, British scientific history, transcendental poetry and, for some reason, the Mars Volta. You’re constantly, deliberately, reminded that this is a journey, a voyage to far beyond the stars.
As all these references were percolating through my mind, I found myself returning to the idea that the Forges of Mars trilogy is Star Trek: Voyager 40,000. It’s a series that occasionally attempted something big, got mired down in technobabble, never felt like it was committed to its premise and shoehorned in a sexy character for vague reasons. But it was also a series that meandered far and wide, with some excellent episodes and mini-arcs that has retained a long and dedicated following (though Deep Space Nine is infinitely better, suck it) and is still worth watching. Forges of Mars shares the very Star Trek style of telling stories, with a strong echo of the episodic-within-arc structure that Voyager had such a fraught relationship with. It’s set in a wider universe that is cast off – you don’t need knowledge of 40k (or TNG) to understand either, and the plot conceit of distant voyages facilitates that – from the jump, leaving the characters to sink or swim. We have a set of characters broader than are needed to strictly tell the core story, and every individual character has their foils and friends that occasionally barely interact with the core plot until they get their own episode in extremis. They’re inconsistently followed, sometimes foregrounded before fading into the background for a book or a series. That doesn’t mean there’s dangling plot threads everywhere – just as in Voyager, or any Star Trek series, we’re supposed to think the absent characters are getting on with their lives. For most of them, we don’t check in constantly enough to see everything from every perspective – the plot advances, we get some core POVs, other characters join or rejoin later on, when the status quo has changed. Just like Voyager, there’s a scattering of moments, episodes and plots that resonate, occasionally reaching really impressive highs, but there’s a similar feeling of never quite committing to the idea that you’re boldly going where no one has gone before.
While there’s structural associations with Voyager, there’s thematic and character ones too. Galatea is a dangerous hive mind brought onto the ship in dubious circumstances. Blaylock starts off as Chakotay, the number two who doesn’t quite believe in the mission – or more directly another Star Trek reference in the form of T’Pol, notably played by Jolene Blalock – crystalline entities abound, the bridge crew get variably filled out and occasionally killed off, an android realises it’s a real boy, and there’s awkward upper/lower decks interaction in ten forward. It’s not a pastiche, at the very most a clearly pretty loving homage to the kind of stories Star Trek tells when it looks out rather than in. Those aren’t bad stories, and neither is Forges of Mars. You can settle into Voyager 40,000 and just vibe with the ride, seeing what’s out there while letting your brain skirl off the technobabble just as you do when Torres spouts it from Engineering.
Beyond the Limits of the Imperium
We’ve established that Warhammer 40K is a place, just like Star Trek, in which many stories can happen, and Forges of Mars takes that to a new frontier. As Kotov’s fleet literally journeys far beyond the boundaries of the Imperium, facing all sorts of new perils, unusual enemies and mind-bending threats, McNeill takes the 40k setting there too. Freed from the grinding horror machine of the Imperium, the Speranza transforms 40k into a very different place – gentler, brighter, more rational. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a horrible place where menials are sacrificed by the thousand, but it’s not quite the grimdark you see everywhere else. Everyone is kinder – legitimately everyone, even the Marines – there’s more humour out there, technology is more accessible and characters stray in and out of their places with relative ease. A brighter 40k is an interesting thing, and occasionally jars you right out of the narrative when you’re expecting Kotov to unleash the nerve gas or exterminatus, instead of forgiving and forgetting, but creates a unique vision of 40k in general and the Mechanicus in particular. There’s a really interesting place to explore there that begs the question “what if they weren’t almost completely clueless weirdoes who chant endlessly before hitting the button mystically marked Zero-N?” The Mechanicus who truly understand their technology are a very different beast, and wringing even more weirdness out of that by putting the noblebright Mechanicus out of their comfort zone with Telok’s madness is a great conceit.
I think it’s interesting that McNeill took this track at the same time as casting his crew far out beyond the boundaries of Imperial space. The plot gives the Speranza and all who sail in her more than enough room to go out and be weird, be (relatively) kind, to possess technology they by all rights shouldn’t, and still be bounded within the permissive realm of 40k fiction. Strangely enough, the brighter vibe takes us out of our comfort zone as readers – we know how the 40k universe works, but here it is with more tech, less warp nonsense (none, in fact) and more rationality. It’s shocking, to an extent, and creates a subtle wrongness to the whole series, one that only gets put right when you meet Telok and his creations who are far, far, more “40k”. You know from the off that everyone is journeying into horror – this is a black library book after all – and unease comes from seeing the hope die in Kotov’s eyes just as you knew it would. The abject megalomania, nonsense-tech-horror and bloody murders of book three see us on the brink of returning to the world of 40k, forming a path that handholds the weird and wonderful Speranza after two and a half books of Star-Trek zaniness back into the fold of miserable, world-ending, grimdark preposterousness.
I don’t think any of this is accidental, it feels too deliberate, McNeill setting out to write a different kind of 40k story with an altogether different feel – high, pure sci-fi, the kind of A E Van Vogt space adventure exemplified in Voyage of the Space Beagle – free of the shackles of particular planets, chapters or foes before smashing that apart and putting us back in our box. Even with the familiar (Black Templars, Biel-Tan, and Cadians) there are twists of character and plotting that give a different take on old favourites – veterans of GW’s output will be pleased to know there’s full on references to the old Cityfight Vogen campaign to the point where I checked White Dwarf to see who wrote that one – while giving us enough recognisable touch points that it’s all still verifiably 40k. By the very end, after it has all fallen apart and we are given an Animal House-style credit reel, we’re back in the old grimdarkness, comforting, familiar and skull-laden. While I think it’s fair to say it’s a swing and a miss, Forges of Mars feels different, but never too different. It’s very much 40k as seen through a particular lens, almost uniquely one that wasn’t crafted in Lenton, and – for all the faults of the series – I think that is a precious thing.
I’d usually end on a note that tells you whether or not I’d recommend reading Forges of Mars, but I’m not sure that’s wise because – in full honesty – I don’t know. Do you want something that tries and fails, or something that sticks the landing you saw coming from a mile off? The Black Library – hell, all libraries – are full of the latter. I think there’s worth, sometimes, in being the former.
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