Dawn of War (Warhammer 40,000) [Mass Market Paperback]

Cassern S Goto (Author)

Book Description

Series: Warhammer 40,000

In the grim darkness of the far future setting of Warhammer 40,000 there is only war! Now that unique mix of science fiction with decaying medieval stylings hits the PC in the first of a new line of Real Time Strategy games. Created by computer game giants THQ, Dawn of War will be one of the season's major releases, backed up by an immense advertising and publicity program. Both game and novel tell the saga of the Bone Ravens, near-superhuman Space Marine warriors. Their mission is to destroy the planet Cyrene and its heretical populace, lest surrounding planets are tainted by their daemonic allies. But for Brother-Captain Angelos this is no easy command - for Cyrene was the world where he was born. Duty and honor are called into question in this storming slab of military science fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Great SF from a very dark future" - Starlog"

About the Author

Ian Edgington is a prolific comic book writer who has scripted for such illustrious characters as Spiderman, Batman, Xena and the Terminator. He has written novels based in the Star Trek universe. This is his first novel for the Black Library.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Games Workshop (December 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844161528
• ISBN-13: 978-1844161522
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,903,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I can't believe the "reviews" about this book., June 3, 2005

By 

Astartes Prophet "astartesprophet" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dawn of War (Warhammer 40,000) (Mass Market Paperback)

I can't believe the "reviews" about this book.

Plainly, it's a sad excuse of a book, and yes I have read between 45-50 Warhammer 40K novels so far (almost all of them), and sadly this is one of the worst (maybe even the worst). I don't blame the writer or Black Library for putting this book out, they did what they could with the material, but the material was too weak to none existent.

First, all the WH40K novels suffers from some restraint of the "playing universe that is WH40K" then if that's not hard enough, confine it even more to follow a weak story line from a game. (The game is great, but the story line is paper cut out and then some.)

The end result, is a bunch of one dimension characters, with empty minds, and as mentioned before, they change their mind at a whim, just making them feel below 1 dimension, I respect that the Eldar are not covered in many book as mentioned before, but Farseer is a much better choice then this "novel".

The big story line are classic and has been done 100 times before in all games, even outside the WarHammer 40K universe, some of the Codex short stories are better then this novel, and that's saying a lot. Characters and setting are bellow one dimension, it feel like reading a small intro to a game that went horribly wrong and long, it would not fit in the box, and decided, let's make a "novel" with this mess and sell it.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone, and I just wish that peoples wont judge the Black Library's book collection with this one book, that would be a tragedy.

You want to read :

About Eldar's - Farseer

About Space Marines turning to the dark side - Soul Drinker, Crimson Tears and The Bleeding Chalice

About Chaos Marines - Storm of Iron

About Inquisitor - Eisenhorn Trilogy, The Inquisitor War (Draco) and the new Ravenor's.

My recommendation - Anything written by Dan Abnett and William King.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Storming sci-fi!, March 2, 2005

By 

Edison H (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dawn of War (Warhammer 40,000) (Mass Market Paperback)

Considering that Dawn of War is the novelisation of a computer game, it was fantastic! The writing is powerful and the action scenes are the best I've seen. If you like Black Library stuff, you'll love this.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Readable WH40K, Yet Thoroughly Mediocre, July 23, 2007

By 

Robert A. Booth Jr. "Commissar Bodjo"" (Masschusetts, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dawn of War (Warhammer 40,000) (Mass Market Paperback)

I don't know what the heck I was expecting when I got this book. I think my buying this particular work of CS Goto occured before I actually made the distinction between the good writers of the Black Library and the ones that are something less. Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill, William King, Ben Counter, James Swallow, Andy Hoare, Steve Lyons, Mitchell Scanlon, and...actually, reading much pretty any other fething writer that the BL uses is better that reading Goto. He's an adequate writer at best, and most of the time worse. Abnett and McNeill are my favorites, in that order.

I'm too long-winded, so I'll get to this specific book. It's based on the Relic Warhammer 40K Real-Time Strategy game, Dawn of War. DoW is an excellent game and so are both it's expansion packs, and the plot was certainly good enough for someone to write a good book based on it. True, sometimes it's tough to translate from a game to a good movie or book, but there was enough space to maneuver within the storyline that Goto--if he was a good writer, let's assume for a moment--ought to have been able to do better.

First of all, the whole idea of writing a book on this game, it would seem, would be to flesh out the characters a bit and at least make them seem a bit three-dimensional. Not true of anyone in this story. If you played the videogame, you know exactly what the characters of Captain Angelos, Librarian Isador, Chaos Lord Bale, Sindri the Sorceror, Colonel Brom, Inquisitor Whatevertheheckhisnameis are all like. The backstory at the beginning suffers from lethargic writing that manages to make a scene where a giant eldar avatar fights a demon prince seem dull.

From there, our man CS is off to the races.

The plot is fine, really. The thing is, Goto didn't come up with the plot in the first place. He does an adequate job of telling people what they already know if they played the game. Some of the fight scenes are okay. But seemingly any time he tries to expand a theme, he manages to screw up. A light Eldar, for some reason, is seen shouting "blood for the blood god." That is simply not something you'd ever catch an eldar saying outside the weird world of Goto. Other lowlights:

-Lord Bale, the Chaos leader, is a piece of cardboard holding a scythe, but the best part is how Goto describes him as "rampaging across worlds and galaxies" in the past. Worlds: okay. Galaxies: no. Bale has not been to a different galaxy unless you're talking about the warp. Even if that's the case, the poor word choice is an indictable offense anyway.

-Colonel Brom, the local PDF leader, is a bizarre character. Most of the time, the Space Marines flat out ignore him and piss him off to the point where he...well, I won't spoil it, but Brom in the game NEVER TURNED TO CHAOS, GOSH DARN IT. Sorry, I spoiled it. But what the hell? It's not even accurate to the storyline of DoW. How hard could it have been to stasy faithful to a frickin' video game storyline made up of a few cutscenes?

-Goto is just not very good switching scens constantly, and he chose to try and show this conflict from all four sides (Good, Chaos, Eldar, Ork) and it doesn't work. Too much face time for the Eldar, too much face time for the ridiculous Ork characters he crafts.

-The Guardsmen who defend the city of Lloovre Marr have NO senior officer in command of them. Thus, one of them opens the gates when the Eldar come calling while another opens fire on them. They put up pathetic resistance and die. What possible explanation is there that there wasn't even a frakking Lieutenant to watch over the walls of one of the bigger cities on the planet?

-Gabriel's duel with Bale is a pathetic fight scene. Awesomely pathetic.

There's more, and I could go on and on. Instead I'll just say that Goto gets the second star more because I know it's tough to adapt a storyline from another source. Otherwise, this would get one star. I do not recommend this or any other Goto WH40K book unless you're flat out of WH40K to read.