In the grim dark future there is only war.

The mantra of Warhammer 40k permeates every page of Titanicus: fantastic but believable science fiction, glorious and bleak .

This novel is about Titans: two opposing armies of enormous war-engines alternatively trying to invade and defend a planet, but also the fate of the soldiers and civilians caught in the firing line. To this reviewer it is almost perfect sci-fi presenting exotic, seductive ideas that are both alien yet utterly plausible at the same time. The Titans themselves are living beings – monstrous God-Machines – but operated in synchronisation and the will of their mecha-human pilots. The machines smoulder and growl in their desire to get into battle, battling wills for control with their operators who are wired into their ports, and their captains – the princeps – floating naked in amniotic caskets. The interfaces mean that the princeps and their crew not only have the  radar view of the battlefield but also feel the burning desire for war that resides inside the machine itself, described perfectly when operator Gentrain, after his machine has just finished an engagement:

…felt the hunger pang of the empty magazines and shell hops.

Much like in Abnett’s brilliant Necropolis, Titanicus follows the duration of a major conflict, and Abnett is savvy enough to realise that the attraction of the god-engines themselves needs to be tempered with other stories: so we follow the plights of civilians, lost and hunted soldiers, frightened and under-prepared reserve troops, spying ambassadors, military commanders and attaches, powerless civilians and opportunistic merchants throughout the conflict. This works to different levels of satisfaction as sparse characterisation sometimes reduces the cast to a confusing mass of names, and some of the characters are minor indeed, occupying only a few pages through the novel, having no impact on the plot and providing just a snapshot of the city.

Battles – particularly between the titans – are furious and deadly, and rightly praised as one of the author’s strengths in the blurb on the back. To his credit, Abnett engineers several encounters between the god-machines and makes each feel different, understanding with almost unholy prescience how the conflicts between the epic machines would play out. Prolonged tactical duels demolish towns through their terrible ordinance, and the engines themselves as they rampage through  hive buildings and factories, while ground forces scurry between their legs to fight vicious hand to hand battles, or attempt to snare and bring down the enormous beasts. Titans hide and hunt like submarines in the deep, even duelling in close-combat with colossal maces and clawed fists. One of many such battles begins:

 It ploughed towards them through the dusty granaries beyond Birdmarket, striding hard across the ditches and underwalks that criss-crossed the back-land. It kicked down walls and shouldered aside the towers and eaves in its aggressive lust to reach the Imperial Titan. It tore through an overwalk bridge that blocked it at chest level, twisting and snapping the metal frame like a winning sprinter breaking the ribbon. Debris from the bridge sparked and bounced down into the street below.

The novel’s title deserves a special mention too, revealing itself to be a particularly wry joke near the conclusion. Possibly the biggest weakness of this novel is at the very end. It is rare that a work can be criticised for being too short, particularly one clocking in at nearly six hundred pages, but in finishing Titanicus the reviewer realised that there were only fifteen or so pages left to try and wrap up several unresolved plot threads, and that it wasn’t going to be enough. The conclusion works functionally, but feels hurried and a little more time to indulge in the long journeys of the characters would have been appreciated.

Titanicus, much like other Warhammer 40k fiction such as the excellent Eisenhorn (also written by Abnett), could be a tough sell. If military sci-fi fiction isn’t for you, then the story and its mythology could well be too opaque to enjoy, but once the reader is initiated into the exotic and dark world of hive planets, god-machines, battle forges and malign chaos forces, Titanicus wires the reader into the body and mind of the titans as utterly as the pilots within.

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