Even people who enjoy Titanicus often complain that it feels a bit bloated, like a GRR Martin book. Some of the characters and plot threads could have easily been cut to tighten up the story and keep the word count down.

I get the feeling that some of these were intended as slice-of-life (or slice-of-war) vignettes that got out of control. If you spend too much time on 'making the world feel alive', you can make the reader think those sections are going somewhere rather than just fleshing things out.

For instance, at the start of the book we get a scene from the perspective of a PDF infantryman pinned down by a Chaos Warhound. Good scene. Very effective at conveying how nightmarish it is for infantry to face a Titan and how badly the odds are weighted against the unprepared 'good guys'. The POV character dies, so we obviously never get another scene with him--and that's fine, because it was meant as a one-off to establish the stakes, the scale of the threat, and so on. Works well. No complaints.

Later we get a scene with Zink, a retired, senile former Moderati in a garden. As a one-off, this is a neat bit of worldbuilding. But unlike the infantryman, it's not just a one-off. We return to him several times--and not just with a sentence or two, but with full-blown scenes of him watching the Titan propaganda on the public screens and so on. The trouble is, it doesn't go anywhere. Zink doesn't do anything, know anything or change in any way. There's a touching moment when he recognises the Titan on the screen--but that's pretty much it. Storywise, he's just decoration and could be cut.

There's also a toymaker. Again, neat worldbuilding (and amusingly meta in that he makes miniature Titans). Unlike the elderly Moderati, the toymaker gets something approximating a storyline. More about this below. But it doesn't affect the larger story of the war in any way. A one-and-done scene with him would have been enough, and the rest of his scenes could be cut.

Those are minor characters, though. What about Cally Samstag, the PDF trooper, who gets far more prominence in the novel? I quite liked her character and her story, taken by itself. The problem is that Titanicus is a crowded book, and Cally's story is too similar to the one about the tank guys. They cover much of the same thematic ground: what it's like for a bunch of ragtag survivors trying to stay alive, on foot, during a war between god-engines that could kill them with a stray shot.

And while the tank guys' plotline eventually ties into the main story in a big way--discovering and revealing the secret reserve force of Chaos Titans--Cally's story goes nowhere at all.

First, while there's a bit of bickering and banter among the surviving members of Cally's team, it doesn't really lead to any plot developments (as far as I remember). The interactions between Cally and the rest of the squad don't actually cause anything interesting to happen. Suppose one of them refused to let her lead, and resented it when the others followed Cally, and started white-anting her to the point of endangering all their lives (e.g. by deliberately withholding vital info or signalling the enemy).

That probably sounds cliched and melodramatic and predictable--and it is--but at least it would involve dramatic storytelling: people's feelings and agendas and choices, leading to consequences, which cause further feelings and choices, which lead to more consequences, and so on. Like billiard balls bouncing off each other.

The frustrating thing here is that Cally's storyline includes the seed of something that could have led to great drama: Every decision she makes seems sensible, but turns out to be wrong. For instance, she tries to stop the rich kid from calling for help and giving away their position--but the kid disobeys her, which leads to their salvation, because Invicta's troops manage to find them.

Ironic, yes... but no story emerges out of it. It has no payoff. There's no narrative consequence, like, say, the other team members becoming convinced she's useless or maybe even an enemy mole, and Cally becoming embittered and/or abandoned with tragic consequences because the universe keeps conspiring against her--in an ironic parallel to the tank guys, who are under the protection of some vague supernatural favour.

Instead we just get a description of Cally Samstag's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

OK, fine, if we're not going to get much dramatic narrative tension within the group, it must come from 'Cally's squad vs a hostile world'. And we do get a fair bit of that. But does it tie into the larger story? Not that I noticed.

At one point Cally's squad rescues a wounded Titan princeps. Great! I bet it's someone we've already met in the story. One of the Invicta or Tempestus characters, surely? ...No? Oh, well, maybe this princeps knows something important! Or he's the one extra leader we'll need for the final battle to pilot that spare Titan whose crew got slaughtered when the skitarri broke into the cockpit, thus turning the tide of battle at a critical moment! Or his unexpected survival will boost morale when all seems lost!

Er... nope. Invicta is just like 'ta, princepses are rare and precious, you'll probs get a medal, now go home.' And we never hear anything about the princeps again. His only point appears to be as a plot device to get Cally's squad rescued. (He's the reason Invicta's skitarii come looking for them.)

And even this is totally out of Cally's control. It's not as if she realises, 'hey, if we radio this in we'll give the big boys a reason to come save us!' Instead she tries to keep the princeps a secret, assuming (sensibly) that the enemy will want to kill him.

If the rich kid and/or others in the squad became convinced Cally was incompetent, and therefore decided to disobey her orders and broadcast their position, that at least would involve some kind of dramatic consequences. But no, the kid just does it like she's been saying she'll do for chapters. Nothing Cally says or does affects the outcome one way or another.

In other words, Cally's story ends not due to her choices and actions, but because the plot is arranged so that it ends. It's like the whole thing is just an exercise in 'This Is What It's Like To Be An Adobe Printable Format Trooper When God-Engines Fight'. Which would make for a nice one-off scene, but not an entire subplot taking up a huge chunk of the book.

I would have much preferred to either keep the tank guys and drop Cally, or combine the two storylines into one (so Cally's squad is the one to discover the secret jamming tower).

But wait! There's more! What about Cally's husband Stef? (Who by the way is one of the most amusingly useless and contemptible characters I've seen in a while, making me wonder what Cally ever saw in him.)

His day goes much worse than Cally's... but unfortunately he's got basically no redeeming features, so it's hard to feel much empathy for him. Right from the start he seems like a selfish, useless lunk. That's fine--he's just background detail, right? Yet instead of just forgetting about him, we keep coming back to follow his story. And instead of changing or growing, he just gets himself into worse and worse situations. Eventually he murders someone and gets himself shot in the inevitable Mega-City One fashion.

A decent man who becomes an awful one would be compelling. A gakhead who redeems himself would be equally interesting. But Stef's story just flatlines, literally. He starts out as 'ugh, what a waste of space' and continues to reach ever-greater quantities of 'ugh' until he's dead.

But hey, maybe that's OK, because his story isn't really about him; it's all a setup for gut-punching Cally at the end, right? Only... what does that gut-punching achieve, other than to underscore the fact that Cally's bad day was in fact not good?

One of Abnett's weaknesses is his tendency for sudden, pat endings. (I sometimes wonder if this is a comic-book writer's thing--continuing characters and story arcs mean things never really end, so you don't need to learn how to do them well.) But Titanicus is a much worse offender than usual because many of the storylines don't get endings at all.

Even though the way the Mechanicus schism plays out is cliched--right down to the climactic 'villains and protagonists face off in a one-on-one punch-up, but with combat tentacles because 40K'--I actually found it to be the best-told storyline in the book. A well-worn pulp story running on predictable rails, sure, but it's got a beginning, it's got complications, it's got twists and betrayals and revelations, it's got that gut-clenching feeling that things just keep getting worse and spiralling out of control, it's got a tense final showdown, it has ramifications for the wider war (though maybe not as much as I'd like), and it has a resolution. It's a bit annoying that the strongest storyline in the book is the one that isn't about Titans, but oh well.

The tank guys' storyline also does a decent job. It's more of a slow-burn mystery, it doesn't have much in the way of character drama, and it has the problem that the characters are only heading where the supernatural force (aka the author) wants them to go. But it's tense due to the constant danger the characters are in. It pays off in a reasonably satisfying way. It ties into the main story (by revealing the existence of the second Chaos force, thus preventing Invicta and Tempestus going to war). As a B-plot it's fine.

Then there's everything else. As the Orks would say: wot a lot of mukkin' about.

Various minor characters, such as Lau the skitarii and Orfuls the Warhound princeps, are 'ambiguously dead' at the end. Why is Abnett so reluctant to confirm what happened to them? Because he's saving them up for a sequel, I guess. (Comic-book writing again?) It's frustrating, but they're not all that important narratively speaking.

More annoying are the characters with actual plotlines that just peter out at the end.

The toymaker gets about two thirds of a storyline. He's in the doldrums at first, then sees a change in his fortunes thanks to the war. Unfortunately he then gets caught up in the riots caused by the Mechanicus schism spilling over. What happened to him? We don't know. Ooh, how ambiguous! But it makes spending all that time on him earlier pointless. Too much for worldbuilding, not enough to resolve the narrative.


Cally gets a final kicker to her terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day: She gets home and finds out Stef's dead. Well, thanks for kicking her when she's down, Abnett. Themewise it's vaguely effective--Cally's (possibly) a hero, but her life is ruined and she's miserable! Irony! But spending all that time on her storyline, achieving nothing much in the way of character drama or contributing to the larger plot, just to make a point like that is... a lot of words that could have been better spent elsewhere. (We also didn't need to waste time on multiple Stef scenes throughout the book to get that effect, since he's so unlikeable and unempathetic; she could have just come home and found out the news.)


The Invicta guy (Tarses) who has to cope with an arrogant young inexperienced princeps (Prinzhorn) is a great setup and features plenty of compelling character drama. I loved every scene with him. But... what happens to him at the end? That whole conflict seems to get dropped. I can't even remember if they feature in the final battle, or whether they struggle to work together during it. Do they reach some kind of accommodation? Does he regret it when the Tempestus princeps says his goodbyes at the end? Do they even survive the final battle? Again, we get two-thirds of a story, but no conclusion.

(My criticism here may be unfounded; I just can't remember what happened, but that in itself suggests a poor resolution. I also can't remember if Prinzhorn ever found out that Tarses murdered a magos. Could have made for some solid drama if he did--enough to derail the tentative rapport they were building. Especially if he found out right in the middle of the final battle...)


The guy whose Tempestus Titan is invaded by skitarii and its crew killed? The sequence seems important at first, since we spend quite a bit of time on the Titan's faltering efforts to make it home. As he loses consciousness, there's a hint that something significant is happening (flashes of binaric that he can't quite make out, etc). And he doesn't die; he ends up in a coma. Aha! A plot thread that will no doubt continue when he awakens and remembers something important! Um... except he's never mentioned again.

Well, OK, maybe the enemy seize control of the Titan and play dead until it's salvaged, at which point they power up in the hangar and destroy everything, thus raising the stakes further? Nope.

In the context of the larger story, this whole thing barely matters. All we get are a few comments about using the Titan's heroic last stand as propaganda for the masses.

The book is full of these disconnected scenes and threads that fail to mesh. Again, they're quite possibly intended as quick vignettes to make the world feel solid... but Abnett ends up spending so much time on them that you think they must have a point in the greater narrative. What if the slaughtered-crew plot thread had been combined with the Tarses/Prinzhorn story in some way, so that it's their Titan struggling to make it home? Or what if the princeps Cally's squad rescued was from this very Titan?


How about the great and powerful Gearhart? He spends chapter after chapter worrying that he's losing it. He's old. He's fading. His grip on the present day is weakening. It won't be long before he merges with his Titan. This will probably be his final battle. At least he can go out fighting.

Everything about his storyline indicates that he's going to a) make some noble final sacrifice or b) suffer the fate he fears and be ignominiously removed from command afterward. Both predictable fates, but satisfying.

And then... neither happens. Gearhart survives. He stays in command. He doesn't end up a senile old wreck. Off he goes with Invicta to the next war.

Well, that was pointless.

Imagine how much more effective a sacrifice by Gearhart would have been. For instance, in the final battle as written, a Chaos Imperator (!) appears out of nowhere. Loyalist Titans are getting toasted left and right. They only take it down when one random princeps, who's barely been mentioned in the story up to now, takes direct mental command of a whole Games Day Display's worth of Titans to coordinate their attack on the Imperator.

That's a whole lot of fuss and bother involving:
- a sudden dire enemy threat we had no idea about (see surprise vs suspense in #3)
- a bit-part character who has been irrelevant until now, and about whom we don't care
- a tactic we had no idea was possible until now (oh, we can mentally control whole maniples now? Who knew?), but which is clearly described as a dangerous strain on the princeps who tries it.

What if Gearhart had been the one to take control? We care about him; we've followed him through the book, including his stand against the Reavers on the Titan's Steps. He's clearly the oldest and most experienced princeps. If anyone could pull off a crazy trick like that, it's him. It would be an excellent example of a character's feelings and thoughts and wishes leading to action and consequences, i.e. drama. And it would give him the heroic end that his story has been building toward: the strain of linking to all those Titans kills him. The whole thing seems like the perfect send-off. It drives me mad that he doesn't get it. Mad, I tell you! *insert gif of John Cleese with a fork*


Now you may be tempted to point out that some of the above decisions could be in the name of realism. For instance, having Gearhart coordinate the maniples against the Imperator is unrealistic. He's commanding the entire battle; of course he'd delegate giant-killing duty someone else. Similarly, expecting the skitarii-slaughtered Tempestus Titan to matter in the greater scheme of things is also unrealistic. It's just another incident in the war. Same with wanting Cally's storyline to go somewhere other than 'wandering around at the mercy of fate'. Sometimes life is like that.

But real life isn't like a story. And it's possible to try so hard to be 'realistic', and to show what life in the 41st millennium is like, that your story becomes unsatisfying and time-wasting.

The hidden enemy Titans don't provide much tension for most of the book, because neither the characters nor the reader know they're out there. We suspect something's up, but don't know exactly what... which means that our interest is held awaiting the resolution of a mystery, rather than worrying about how the characters will beat the odds.

Mystery tends to be a weaker hook and line with which to bait your reader than empathy and suspense. The trouble is that people often default to thinking 'suspense' means not knowing what's going on. And yes, that is interesting... but often it's far more interesting to know what's going on--so you're worried as heck about it.

It's like that old Hitchcock example of a bomb under a table. If neither you nor the characters know the bomb is there, watching them sit around the table playing cards is kinda boring. You're just like, "I guess this is going somewhere. I wonder where?" When the bomb finally explodes, it's a shock and a surprise. Now you're hooked! But until then, the story seemed meh.

On the other hand, if you know the bomb is there, and the characters don't, then right from the start you're on the edge of your seat screaming "SOMEBODY LOOK UNDER THE TABLE! FIVE MINUTES LEFT!"

Example: The Fellowship of the Ring movie kicks off with this long prologue all about the history of the world and the Ring. It annoyed me when I first watched it, because having great big prologues was a cliche in 80s fantasy novels imitating Tolkien, and a lot of them were unnecessary. Why couldn't we just learn about the Ring as Frodo and Gandalf learn about it? Why do we have to wait twenty minutes for them to figure out what we already know?

Then I tried watching FotR without the prologue. And it wrecks the first twenty minutes of the movie. Without that overhanging sense of doom--without knowing at the back of your mind that this evil trinket is right here in the homely bucolic Shire, and all this cheerful rustic peace is living on borrowed time, and there's Serious Business about to go down--the first part of FotR seems twee and ridiculous. There's no suspense.

In this case I'm being unfair to Titanicus because some characters (the tank guys) do slowly figure out that something weird is going on, and try to find out what it is. That's at least a decent mystery plot, which kept me reading to find out the answer.

However... if we, the readers, knew about the enemy force long before the characters did--for instance, if we had a couple of scenes with a Chaos commander or princeps gloating as they oversaw the secret deployment of the reserve force--we'd be on edge the whole time, knowing the situation was much more serious than Invicta assumed.

True, the mystery of one sub-plot would be spoiled. But the tension of the overarching story would ratchet way up for the entirety of the book as we waited for the other shoe to drop. Invicta could be all like "We've got this in the bag, fellas," and we'd be mentally shouting "No, you idiots, there's twice as many spiky Titans as you think, you've totally misjudged the situation, you're overconfident and complacent and aaargh the suspense is killing me!"

Now, to be fair, the real narrative point of the secret Chaos force is to give Tempestus and Invicta a reason to back down instead of shooting at each other at the height of the Mechanicus schism. (Which makes me suspect that the Mechanicus storyline is the central one, and all the Titan stuff is just backdrop--see below.) But we could still know about it much earlier, even if the characters don't.

The biggest overarching story problem--assuming this is meant to be a story about Titans fighting Titans--is this: Legio Invicta shouldn't have turned up until the end.

Huh? you say. The whole book is about Invicta.

Well, no. Not really. It's about Titans fighting, and Mechanicus politics, and ordinary people who get caught up in both. There's nothing particularly special about Invicta per se. Certainly much less so than the wackier Legios you find in the Heresy days, such as Solaria.

Most of the Invictus characters, such as Gearhart, could have been Tempestus characters instead. A few political details would need tweaking, but it wouldn't change too much. Subplots such as the arrogant young inexperienced Princeps taking command of an old, ornery Titan and crew could still have worked, even if he came from the same Legio. And so on.

Why should this matter?

The book kicks off with Legio Tempestus in dire straits, hopelessly outmatched by the invading Chaos Titans. That's a great hook for the reader. The first few sections effectively convey a) how terrifying Titans are against infantry, b) how terrifying Titans are against tanks, and c) how terrifying Chaos Titans are against Tempestus Titans when the latter are outnumbered and briefed with bad intelligence. The sheer panic and terror of those first few sections are burned into my brain.

This forge world is in deep trouble. How the heck will they get out of this?

Then Invicta shows up, says 'no worries folks, we'll handle this', and proceeds to do just that.

Suddenly we go from a desperate situation that will surely demand incredible heroism and sacrifice with little hope of victory... to a slugging match between two roughly equal forces (narratively speaking), featuring competent and confident leaders, in which victory seems likely as long as nobody screws up.

Result: the extreme tension of the first few chapters drains away and the book becomes a mildly interesting account of Titan skirmishes. Each individual battle is thrilling, in typical Abnett fashion, but there's little sense of how they figure into the overall war effort. It's just 'famous battles of World War II' instead of 'holy gak, Hitler's invaded Poland, how the heck will we stop him?'

Imagine how much more gripping the story would have been if Tempestus had to fight on alone, holding out for as long as possible against overwhelming odds, until Invicta finally shows up in the last chapter and saves the day. All the Invicta characters could have been Tempestus characters. You'd lose a little inter-Legio bickering but gain a bulk lander's load of dramatic tension. (I'm thinking of a comparison to the Gaunt's Ghosts novel Necropolis here.)

That early bit when Varco's tanks are destroyed because the Mechanicus got intel wrong and a Warlord died? Serious losses, since Invicta's not about to show up and take the pressure off. (And how come we never followed up on that thread or that adept?) The Titan that dies trying to make it home? A disaster for the war effort. Cally finding a wounded princeps? A stroke of luck in their darkest hour, since Tempestus are so few. Tarses and Prinzhorn trying to work together? The risk of installing this young upstart gets turned up to eleven because there are so few Tempestus Titans left and they can't afford to screw it up. And so on.

As a bonus, Tempestus and Invicta will no longer face off against each other at the end, because they're not on the same planet yet. Which means you don't need the secret second Chaos force to show up and give them a reason to fight together. Which means you don't need Varco's tank-survivor plotline at all. Result: a much leaner, tighter book.

However, there's one obvious rejoinder to the above: I'm reviewing the book I wish Abnett had written, rather than the book he actually wrote. Titanicus may not in fact be about the Titan war at all. Which brings me to...

Some of my criticisms (especially the suggestion that Invicta should have shown up at the end) assume that the Titan vs Chaos Titan war is the heart of the book. But... is it?

Although some (e.g. Lord Damocles) feel that the Admech story is tacked on, I harbour dark and nasty suspicions that it's the other way around. It may well be that Titanicus is built around the Admech drama, and the giant robot war against Chaos is just backdrop.

Even if that wasn't the original intention, the Admech storyline may have grown out of control until it took over the rest of the book.

In that case, we do need two Legios present at the same time, so they can square off against each other at the end. The rest of the story needs to take a certain shape to accommodate that. That's why the Chaos plan is irrelevant, the secondary force needs to show up to resolve the stand-off, Varco's tank survivors need to find out about the secondary force, and the various Titan-combat bits feel disjointed and scattershot.

If so, it's a bit of a bait-and-switch on the part of BL marketing. I bought it for hot god-engine on god-engine action, not cyberpunk internecine strife.

As published, Titanicus feels as if it can't decide whether it wants to tell a Mechanicus story or a Titan-war story, and haphazardly tries to do both with mixed results. This may be why the book as a whole didn't work for me: its various components are working at cross-purposes. Narrative decisions that would make for a better Titan-war story, like having Tempestus fight alone and outnumbered, would hobble the Mechanicus story and vice versa.

Still, like I said, it was decent enough to read until the end. More than I can say for many other books.

Regarding the ending, it seemed like the Arch-Enemy had spent its heaviest machines at Argentum, and what was left was a mobile reserve of ligher-weight stuff that's not supposed to see open battle against battlefield supremacy machines like the Warlord-heavy Invicta and Tempestus.