March to Other Worlds Day 16: Gaunt's Ghosts by Dan Abnett
Day 16 Gaunt’s Ghosts by Dan Abnett
In 2002, I was looking for a new military sf series and discovered Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I had never played any of the Warhammer roleplaying games, but I had bought the miniatures and many of the Warhammer fantasy supplements for use in other games. Looking back, it seems to me that the series didn’t really take off until book three, Necropolis, when it became one of my favorites and encouraged me to read a lot of other books in both the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes.
Warhammer 40,000 is a bleak place to live. What I’m about to describe comes from my impressions after reading dozens of books set in the universe. It appears to me that when humanity discovered faster-than-light travel, they inadvertently exposed themselves to the mutating and corrupting forces of chaos which existed in the warp. This force began to drive people insane and it spread among humanity as a sort of contagion. It activated psychic powers in many people and triggered a civil strife that seems to have essentially overthrown what we would think of as a scientific age.
Civilization survived by moving into a state of permanent warfare against the forces of chaos and by rejecting the advanced science that had led them to discover the corruption. Yet, they needed the things that science produced, so science was turned into a religion and scientific knowledge was turned into a catechism of secret knowledge guarded by various guilds. A political officer class, called commissars, was created to guard against the corruption of chaos and cowardice in the ranks and for tens of thousands of years the war has continued.
Gaunt’s Ghosts occurs within a multi-decade effort to liberate the Sabaat Worlds, a cluster of nearly a hundred star systems, from Chaos. Excerpts from historical chronicles that start each book help us to understand the context of the current fight and make it clear how important the crusade was and of the special role that Gaunt’s Ghosts played in winning it.
The series is packed with great military action, superb characters, and men and women who find it within themselves to soldier on when there is no hope that they will ever be ultimately victorious. The Ghosts are “ghosts” because their home world was destroyed before the series began. They are the “First and Only” regiment that will ever be raised from the planet Tanith to serve the Emperor. If you’re looking for a good military sf series that focuses on the infantry, you should give this one a try.
