"Legion"

Legion (Dan Abnett)

"Legion", like "Fulgrim", is a frustrating book. The Alpha Legion, who the book is about, tend to lurk in the shadows and only appear for extended periods as the book goes on. The problem with this is that the author focuses his attention on something called the "Geno Five-Two Chiliad", which has a trillion new, confusing words, names, and concepts. I knew just flipping through the Dramatis Personae section at the front of the book this was going to be trouble. What do you do with names like:

Sri Vedt - Uxor Primus of the Geno Five-Two
Honen Mu - Uxor
Rukhsana Saiid - Uxor
Hurtado Bronzi - Hetman
Dimiter Shiban - Hetman
Franco Boone - Genewhip

And, oh boy, the book doesn't do any favors keeping all this straight, either. The Uxors are female officers who command the troops, which is easy to grasp. It gets annoyingly hard to keep track of when the author's laying down that the Uxors are female officers who have little retinues who use something called "'cept" (always with that distracting ') to order troops around, so you'll have Honen, or Mu, or Uxor, 'cepting her ass off with Hurt, or Hurtado, or Bronzi, or Hetman, or Het.
I never really got used to this. People, please, if you have confusing names, just pick a name and run with it. I realize that you may want to have Uxor Mu call Hetman Bronzi "Hurt" instead of "Hurtado" to show how close they are, but when I can't keep the fucking charecters straight because they have six ways they're referred to you're just defeating yourself.
So that's issue one. Now things get even goofier when we meet John Grammaticus, agent of THE CABAL, a group of anicent, smug Xeno scum. Now this introduces a big problem, because the Cabal meeting with the Primarch of the Alpha Legion is such an important event that it natrually suggests itself as the climax of the book, and the events immediately following it are so momentus that it pretty much has to be the climax. The problem this creates is that since this meeting happens at the end of the book, quite a lot of it is Grammaticus trying to get the Cabal in touch with the Alpha Legion, and this part isn't exactly thrilling. In "Fulgrim", a craftworld just shows up, hails the Space Marines, and a meeting is arranged, and while I understand that if that happened here this book would be about 75 pages long, it does get mighty tiresome as roadblocks are constantly thrown up to make sure the Legion and Cabal don't meet until the end of the book.
All that being said, when the Cabal and the Primarch do finally meet the book picks up, and the end comes with a bang. As with "Fulgrim", however, the last 8th of the book being great isn't really enough to save it. I don't want to imply this book is as bad as "Fulgrim"; The parts with the army are interesting, if hampered by the names, and Grammaticus' sneaking around isn't that great but does have one spectacular fight scene, if nothing else. I can't really recommend this book to the general population, but if you love the Alpha Legion - does anybody? - then you can't go wrong. You goof.

Grade: C