Book review - Dark Imperium

Another Quick hit today. I have just finished reading the new Dark Imperium novel that I got for Christmas. Ok, so it might not be that new anymore but it was new to me. I haven't read much 40k stuff in recent years, the last thing that I read was the first trilogy for Ragnar, which I greatly enjoyed and have been meaning to read the second trilogy ever since, but at the time I read the first one is was not out yet. Having just looked, it was apparently published back in 2009! That's a long time ago now, I really should read more!

As for the Dark Imperium book itself, I really enjoyed reading the book. While I would not say it was a gripping as some other book I have read, both 40k ones and other genres, it was a good read. The story moved on nicely and always kept you wanting to read more and find out where things were going. There was also a few nice little teasers and intriguing bits in the book. Most, if not all, of these have already been seen and written about, such as Crawl having new marines with traitor gene-seeds or Crawls use of Xenos technology in many of his inventions. It does open many doors for GW to move the story and the technology on from where it presently stands. What really got me about the story though, was how many of the new marines, who in reality are actually old old marines, and the Primarch view the modern imperium. How archaic and regressive the place has become, how technologies that were taken for granted have become bastardised and corrupted. Even simple things like servitors and cherubs, which we all just take as being part of the 40k universe but are seen as vulgar and well, crap, compared to those from the 30k imperium. I am assuming that at some point we will get Primaris Tech Marines or something similar, trained by Crawl or one of his minions, and so will we see a return of some of the 30k technologies or even just some cleaner, more visually pleasing (?) models?

One other thing about the novel, is that it does make me like the Primaris Marines a bit more. They don't come across completely "i'm much better than you", in the book, they just act as marines act, but they do seem to be favoured by the primarch a lot more that the normal marines. I still don't like the back story at the moment and I really hope that they add to it and make the role of the Eldar more known and understood, or at least accepted that they had more of a hand in these things than we know at the moment.

If you haven't read the book, then I would recommend reading it as it is a good book but I would not jump it to the top of your reading list if you have one.