Fire Warrior

Rating:
Summary: Substance below the relentless action
Review: Fire Warrior by Simon Spurrier is a novelization of a first-person shooter computer game recently published by Games Workshop.

I want to say up front that I refuse to give any book a 5-star rating. I don't believe that any book, no matter how well it's written and/or who wrote it, is perfect. But Fire Warrior is a VERY strong 4-star read.

I consider myself relatively well read in Games Workshop (or Black Library) fiction, and while I've found several warhammer novels in the past to be good reads, I consider Fire Warrior to be a singularly unique offering in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K universe.

The main character of the novel is a young Fire Warrior named Kais. Kais is a Tau - one of the newest races introduced in the 40K universe. The fact that the primary character of the novel is an alien (or a "xenogen" as the Imperium of man would say), gives the book such a fresh feel that it's a wonder why Black Library and GW waited so long to actually portrait a non-human race in such a fashion. Certainly, other 40k novels have introduced alien (or non-human, therefore "chaos-tainted") characters, but never in the manner that Fire Warrior portrays them... at least as far as my reading of BL fiction goes. Most mainline characters in 40K fiction are human, members of the Imperium (Imperial guardsman or super-human Space Marines), and as such their "perspective" (even if intelligent and considerate) is inherently fraught with "insiderism" weakness. A human being of the Imperium simply cannot, in my view, look upon the Imperium with as fresh a perspective as a Tau "outsider".

And so what we have here in this novel is a brand new look at the Imperium, and through the eyes of our sleek Tau fire warrior, we see a gangly, uncontrollable, smelly, oozing race of cybernetic augmetics, once-human servo robots fluttering about on scripted I/O tasks, uber-human Space Marines whose supped-up bodies defy logic, and weird tech-priests who wield auguristic powers that would make any Greek mystic blush. In short, through the eyes of Kais, we see that the human race is threatening to become the very thing that it rails against: Xenogen. With every awkward, brutish lunge into space, humanity is losing its "humanity". Which begs the question of when will the Imperium be rocked by a serious Luddite movement. I tell you, it needs one, or we may wake up one day to find the distance between Order (the Imperium) and Chaos (the heretical followers of Horus) so small as to be indistinguishable.

Spurrier all but suggests the very same thing through the inner-mumblings of Kais. During one scene in the novel, as Kais is running for his life, he sees both human and tau body parts strewn along the way, mingling in ghastly flesh heaps, and he wonders...

"Here a tau arm lay, knuckles clenched, beside a de-limbed human corpse. There was a symbolism here, perhaps. A sense of unity, a sense of physical sameness. Given a talented enough por'hui journalist, this scene might mean something. 'In death, we're all the same'..."

This simple passage basically sums up the novel for me. Not only in death are tau and humans the same, reduced to simple chucks of meat, but I argue that they are the same in life as well. Humans, tau, eldar, and even the savage green-skinned orks are, in essence, all the same: "humanoid" races adrift in a sea of stars trying desperately to carve out a slice of the cosmic pie. Who is right and who is wrong? In desperate combat, humans and tau speak past each other, neither side willing to fully understand and appreciate the other, and all the while an even more dangerous threat lurks just beyond their comprehension, an evil that threatens to "force" them to work together to ensure their mutual survival. These things and many more thought-provoking tidbits await you in this novel... if you only care to peel back the layers of relentless action and look.

Character development is very good as well. Kais is not just a killing machine, plowing his way through the enemy with first-person shooter precision (side note: This is a novelization of an action game, don't forget, so some suspension of disbelief must be made to accept battle scenes that defy realism). He's a flawed being, a young, untested fire warrior who constantly questions his abilities. And as he becomes a better fighter, he fears that he's losing his soul, so to speak, becoming what the tau call Mont'au, a unstoppable killing force that may consume him. Other characters, both tau and human, are introduced throughout the book, some whose purpose is nothing more than to be introduced on one page, and then be blown to paste on the next. Yet, even with these "minor" characters, Spurrier offers up enough meat on the bones to make you care (at least for a second) about what happens to them.

If there is one criticism I could level against the book is that from time to time, the prose flirts dangerously close to turning purple. Spurrier tends to over-describe the setting from time to time, and I admit getting a little annoyed by the excessive use of the word "blood". But these problems didn't keep me from reading and enjoying the book, and it shouldn't keep you from doing so either. As a media tie-in novel, it succeeds on many levels.

Rating:
Summary: Friggin' awsome
Review: I baught this book because I was waiting for the game to come out, I loved it It is one of the few "inspired by" books that contains an excellent plot and very good writing. I finished it in a day, so I gave it to a friend who also loved it.

Rating:
Summary: A great addition to the Warhammer 40,000 universe
Review: I thought this book was great, simple as. Theres plenty of character building, even with some of the minor characters. AS you read the book, the perspective changes from young Kais, a Tau Fire Warrior, to the minor characters I mentioned, describing some of the awesome battles from various perspectives.

If I had to name one fault with this book, it is that I felt a little let down with the ending, but that beside... an overall great read - a worthy addition to any Warhammer 40,000 collection, well, any book collection.

Rating:
Summary: A great addition to the Warhammer 40,000 universe
Review: If you are rabid 40K enthusiast, you may be tempted to give this review a negative rating simply because I gave the book 2 stars. Well, please hear me out. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is one of my favorite settings. I have been playing the game for nearly 10 years. And over those years there have been many high-quality novels written for this universe.

This, however, is not one of them. Let me be blunt: as much as I like 40K, I know excrement when I see it.

I went into this novel accepting the fact that it would be a fairly faithful translation of the video game. In that aspect, it definitely succeeds- although I wouldn't necessarily call that a good thing, as I'll explain.

The plot, such it is, follows a young Fire Warrior named Kais as he carves a bloody swathe across the border between Tau and Imperial space. Despite a standing peace treaty the Imperium has become increasingly aggressive in military actions into Tau space, which results in the capture of an Ethereal by the governor of Dolumar IV. This forces the Tau Empire to take action. Of course, as the Imperium and the Tau engage in full-blown combat all of the resulting bloodshed is merely the backdrop for a much more sinister plot that threatens both sides.

Kais' main traits are his unresolved issues with his father, and his increasingly callous thirst for combat. I wish I could say that there was more to his personality but there really isn't.

There are a few other characters, but all of them suffer from a similar lack of development, even the Imperial governor who serves as Kais' primary enemy. He's simply the Bad Guy. There is also the Gruff Veteran, the Calm and Collected Ethereal, and to top things off we have the Reluctant Ally in the form of Ultramarines Captain Ardias. But surely, you ask, there must be more to these characters!

No, no there isn't.

Now let's get on to the writing. The authors employ two main techniques. The first is to spend a few pages introducing a minor character, only to have him killed off at the end of that very same introduction. The second technique is to show an event happening at one location, and then turn back the clock to describe something that Kais had already done somewhere else (the effect is quite distracting, not unlike a clumsily pressed rewind button). The authors then repeat these techniques again, and again, and again until by the end of the novel it becomes completely predictable. Spurrier and Gascoigne seem to have chosen these techniques primarily to increase the page count and nothing more.

Interspersed throughout all of this are the obligatory and inconsequential flashback sequences. The bulk of the novel, however, depicts scenes of combat, most of which is actually fairly well done. The combat is sometimes contrived, however, particularly at times when Kais faces Space Marines who seem to have been trained to be incompetent (such as the Marine who caught a live grenade that was thrown at him, then took a few moments to stare at it before it blew off his arm).

I would have to say that the single bright spot is the insight the novel provides into Tau culture and into the relationship between the Tau and the Imperium. These few passages are quite interesting, but unfortunately cannot make up for the book's other flaws.

Overall the novel clearly fails to deliver. I would still have given it a higher rating, however, if there had been at least some attempt at character development. There is none. As I noted earlier, Kais is completely blank and uninteresting as far as personality is concerned. By the time the final showdown takes place, I honestly didn't care one way or the other whether Kais emerged victorious. The novel's main, telling flaw isn't that it is based off a video game, it's that it READS like a video game. This is unacceptable.

If you don't mind having your intelligence insulted, then you'll probably enjoy this novel. Discerning readers of 40K fiction, however, will almost surely be greatly disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed
Review: If you are rabid 40K enthusiast, you may be tempted to give this review a negative rating simply because I gave the book 2 stars. Well, please hear me out. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is one of my favorite settings. I have been playing the game for nearly 10 years. And over those years there have been many high-quality novels written for this universe.

This, however, is not one of them. Let me be blunt: as much as I like 40K, I know excrement when I see it.

I went into this novel accepting the fact that it would be a fairly faithful translation of the video game. In that aspect, it definitely succeeds- although I wouldn't necessarily call that a good thing, as I'll explain.

The plot, such it is, follows a young Fire Warrior named Kais as he carves a bloody swathe across the border between Tau and Imperial space. Despite a standing peace treaty the Imperium has become increasingly aggressive in military actions into Tau space, which results in the capture of an Ethereal by the governor of Dolumar IV. This forces the Tau Empire to take action. Of course, as the Imperium and the Tau engage in full-blown combat all of the resulting bloodshed is merely the backdrop for a much more sinister plot that threatens both sides.

Kais' main traits are his unresolved issues with his father, and his increasingly callous thirst for combat. I wish I could say that there was more to his personality but there really isn't.

There are a few other characters, but all of them suffer from a similar lack of development, even the Imperial governor who serves as Kais' primary enemy. He's simply the Bad Guy. There is also the Gruff Veteran, the Calm and Collected Ethereal, and to top things off we have the Reluctant Ally in the form of Ultramarines Captain Ardias. But surely, you ask, there must be more to these characters!

No, no there isn't.

Now let's get on to the writing. The authors employ two main techniques. The first is to spend a few pages introducing a minor character, only to have him killed off at the end of that very same introduction. The second technique is to show an event happening at one location, and then turn back the clock to describe something that Kais had already done somewhere else (the effect is quite distracting, not unlike a clumsily pressed rewind button). The authors then repeat these techniques again, and again, and again until by the end of the novel it becomes completely predictable. Spurrier and Gascoigne seem to have chosen these techniques primarily to increase the page count and nothing more.

Interspersed throughout all of this are the obligatory and inconsequential flashback sequences. The bulk of the novel, however, depicts scenes of combat, most of which is actually fairly well done. The combat is sometimes contrived, however, particularly at times when Kais faces Space Marines who seem to have been trained to be incompetent (such as the Marine who caught a live grenade that was thrown at him, then took a few moments to stare at it before it blew off his arm).

I would have to say that the single bright spot is the insight the novel provides into Tau culture and into the relationship between the Tau and the Imperium. These few passages are quite interesting, but unfortunately cannot make up for the book's other flaws.

Overall the novel clearly fails to deliver. I would still have given it a higher rating, however, if there had been at least some attempt at character development. There is none. As I noted earlier, Kais is completely blank and uninteresting as far as personality is concerned. By the time the final showdown takes place, I honestly didn't care one way or the other whether Kais emerged victorious. The novel's main, telling flaw isn't that it is based off a video game, it's that it READS like a video game. This is unacceptable.

If you don't mind having your intelligence insulted, then you'll probably enjoy this novel. Discerning readers of 40K fiction, however, will almost surely be greatly disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Don't play the video game, read the book!
Review: In the far future, there is only war, and for a young Tau fire Warrior, Kais, war along with other things, will consume his soul. Battling humans, space marines, chaos and himself, the young fire warrior must defeat every obstacle that is set in front of him. Can he do it?

Being a fan of 40k and just about to start an Tau army, I was really excited about reading fire warrior. I don't play video games and could care less about video games, in fact I didn't know this was a video game until I look in the back of the book where they had the advertisment for it. But, fire warrior definitly, filled my expectation. The book starts off extremely well, and like many other black library books, it doesn't take long for the author to throw you into the action. These action sequences are done very well throughout the book, but it's not only action which kept me reading. The character, Kais, is a wonderful character, and the turmoil going on within him was done very well. I really enjoyed reading about him and his development throughout the book.

Fire Warrior is a wonderful book, but it does have it's flaws. I felt the book could have been at least 50 pages shorter. Usaully, with black library books it's vice versa, but there was lots of pointless characters introduced, then a page later they would be killed off. The first couple of times the author did this it was pretty cool, but by millionth time you knew what was going to happen and the excitement of it was gone.

If you enjoy the 40k world or really like the video game check this book out, I don't think you will be disapointed.

Rating:
Summary: Don't play the video game, read the book!
Review: In the far future, there is only war, and for a young Tau fire Warrior, Kais, war along with other things, will consume his soul. Battling humans, space marines, chaos and himself, the young fire warrior must defeat every obstacle that is set in front of him. Can he do it?

Being a fan of 40k and just about to start an Tau army, I was really excited about reading fire warrior. I don't play video games and could care less about video games, in fact I didn't know this was a video game until I look in the back of the book where they had the advertisment for it. But, fire warrior definitly, filled my expectation. The book starts off extremely well, and like many other black library books, it doesn't take long for the author to throw you into the action. These action sequences are done very well throughout the book, but it's not only action which kept me reading. The character, Kais, is a wonderful character, and the turmoil going on within him was done very well. I really enjoyed reading about him and his development throughout the book.

Fire Warrior is a wonderful book, but it does have it's flaws. I felt the book could have been at least 50 pages shorter. Usaully, with black library books it's vice versa, but there was lots of pointless characters introduced, then a page later they would be killed off. The first couple of times the author did this it was pretty cool, but by millionth time you knew what was going to happen and the excitement of it was gone.

If you enjoy the 40k world or really like the video game check this book out, I don't think you will be disapointed.