Day of Ascension

[nagashnee]

So no thread that i could see on this, i live in Athens Greece so 2 days off due to snow gave me the chance to read this. This will be a no spoiler review as i have never bothered to learn how spoiler tags work.

 

First of this is not a genestealer cults book, neither is it a mechanicus book, to my great joy it manages that rare BL feat ( tho 2-3 Authors are experts at this) of finding that nice middle ground where it gives both factions their time in the sun, main characters, motivations and arcs. So on that score 9/10!

 

The plot is precisely what it says on the cover, solid no mess no fuss fun on a forge world where a cult is making its move and the Adeptus Mechanicus is as always its own greatest enemy.  My only real complaint here is that while the forge city the novel takes place at is covered okish the actual forge world is very much left totally blank and this does irk me a little and create 1-2 little issues in my mind with the ending but overall solid stuff 7/10.

 

Characters, the cult steals tho show on this one with the main cult pov character being very well explored, written with a solid arc and view at what being raised in the cult would lead too. The mechanicus ones were also nice and fun, but many of them were simply not covered in the depth their brief views made me want ( Fabricator General art collector??? How, why, when??) . The main mechanicus character is very very very much a real life university faculty member ( i have met him irl during my time working at unis) just dialed up to 40k! And i loved him dearly for it. The picture of the underfunded, slowly dying department in a institution that no longer values them was heartbreaking for me personally and made the book a sure keep on self even if it was not a mech book.  11/10 but i am biased here. 

 

Overall the author tho new to the setting gets the 40k universe pretty well, the plot while simple is fun to read and the experience is made a joy with well written characters who feel believable.  Do not regret ordering the book and while i doubt i will re read it once my actual dead tree copy arrived i will ever more keep a eye out for underfunded mechanicus reserach projects fallen on hard times in need of help. 

[Cactus]

Thanks for the review, it's what I needed to convince me to buy it. These are two of the most interesting (to me) factions in the 40k setting but the disappointing Skitarii tie-in novel made me wary.

[caladancid]

How long was it? Amazon said it was fairly short for the Kindle version, something like 190 pages but the paperback says 360ish?

[cheywood]

How long was it? Amazon said it was fairly short for the Kindle version, something like 190 pages but the paperback says 360ish?

It’s very short. Audiobook is 5 and half hours. The 368 pages thing seems to be a placeholder Amazon uses for some unreleased BL books, for instance Throne of Light is also listed as 368.

[nagashnee]

How long was it? Amazon said it was fairly short for the Kindle version, something like 190 pages but the paperback says 360ish?

 

 

Not very, 2 sittings got me thru it, can check page count when home?

[Fire Golem]

That explains why it’s like novella priced then. I was confused why it was £12.99 in hardback when it was apparently nearly 400 pages. 

[byrd9999]

If it's a £12.99 hardback novella, does that mean it won't get an £8.99 paperback release?

[Fire Golem]

If it's a £12.99 hardback novella, does that mean it won't get an £8.99 paperback release?

Probably, which also explains why it’s available on Amazon and Waterstones. Hardbacks usually aren’t apart from like the Primarch novellas. 

[theSpirea]

It's not a novella. Not the usual BL 90K words but it is still slightly over 50K words. That still counts as a novel.

 

If it's the small hardback then it won't be getting paperback release (Warhammer Horror hardbacks, Primarchs, Horus Heresy: Characters, etc). These books are published only as hardbacks. Sure, BL might make an exception for well known author but I wouldn't count on it.

[cheywood]

For my purposes novella vs novel isn’t particularly relevant as long it’s good. BL publishes lots of ‘short novels’ that other publishers might consider novellas. Tchaikovsky considers Day of Ascension a novella based on his TOW interview:

 

‘ToW: If someone enjoys Day of Ascension and wants to check out your wider work, where would you recommend they start?

 

AT: I think the closest work is amongst my other novellas – perhaps Firewalkers or Walking to Aldebaran, or else the Expert System’s Brother.’

Edited January 26, 2022 by cheywood

[caladancid]

It is the same price as all the other BL full length eBooks- 16.99 USD, which is what had me curious.

[DukeLeto69]

The GW/BL marketing guys are sometimes pretty clever at maximising revenue.

 

The trend towards novellas and short novels (like the Horror line) being only available in hardback means the consumer is paying more for less (ignoring point on quality of writing here).

 

Back in the old days most BL novels were of this shorter variety anyway and in paperback. Looking at the excellent Calpurnia books by Matt Farrer for example, the page count is 256 (not sure what that means for word count).

 

Nowadays they do look “thin” and could possibly be perceived as poor value?

 

Personally I would rather read an excellent short novel by a quality writer than a meandering epic that is sub par.

[Knockagh]

Absolutely agree with the duke here. Nothing worse than a high word count book by a poor author. The novella length books suit me just fine. Many authors are very capable of writing good shorts but struggle when the word count gets high. The trap though of thinking a short book has to be fast paced and action heavy though is high. We’ve had some superb novellas in the last few years, rich in good high quality world building.

Having said that a good lengthy book can be superb, if handled well. Value for money is quite another thing altogether and probably one best ignored when it comes to GW in general. It’s never there. But they are what they are a big old company chasing an ever increasing stock price and unfortunately that means someone has to pay.

[byrd9999]

Novel/novella, I don't care. It's quality over quantity for me. I'd be happy never to read another 550-page Graham McNeill mid-series Horus Heresy book again.

 

It's just that money is a thing, so I prefer to wait for paperbacks rather than buy the hardbacks where possible. I do love the look and feel of the £12.99 horror and Primarchs series hardbacks, so I don't mind buying them if that's how they are released (i know GW and BL aren't hobbies that can be done "on the cheap"), but if there is a paperback then I would wait.

[DarkChaplain]

I often argued in favor that the length should be secondary to the content presented, both in terms of quality and the room it needs to fully develop and wrap up to its full potential.

 

Sadly, it seems that BL has lately been embracing the half-length format even for stories that really needed more room to grow and breathe. Warhammer Horror has a few such books, including The Bookkeeper's Skull, which had a laughably brief climax at the cost of tension, and introduced vital key elements to the mystery only very late, and then bum-rushed to the finish line. This is happening more often than it used to... and it's all the more frustrating when I look at the hardback price tags of often 15€ even on Amazon.

 

I hope Day of Ascension stands above those issues, but honestly, I'm currently unwilling to buy it at those prices when I already know that it's shorter than their audio box sets and a simple paperback full-length novel easily fills twice the pages, maybe even three times as many. The price should reflect the quality of the product, yes, but also its dimensions, meaning size or length.

 

BL has decoupling those aspects to the point where I'm no longer comfortable blind-preordering their books when announced, before I know from a print copy in the wild or an audiobook listing, just how much "bang for your buck" is actually included, especially when they call everything novel these days anyway (even old novellas, going by WarCom...). It's feeling more and more like the hardback-only release is more of an attempt to make the books appear thicker than they truly are, by virtue of thicker binding.

[DukeLeto69]

We recently had a discussion on authors being paid and advances/royalties based on retail price etc.

 

If I was Fehervari I would be a bit miffed that I wrote a 349 page book that gets a £8.99 paperback release while Hill writes a 200 page book that gets a £12.99 hardback release.

 

Note that is not a comparison on author quality (I am a big fan of both writers), purely a quantity/effort/time vs reward point.

[Knockagh]

 

BL has decoupling those aspects to the point where I'm no longer comfortable blind-preordering their books when announced, before I know from a print copy in the wild or an audiobook listing, just how much "bang for your buck" is actually included,

 

Unfortunately though given that most physical books sell out in a day or two GW seem intent on making sure you don’t get the opportunity to find out anything aside from what they tell you

[grailkeeper]

I'm a big fan of the author's- particularly the book cage of souls. I read the entire book today- I don't think its his best work. It is very short. It could have been longer. Still pretty enjoyable but should have been longer.

 

He's mates IRL with ADB.

[aa.logan]

I’ll echo grailkeeper; big fan of Tchaikovsky, enjoyed this book but it really could/should have been longer.

 

It’s really refreshing to see more than just the Imperium’s perspective in a book, and putting moral ambiguities front and centre of a 40K novel is welcome. Tchaikovsky, for all that he is new to the setting shows that he ‘gets’ 40K.

 

Some of the pacing feels a touch rushed- parts are far too reliant on coincidence and the speed of character development at times jars, so an increased word count would help- Tchaikovsky is a more than competent author so I don’t think these are necessarily down to any failings on his part.

 

Despite this, I’d heartily recommend the book, short or not, I can only blame myself for having overly high expectations.

[cheywood]

About a third of the way through myself and it is very breathlessly paced, but the prose is up there with BL’s best and I love the way Tchaikovsky’s portraying the Ad-Mech. So many authors lean into techno-babble and crazy body modification but Tchaikovsky is focusing on the suffering of their industrial workers and the brutality inherent to their system. It’s been great to see novels like this, TDK, and The Bookkeeper’s Skull approach the Imperium of Man as first, last and foremost a place of suffering and blind zealotry. Too often BL novels are promoted as tales of heroism without nuance, even though most authors approach the setting from a very critical point of view and that comes through in their prose.

 

Edit: This is my first time reading anything by Tchaikovsky, which might help in that I have none of his original works to compare with Day of Ascension.

Edited January 30, 2022 by cheywood

[cheywood]

Finished this up yesterday. Pacing wise it could’ve used a little more time to breathe as others have said, but the story still works well as is. The brevity seems most apparent in the fight scenes, which are frequently the right places to keep things brief anyways.

 

From a prose standpoint it’s clear why Tchaikovsky is so well regarded by the broader SFF community. I’m very eager to jump into some of his other works now. This is up there as one of the best Genestealer Cult and best Mechanicus stories. I don’t think it surpasses Cult of the Spiral Dawn or Titanicus, but beyond that I’m not sure either faction has received better treatment. How it gets there is interesting, though.

 

I think Tchaikovsky been open about coming to the setting fairly recently, and you can tell that’s the case. This book isn’t about giving new twists on established lore or getting deep into the background. It reads as though Tchaikovsky did some general research and then read each faction’s codex. I’d bet good money most of the people on this forum know more about 40k than he does. But that doesn’t matter, because he clearly knows more about writing compelling characters than most BL authors, and that shines through in the POVs of Dravien and Triskellian [sic]. They’re believable and flawed. Triskellian especially manages to embody the flaws of the Mechanicus without coming across as a caricature of ‘logical’ thought like so many tech-priests.

 

9/10

[sitnam]

Ill second basically everything you said Cheywood, although I think as a GSC novel this does a better job humanizing them then Spiral Dawn did.

 

I kind of saw the big twist coming at the end, but it was still very satisfying. I would love to see more Tchaikovsky in the future, hopefully with some other unique POV

[cheywood]

Ill second basically everything you said Cheywood, although I think as a GSC novel this does a better job humanizing them then Spiral Dawn did.

 

I kind of saw the big twist coming at the end, but it was still very satisfying. I would love to see more Tchaikovsky in the future, hopefully with some other unique POV

You’re entirely right re humanization. I’d even say Dravien is far more easily empathized with than most baseline humans in BL novels.

[Beren]

Finished this in pretty much a single sitting, and I can say I wasn't dissapointed.

 

I find it somewhat ironic that for an author whose outstanding achievements include being exceptionally skilled at writing the inhuman, one of his key strengths here is just how human he's made the genestealer cult protagonist. Normally you get the sense of 'mind-slaved fanatic' immediately but here... it was just hope. Almost fully genuine hope for themselves and for a better future than what the Imperium has provided, and that's what makes it so heartbreaking when you remember what happens when a genestealer cult's endgame actually is.

 

The tech-priest is also an excellently written character, but in an entirely different direction. I sort of feel that he fulfils a basic archetype that has existed for ages but never actually made it onto page as a character - that of the Magos Genetor that sees the organic body as just another machine. A really good example of this is where he (this spoiler has absolutely nothing to do with the central plot, or much else really, but I'll spoiler it nayway just in case)

gets annoyed at a procedure that will increase worker mortality, not because he cares about the workers but because he predicts it will cause a workforce and production crash several generations down the line

.

 

An additional note here is that neither faction shown seem to be 'prime' examples of what they are capable of.

The genestealer cult seems to lack any purestrains or even a patriach, and at times even seems near broken in willpower. I did think that they even lacked the standard high level infiltration thing they do... and then the Skitarii happened.

 

The Forge World also seems to be a lower tier one, bordering on being an Ad Mech overseen manufactory world rather than a 'true' Forge World, to the point where even singular enclaves seen elsewhere (such as in Flesh and Steel) seem to be ore impressive in certain ways. As cheywood said, this is much more focused on the industrialisation and pettiness than the high-tech 'greater mysteries or explorator aspects.

 

Overall, a highly recommended read.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Beren

[Knockagh]

Finished this, yesterday, I’m laid up with covid and doing very little! Fabulous book. I’m not familiar with the authors other writing, but boy was this a well written book.

The characters on both sides were utterly chilling in their very different ways. The 40K universe was depicted brilliantly in all its nasty ness and the imperiums brutality would make you weep.

Twist at the end was superb and we are definitely left with the possibility of more. Hopefully GW paid him some money for the book and didn’t just give him plastic and paint and the guy comes back to write more. Brilliant. I honestly didn’t think genestealers could be written so well