Dragonlayer said:
Note that I said "some" realism, though I apologize if the meaning was unclear: I meant Abnett's Guard stories involve an expanded awareness of the military and civilian dimensions of 40K existence. While we are still fundamentally talking about people with future laser guns blasting away at evil ghost possessed people, the books go into aspects that are often forgotten by other 40K stories that heap on the cheesier parts of 40K, like the hard-partying wolfish pop-culture Vikings of the Space Wolf series. Stuff like inter-factional disputes, political considerations driving strategic aims, life under enemy occupation and logistics make the Ghosts books shine to me, whereas other books - while more often then not still enjoyable reads - just want to put the average 40K codex cover art to words (i.e. one giant battle involving everything in an army, fought as a duel). Does this make the stories generic? I don't think so, because while they share tropes common to other military sci-fi stories they are still firmly grounded in 40K's lore - the Imperial Guard is very different to the Mobile Federation.
In of itself, that doesn't make him generic, it's the manner in which he does so.
Now, I absolutely agree that far too many 40k books are just describing the cover art, that's a good way of putting it, and Abnett does stand out for going a bit further than that. Just, while he is very good at coming up with set piece and locations, he's not particularly interested in making them fit the established 40k universe, or even anything else he's established in his other stories. Occasionally not even the other parts of the same book. He comes up with memorable places and ideas that don't fit together into any greater context, they could just as easily be set in any other generic sci-fi universe.
There's a lot of BL books that do worldbuilding much better. Bill King's protagonists in all of his stuff tend to be more or less the same, but they will sit down and contemplate the universe and their place within in to bring the world to life, and in ways that are consistent and, as much as possible, make sense. Of course, IMHO, Bill King far surpassed more or less everyone else who has written for the BL in this, so it's not fair to condemn Abnett for not being as good as King at that.
Abnett's other problem is that some of his highest profile generic characters are people that shouldn't be. Someone like Corbec or Rawne, ok, they come from a culture noticeably like ours, but Tanith might have just been like that. Abnett even says Rawne is a "typical Imperial male"...which is rubbish of course, there is no such thing, but whatever. They are fairly well executed character even if we've seen them over and over before.
Eisenhorn and Gaunt, however, can't be. They are perfectly well written generic heroes that are filling the spaces where an Inquisitor and a Commissar should be. They should be fanatics with a mindset very alien to us. You could take Gaunt out of 40k and stick him in as a generic British or US officer in a WW2 story, and he'd work fine. You should not be able to do that with a Guard Commissar.
Abnett, of course, is far from alone in this. Mike Lee turned Malus Darkblade into a generic chosen one over the course of the series, and then into a hero for the last book. Goto went so far as to have an Inquisitor refer to marines as "big boy scouts".
In fairness to Abnett, he seems to have totally gotten past this for "Riders of the Dead". He'd obviously done loads of research, and sometimes it got annoying how much he wanted to show that he did, but he made the north seem very different from just another bunch of barbarians.
Dragonlayer said:
Well of course he sounds like an incredibly basic writer when you sum up his stories like that
Not his stories, his endings. He's done many, many stories for BL, and they all share the same endings.
Now, I must say that I don't think Abnett is a bad writer. His stuff is almost always going to be entertaining, it's just that he's not so good at being consistent, or rather, in covering up his inconsistencies. Most BL stuff tends to be neither consistent nor entertaining. "The marines (including one who is "big, even for a marine" epicly killed the monster without use of anything resembling tactics and then discovered that the Inquisitor was up to no good, because he always is"...that's half of every 40k book ever, it seems.
