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Galaxy in Flames

This post contains spoilers for Galaxy in Flames, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) October 10th, 2006.

I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to say about this one. This book is the story of how Horus took the major part of the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters Legions to the Istvaan system on false pretenses of putting down another rebellion, and on the planet Istvaan III deployed those portions of them he judged most likely to object to his rebellion against the Emperor in a spearhead strike against the planetary capital, then bombarded the planet from orbit in an attempt to kill all the potential loyalists in a first strike. Saul Tarvitz, an Emperor's Children marine from Horus Rising, does some investigation behind the scenes, figures out the plot, then flees to the planet's surface in time to warn the spearhead, who take shelter underground, allowing many of them to survive the bombardment (virus bombs that otherwise kill all life on the planet, including its six or so billion civillian inhabitants). What follows is then three months of fighting on the surface in the ruins of the planetary capital, with the loyalists in slow retreat, getting whittled down to buy time in the hope that word has gotten out of Horus's treachery and a relief force will be sent to rescue them. No relief force arrives, but their slow defeat does tangle up the traitor forces in time for word of Horus's treachery to make it back to the Imperium. Loken and Torgaddon, the loyalist half of Horus's advisory Mournival council, fight Abaddon and Aximand, the traitor half; Abaddon and Aximand both live, Torgaddon dies, and Loken's fate is left unclear (spoilers he survives and is a character in later books).

It ends like this:

In the meantime, three embedded civilian observers who've been secondary characters in the last two books escape from Horus's flagship the Vengful Spirit to the Eisenstein, the one ship in the fleet held secretly by loyalists, which escapes and will be the subject of the next book. One of them, Euphrati Keeler, is now preaching the Emperor's divinity, manifesting miracles, and being called a saint.

It's essentially an extended action story with a jailbreak B-plot. It makes some odd pacing decisions, basically skipping from the bombardment to the last few day of the siege; I feel like it could have wrung more drama from making the situation more grinding and desperate... but then I'm just describing Helsreach, which is not surprising because Helsreach did this better.

All but one of the traitors have ridden a slip-and-slide down into Saturday morning cartoon villainy in this book; they're now all sneering monsters, constantly internal monologuing their own sense of superiority and expressing petty contempt for everyone around them, including amongst each other. Horus imperiously tells people who were his trusted allies, friends, and close confidants in Horus Rising how cool he is and how they'd better not fail him; those former close confidants and trusted allies just accept that he's right to do that and then treat their former friends and subordinates the same way. It's not even that they feel out of character; they don't really have characters. The exceptions are Lucius, who's like that but more so, because he's one of the series' designated ultra-assholes like Erebus, and Aximand, who kills Torgaddon and feels bad about it. I assume that'll come up later.

Look, it's fine. It does the job it sets out to do. It doesn't fail in any interesting or infuriating ways like False Gods did; the ending is reasonably affecting if you like Saul Tarvitz. It successfully novelizes some lore that was around for decades and moves the events of the series forward. This is one of the most important events in the Heresy and we'll be re-visiting it a lot in future material; I hear some of that future material treats it better than this did.

Euphrati Keeler's role is weird. You would think the book would be interested in playing with tone when it comes to the death of the atheistic Imperial Truth and the birth of the Imperial cult, but like the death of all native life on Istvaan III and the betrayal and murder of the loyalists by their traitor brothers, it's all presented in a very matter-of-fact manner.

What I mean when I do not control the hyperfixation.

Made me a new stompy friend, adorned with old Terran "Edge Ward" designs to protect from daemons and in-laws. Lot of fun putting this one together, and as with the one I did a few months back I cannot undersell how delighted I am that nailart transfers are literally the same stuff as your usual wargaming transfer sheets.

Disney: ok you can use mickey mouse, but- Nomura: Michael is now a Flawed Warrior King with a reckless past who is not exactly forthcoming wrt to the truth. He makes critical mistakes like leaving people behind in the realm of darkness but also takes the nearest troubled teenagers under his wing at every possible opportunity. He is always trying to make up for how he’s erred but despite keeping a fairly level head is sometimes consumed with thoughts of vengeance when his friends are threatened. Also he says it’s not only okay to be gay but that the capacity for such strong love is the source of your power–

Round my way, getting off the bus you thank the driver. "Cheers, Drive". It's such a cultural keystone that when they built a new bus station in the town center, there was a petition to name the street it was on "Cheers Drive".

If you take the bus, wave to the driver and thank them as you're getting off the bus.

Being a bus driver is an underappreciated and difficult job but still very vital to society. They still have to do customer service and deal with rude and even aggressive passengers, and on top of that have to deal with traffic and other drivers all day (and let's face it, there's a lot of bad drivers out there who aren't considerate about sharing the road). All while providing an invaluable service of getting us where we need to go. Showing them some appreciation can go a long ways for someone doing such an important job that usually gets little to no recognition or thanks.

narnia has actually way too many completely devastating concepts in it that are not explored At All

Insurance on low-probability-large-payout events can be very odd, but often makes sense purely at scale. Not surprised there are specialists, dabblers would be taking massive risks - ironically, insurance companies aren't supposed to take risks. You really want to roll so many dice you can guarantee a certain number of natural-1s. Otherwise you can't plan, you can't hedge, you're just letting someone else gamble with all of your client's fees.

As far as I can tell there's never been a wacky caper movie about committing hole in one insurance fraud, and that honestly surprises me a little.

just finished reading the latest manga chapter and now im sobbing over all the spotlight yui is getting in ur

I was looking at the math for one band (KOVEN, they're great, check them out) I like so much Youtube thinks I'm in the their top 0.1% of all listeners. If I listened to them on repeat for basically an entire summer - 8 songs an hour, 8 hours a day, for 90 days - the world's loudest Introvert-Extrovert tag team would have earned $1.15 from me. (Websearches gave me a 0.0002/stream rate currently). That's obviously an over-estimate, even in brain-rewiring obsessions I listen to other stuff occasionally - but you see the point, right? Life-altering levels of love of their music, and I wouldn't even have gotten Katie and Max a cup of coffee each. Buying one of their EPs probably got twice that to them, immediately. You can see why Katie's always on the road doing DJ stuff - that pays actual money.

one of the more bleak things to acknowledge is that if you pirate literally all of your music and then set aside a spotify subscription's worth of money each month to spend on a single pay-what-you-want album, it would almost immediately amount to you supporting those musicians more than streaming does

Considering SAO's reputation (mostly due to its shitty adaptations), it's really funny to see a part where Kirito and Asuna just turn to the camera and say "stop treating women as property and start treating them as people."