u/Misopogon11

Hey, I've recently finished Hive by Dan Abnett.

This is Dan Abnett's magnum opus. I'm of the opinion that his style has gotten a bit meandering and out of control lately, with especially The End and the Death vol. 3 driving me a little bit angry with how many points of view essentially describing the same thing (reality is breaking around in Terra); I'm sure there are many people who enjoy that, of course, but I very much prefer tighter, more compact narratives where every moving part is connected to each other to tell a combined narrative.

This book isn't any better. But this time, it's more of a strength than a weakness (though I'm not gonna deny, the book is still a little bit too long for what it needs to accomplish what it wants).

I described it to a friend, jokingly, as "The Wire if at the middle of season 4, America was nuked and every character just died". We get so many points of view for so many characters living in the Hive, the true 40k living experience; a lot of novels naturally focus on characters that lead, by the standards of the setting, exceptional lives - great warlords, heretical antiheroes or even outright aliens. This time, it's, well, everyone else.

Abnett's great establishing works of Eisenhorn series focused on a character that could be called exceptional, but who regularly interacts with the "civilian side" of the setting; here, civilian side is the protagonist. Even the planetary governor is a relatively minor officer by the standards of the setting, ignorant of so much about the galaxy, though she holds great power over billions upon billions of people.

This leads into what can be considered both a great weakness and a great strength for the setting. Not every storyline has a satisfying conclusion, not every character blossoms into a natural character arc. This is unsatisfying, but it also makes sense - when alien horrors from the outside come to devour a planet, they don't care about the budding relationship between a prole and a privileged artist, they don't care about Mulder and Scully (the similarity in names only occured to me when I accidentally said their names out loud while reading the book) having their buddy cop adventure or a planetary governor preparing a lawsuit to pause extreme tithe payments. They come and eat you, murder everyone. That's the Dark Millennium - nothing of what you do matters.

But as I said, not only is this unsatisfying, but fails to (or, I suppose, doesn't focus on) the other side of the horror of the 41st. The human aspect of what makes the Imperium so terrible, while on display, is taken out of focus - while the dysfunctionality of Hive, all there is, is definitely party to blame, it makes you question what exactly they could've done to prevent the planet's inevitable fall. Could there be a more satisfying storyline, that maintains the same grimdark ending, where the Hive collapses in on itself without any outside force involved? Just human failures?

Perhaps, I don't really have a clear answer to what would be better. The ending will probably prove the most "controversial", or at least, the aspect of the book that sits with people the worst. I don't think anyone will openly complain about how much they hated it save for how "abrupt" (in relative terms to how long everything else took) it was, but I think a lot of people will feel just unfulfilled and empty because of it. 40k relies a bit too heavily on "bummer endings", and people are willing to accept that because, well, it is grimdark, but I think at the end of the day, even if they don't want to admit it, a lot of people would still feel happier if this book, or some other 40k books, had happier endings. I mean, you can't really help but ask yourself, what was really the point of getting to know all these people and the things they cared about, when none of it truly mattered at the end? Was the journey the friends we made along the way?

But the ending here is perfect for the setting. I don't like it, I didn't enjoy it, but this is the 41st millennium at its peak. It's not exactly untrodded ground, you could argue Warhammer Crime series has been there already, but the world complete made for a story complete here in a way Warhammer Crime never did (partially, I think because they posed every single book in the series as the first in a character series - for which no sequels were written). If you want to see what life is like in the grim darkness of the far future, this is the book for you; it's not as comical or as senseless as some of the more over the top depictions of the settings can feel like - there's an actual government here, it's got legislative and bureaucratic processes that any government would have to have, the toil isn't something incomprehensible like 24 hours a day until you die and instead something that allows for workers to persist in surviving, etc. - you know, it's grimdark, but it's not stupid.

And maybe, for anyone who feels unfulfilled by the ending, we can expect Abnett to throw people a bone and write an alternative one where Mulder survives his final, unresolved encounter, and somehow goes on to save the Hive from its destruction. His gun only had six bullets, but they were manstoppers, and his aim was good. I'm sure he could.