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I'm about halfway through and it's been decent. Heckva lot better than iron Snakes. but a lot of people named it as the worst fluff book of 2008.

Why?

My gripe is that it's not a Horus Heresy book. You could take that situation, put it in the 41st Millennium and have essentially the same story. Every book in the Horus Heresy series added to the mystique and fit in the 30k universe and this one didn't. Even Descent of Angels, which a lot of people disliked, added to the 30k universe.

That's why I was disappointed.

Ozymandias, King of Kings

If you haven't read 'Dark Apostle', read it.
Then compare the depictions in it to the mustache-twirling idiotic inept tools in 'Battle for the Abyss' that are laughably call Word Bearers.
Cobra Commander could have pulled off that act of villainy better.

I found the characters to be two dimensional to a degree that would be best explained through geometric equations.
Hell, even the World Eaters. Especially if compared to the dialogues in 'Galaxy in Flames'.

belphagor has a good point there.
i hate to see the villains portrayed as senseless idiots all the time. especially during the heresy, evil was at its best ... battle for the abyss is another one of those "sm kill team saves the day" books, which im just not a fan of.

the other books in the series were far better and not as predictable.

The only character in the whole book that was remotely interesting was the Thousand Sons character. Everyone else was the epitome of a stereotype of the role they were supposed to be playing - there are no distinctions. I can't even remember a single character's name.

Also: no remembrancers, and no humans other than the Imperial Navy. The regular humans are, IMO, what made the first number of books the most enjoyable.

Lastly, you could have written that book with the Word Bearers as renegade eighth founding chapter X. Not much would have changed.

Someone forgot to tell the 40K writer to kick it back a few years, make the characters interesting and include the human perspective.

Just to jump on the bandwagon of hatred, I found Abyss completely uninspiring. I think part of the reason, beyond the lacklustre characters and plot that goes nowhere, is the fact that we were all expecting this book to be the battle for Calth.

Also, it made the Word Bearers out to be a bunch of slowed Redshirts.

Yeah, instead of an illuminating look at the M30, it's just ANOTHER Ben Counter Super-Spazz-Marienz-Saves-The-Day 'action' 'novel'...

Just not anywhere up to standard, especially after Legion. Doesn't expand the Horus Heresy plotline in any meaningful way, either. It might as well have been another M40 novel.

In my opinion, the single most crap-tastic issue with the book was the way the forces were so inbalanced it was a joke.

The Word Bearers are a Space Marine Chapter, trained and outfitted with all the tools that come with the title. They have one added "advantage" they have turned their backs on the Emp, and any notion of brotherhood and honour....so these guys are gonna fight dirty, and do things that would turn any normal Marine white.

To add insult to injury, you have a battleship with a 1000 of these bad mothers cutting its way towards to Calph (or where-ever).....now given these stats, how in the name of all things fluff, is a handful of Marines from the Space Wolves, Ultramarines, World Eaters and a single Thousand Son gonna stand a chance against such a force?

Thats what made the book crap....the writer watered down the "Bad guys" so that he could write an uninspired win for the "Good guys", he did this so that he didn't have to work on character generation or intricate well thought out plot twists and strategy.....

That was my major gripe with the story, all those word bearer marines and they weren't able to put up any kind of defence against a much smaller group of marines. The book even mentions that the word bearers are pure marines in that they live in space and specialise in ship combat.

One thing the book did do though was show that the legions had small groups of marines scattered across the Imperium. This is useful for those who wish to introduce loyalist Death Guard, Lunar Wolves etc into their own chapter's fluff.

Probably because it's not a Horus Heresy story. It's Cliche Marine Story #44-B and just shoe-horned into the Horus Heresy. It adds nothing to the overall story, like Decent of Angels but unlike Eisenstein.

BYE

Yeah, the plot sucked. There were quite a few nice little touches here and there. I particularly liked when the World Eater character was meditating upon the differences between his Legion and that of the Ultramarines. Wait. I think I actually wrote a whole review of this on the B&C. Let me check. Here:

Welcome to the second of my series of 40K novel reviews. This time I'm tackling Ben Counter's Battle for the Abyss.

The Short Version:

This book sucks!

The Long Version:

The plot of this novel is simple. It documents an extended running battle between a mixed force of loyalist Astartes and a small Saturnine Navy fleet against the Death Star, er, Word Bearers' giant super-ship the Furious Abyss. Over the course of the book, the forces are whittled down to just one Space Marine on each side. The final battle is personal combat between Captain Cestus, the Ultramarine commander, and Admiral Zadkiel, the Word Bearers commander.

So, the book is basically a big fight scene; it felt like about 85% of it was various set-piece battles either between ships or between space marines. There were so many damned fight scenes that they just started running together and losing my interest. I know that Black Library is supposed to publish tales of violent blood-soaked mayhem, but there are limits.

Another 5% of the book was spent showing allies snarling at each other, and occasionally killing each other. The Word Bearers were populated by a bunch of paranoid, power-grasping louts. The Space Wolves were openly hostile to the Thousand Sons from the word go, and everyone seemed to have a rather negative opinion about the Ultramarines (though I admit that those opinions were interesting and instructive, for the most part). All of this interpersonal conflict was eventually explained away in a rather half-assed and irrelevant fashion.

For those of you keeping track at home, that leaves 10% for other stuff. "Other stuff," in this case, means background material about the Astartes and the Saturnine Fleet, which was really not bad; too bad we had to wade through so many mindless fight scenes to get at it. I found the pre-Heresy World Eaters and Thousand Sons to be the most interesting; the Word Bearers, Space Wolves, and Ultramarines were more or less the same as their 41st millennium counterparts. The World Eaters and Thousand Sons characters were distinctively of their own Legions, yet loyal to the Emperor and worked with other Imperial institutions.

Counter's command of the Queen's English is a bit limited. He (or his copy editors) occasionally misuse words. Can "actinic?" be applied to a stench? In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means." For the first half of the book, Counter uses it in place of "acrid," but then correctly applies it to radiation in the second half. There are other examples, but actinic jumped out at me because I'm such a Doc Smith fan.

Nerd Details:

I have to admit that I don't take continuity at all seriously when it comes to Heresy-era stuff. There have simply been too many radical background revisions over the years for me to believe that GW is taking continuity very seriously when it comes to this period. I didn't notice any glaring contradictions with the more recent material, but like Isaid, I haven't really been paying much attention.

To hell with the contradictions. What does this book add to the canon? I tend to downgrade the importance of inferior works, but I'll try to take this seriously, because it is about the Ultramarines. We got a bit of astronomical data about the Macragge system (specifically a bit of Macragge geography and info on its moons). There's some information about various inhabited planets and moons in the Solar System, too. For someone willing to take the time to tease out the details, there's a decent amount of information about the organization of the UM Legion, for those of you whome don't think that pre-Heresy Legions organization starts and ends with White Dwarf 126. We see the inception of the Imperial Navy as various smaller navies (specifically the Saturnine Navy) are subsumed into the new IN. So, if you're willing to dig through a lot of rough, there are a few diamonds here, if you're looking for fodder for a Librarium article or something.

Lets see.... there are the holes in the Word bearers logic (hmmmm I could blow them all to but im instead going to use an overly elaborite death scheme that is based on random chance.)

there are a grand total of TWO characters who stand out. (the World Eaters commander and the Thousand sun librarian.)

If you set the plot in the "Present" it would still mostly work. (replace the thousand sun guy and the world eaters with similar SM characters and it would still work).

Go read mechanicum. sounds like its better.

Paper thin characters, very little tie-in with the Heresy, and the dumbest plot I've read.

They're going to blow up a moon, and it's somehow going to destroy the entire Macragge system and kill most of the Ultramarine Legion? Are you kidding me?

Haven't read it yet, but the reviews I see are leaving me with little hope when ordering it. I have read a summary of the plot and I simply think "Ultramarines Omnibus, kill-team stops entire Tyranid fleet". If it's actually this bad, they should reprint it with Davian Thules fantastic accent while he yells "SPESS MEHRENS ATTACK" to add a little humor to this apparently terrible book.

Totally going off-topic with this. Notice how most of the First Founding have an archetype?

Space Wolves - Norse
Ultramarines - Roman
White Scars - Mongols
etc.

Notice there's not a French archetype? Maybe that was one of the lost legions. "For sale: II Legion Bolter. Never fired. Dropped once."

I hope to not receive undue amounts of hatred for this but I enjoyed the book. That said I did not enjoy it nearly as much as any of the first three HH novels, or fulgrim or flight of the E or legion. Those were all great. They all also had a primarch or two in them.

As many posters are saying this book could have been in 41,992 just like everything else, it didn't seem pre heresy at all. It could have had Lorgar (who has almost nothing written about him) or Guiliaman (who has a little to much written about him)

As for not including humans I could have done with a little more about the Armsman or the captain destroyed by the Furious Abyss.

Just my .02

dietrich wrote:Totally going off-topic with this. Notice how most of the First Founding have an archetype?

Space Wolves - Norse
Ultramarines - Roman
White Scars - Mongols
etc.

Notice there's not a French archetype? Maybe that was one of the lost legions. "For sale: II Legion Bolter. Never fired. Dropped once."

i consider the ultramarines to be french ... just take their primarch
roboute guilliman ... that sounds pretty french to me

maybe with a tid bit of french mixed in there

Abyss was bad because:

1. The Word Bearers are idiots.

2. The book is supposed to take place during the Heresy. Yet marines still call each other "heretic" and act like the Emperor is a god.

I also like how everyone seems to know everything about chaos in the latest books. First no one knows anything then BAM everyone gets the memo.

I'd like to know what role chaplains play in pre-heresy Legions. Are they just a symbolic position that administers Legion traditions or what?
Going back to the useless marines of the Word Bearers, did auspexs not exist back then and did the ships not have life sign detectors?
It seems ironic that a Legion of loyalist psykers is destroyed rather than worked with when pretty much as soon as the heresy is over the chapters start having librarians attached to them. Possibly a difference between the rule of the Emperor and that of the High Lords but there are some major inconsistances even amongst the newer books.

dietrich wrote:Totally going off-topic with this. Notice how most of the First Founding have an archetype?

Space Wolves - Norse
Ultramarines - Roman
White Scars - Mongols
etc.

Notice there's not a French archetype? Maybe that was one of the lost legions. "For sale: II Legion Bolter. Never fired. Dropped once."

Well, after you pull their butts out of the fire first in the Great War and then again in Duece, they might not be the archetype for the superhuman killing machines of the emperor.