The Infinite and The Divine (Warhammer 40,000)

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For help with these queries or to submit general questions, comments or feature requests, try Goodreads Help or use the Contact Us form. If one of these ridiculous fanatics actually found a species for us to transfer our consciousness to. This scholastic rivalry is based not just on imagined Necron society, but also the same kind of dynamics that fuel competing theories of knowledge today. I absolutely loved this book, from the interesting view of the Necron perspective of the galaxy, to Trazyn just collecting anything that catches his eye.

Time Master: Orikan is the most skilled chronomancer of all of his kind, and it gets him out of more than a few tight situations.As riddles unwind and ancient secrets are revealed, the question remains: will their feud save the necron race or destroy it? His short stories include ‘War in the Museum’, ‘Glory Flight’, and the Assassinorum tales ‘Divine Sanction’, ‘Live Wire’ and ‘Iron Sight’. Over the course of ten thousand years, they go from competing over ownership of the Mysterios, to working together to unlock its secrets, to stabbing each other in the back over it. We see this at play throughout the novel - my favourite instance is perhaps the Song of Serenade itself, a mathematical code to be solved according to Orikan, a cultural artefact that had profoundly shaped eldar and human culture alike according to Trazyn.

Books from non-human perspectives are rare in Black Library’s canon, but this comfortably proves that ‘alien’ characters can be just as relatable as humans – Trazyn and Orikan may have lost their mortality and, arguably, their souls…they may think in terms of centuries and millennia rather than days, months or years…but they’re still fallible and flawed. But when an artifact emerges that may hold the key to the necrons' next evolution, these two obsessives enter a multi-millennia game of cat and mouse that ends civilisations, reshapes timelines, and changes both forever. Trazyn, a collector of historical oddities, presides over a gallery full of the most dangerous artifacts - and people - of the galactic past.Time Dissonance: As immortal Necrons, Orikan and Trazyn speak casually of centuries and even millennia. Throughout the novel, we see these different forms of knowledge in competition, as each adapts to the others strengths and weaknesses.

I'm inclined to think that these overarching themes were quite deliberate, showcasing the author's own reflections on how humans - like Necrons, apparently - struggle to reconcile and profit from different forms of knowledge.Most of the book concerns Trazyn and Orikan's repeated visits to the planet Serenade over the course of thousands of years, and each time the planet has changed markedly. Edit: To expand slightly on this inspired by a comment, one of the more interesting ways in which the book's rivalry echoes our own human debates over knowledge are the particular blindspots each character has towards the other's work. It makes, obviously, for a fun story that's still punctuated by sufficient explosions to meet the Black Library quota.

A chance to view the 41st millennium from the perspective of the ancient Necrontyr which is incredibly entertaining all on its own. But when an artefact emerges that may hold the key to the necrons’ next evolution, these two obsessives enter a multi-millennia game of cat and mouse that ends civilisations, reshapes timelines, and changes both forever. To the two of them, however, their Time Dissonance means their experiences are more or less continuous. There have of course been many, many posts about it on this forum - I don't really post here myself, but I do enjoy lurking as a bit of a guilty pleasure and it's very common to see excerpts, commentary and theories from those who read and enjoyed a 40k book that hit some very different beats to the norm.Characterful, adventurous, inventive and wildly entertaining, this really is a fantastic book from start to finish.