Got Pissed: David Annandale and his Damnation of Pythos...again.

Nothing happens the book

I have finally finished this 'book'. It sucked horribly. 

Audiobook format is 12 hours long and I listen to these when I use public transpotasium. Whenever I listened to this I felt like it drags on and on and on.

I like Jonathan Keeble's reads and this guy(The David) made me sick of his voice. I have listened and read a shit tons of 40K books and this one was so boring it took me months to actually finish it. I had to read 2-3 other books at the same time to keep myself occupied. Whenever one of those ended I returned to this boring shitfest of a book. And it finally ended. I will look into his Yarrick book for the sake of Yarrick but I will be sure to hate them if they turn sour.

Let's see what other people had to say about this book.

 

 1: Well Tom, Black Library is milking the Horus Heresy for a long time now, so don't get suprised if your tits let out some milk.

2: Being predictable is probably the worst thing a writer or a filmmaker can be. You hate to be two steps ahead of your audience not four steps behind.

3: It is skippable, it sucks.

4: Enjoyable you say? Did you just grew a brain tumor in the last 2 seconds? It's fun? I can't argue with opinions but generally normal people don't find boring, fun. In fact boring is the opposite of fun. You can't get fun when you are bored.

4 stars? I wonder what Tom considered a goodread since he gave this pile of crap 4 stars.

As my good friend Tom put it, this book is boring and bland. Fuck you Tom.

   Whoa there champ. The 111st 5th what? Hold onto your Star Wars toys everyone, we got ourselves an über-nerd. Thanks to Christian we learned this important information about 11112nd company-clan whatevers. Christian is a fine fellow that memorizes all these clan numbers and shit, but the irony is that he fails at math in school. Drop out from school Christian, it's better that way.

   Have you ever met up with one of these über-nerds? They know all the Star Wars character names, the memorize all the 40K dates, and in the end the only thing you need is a fun story in which something interesting happens. Despite all the luggage that came with titles like Star Wars or Warhammer40000 the thing that pulled people in wasn't their arithmetic aspects, but their basic themes and interesting stories.

Basicly put:

Star Wars: Good versus evil, a hero on a journey.

Warhammer40000: Our own history and historical themes shot out into space and merged with popular scifi.

These are the aspects that made those titles what they are, not the 11111113rd company-whatevers.

Also 4 stars...

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh another idiot who liked this horrible boo...OH! Wait a minute, I think we have a winner.
Actually I have nothing to say in protest, he put it out there really good. Good job Simon.

 

 Nick is also a fine fellow. Which makes several good points that I will be supporting later on.

Darrel did you not read "Nemesis"? Where five Officio Assasinorum agents goes on a field trip together to kill Horus Lupercal, there is a meaningless detective story that doesnt go anywhere for fifty percent of the book then Vindicare shoots the wrong mark mistaking him for Horus, culexus assassin dies instantly having no effect on the story, then there is a plot about some warp-assassin that is going to kill the Emperor because of blood and shit. Then they try to kill that and fail, book ends with the Vindicare charging to Horus' battlebarge with his shuttle and Horus says something like "Come at me". No, clearly the worst book ever is Nemesis, but nothing is more boring than Damnation of Pythos.

These two following are from thefoundingfields.com

 You haven't read War and Peace do you? Where there is 200 characters and every scene is an elongated description of the current event.

David has 3-4 distinct characters at most and his book is incomprehensible as fuck.

For someone who claims to have seen the best, you really are dumb. I can't imagine what you think about some classic scifi books if you think this deserves 7.2

Let's see what Black Library have to say.

Even they know.

So let's break down this story and see what's wrong with it.

   The story is basicly this. There's these Isstvan survivors, they escape from the masscre and then find an Emperor's Children ship. They assault it. Inside David tells us about the contrasting ideals between the mechanical and inhuman Iron Hands doctrine and the corrupted and flesh pleasure practices of the Emperor's Children. The descriptions in the ship assault was one of the two things I actually cared about. But if you are a 40K veteran the description is just copy paste from Chaos and Space Marine Codexes. Iron Hands are robotic and abhor flesh, Emperor's Children like flesh and it's pleasures. Where Iron Hands try to replace their flesh with machine, Children enhance their flesh with vocal cords and super sensitive eyes and mega ears and penises that are vaginas at the same time.

   So the contrasting ideals of two sides were downplayed. If the entire book was machine vs flesh, it would be more interesting. But it wasn't, there is just some two pages of abstract explanation of these ideals which are already known to long time 40K fans. 

   Abstract writings of David is horrible. In every two sentence you get: "Then the night fell, like it was a dark curtain being pulled over the sky." or "Then the thunderhawk crashed like a meteor that plunged from the heavens with the screaming of the angels, it rolled over like a stone being lifted and let go.". No, these weren't actual extracts from the book, I just made them up from the bottom of my ass. But they are pretty close to the actual thing. I appreciate his abstract description of the warp and how it is actually madness incarnate but you don't need to do the same thing over and over again for the entire book. The only word that came to my mind is "FILLEEEEEEEEEEER!".

Let's compare:

"Then the thunderhawk crashed onto the earth and rolled over slowly." : Lotz a wordz

"Then the thunderhawk crashed like a meteor that plunged from the heavens with the screaming of the angels, it rolled over like a stone being lifted and let go." : Lotz a wordz

I used the Ork counting system here, anything more than five is lotz. So if we equal these two values.

Lotz = Lotz

...

I'm sure that if you use human arithmetics and figure out which sentence is longer, then you would find that these descriptions are only there to fill up the book that would otherwise would not be filled with such a simplistic storyline.

   After the ship assault where nothing literally happens, the Iron Hand ship reaches a planet. You guessed right, the planet is Pythos.

   Then Iron Hands fight lizard monsters which is reminiscent to that Salamander book, which was far more interesting than this pile of crap. Whatever it was called. Promethean Sun, I had look it up. It had Vulkan jumping off a thunderhawk if I remember correctly. Then there were Eldar using forest magic and flying on dinosaurs. They were Exotarch Eldars if I remember correctly. No wait... Exodite Eldar. Exodite are the wild elves. They use dinosaur-tech which is awesome.

   Funny thing is I listened to Promethean Sun when I quit Damnation on Pythos and I had totally forgotten about it. But while writing this I remembered what happened in it. It wasn't amazing but it wasn't bland too. So you can imagine what kind of a fail-fuck David Annandale is. I just finished his book and does not remember a single fucking thing.

   On Pythos, they fight dinosaurs and find that there are native humans living. Then the survivors of the secular Imperium and religious native humans start up a village. Literally they build a village with a temple and all that.

For the middle chunk of the book there is oddity dialog between seculars and religious people and you directly predict that this would go two ways. Either the religious people worship chaos or they worship emperor. So it's a coin toss between the two sides. David tries to make this into a philosophical religion vs secular ideals kinda thing. But it drags on and on. In the end it is revealed that they worship Chaos. Whopdydo, what a twist.

At this point the only thing I liked was that Iron Hands go into a cave and they find giant grubs.

Imagine this but twice as large as a Space Marine

Then they fight the grubs for no reason. Action scene involving grubs were fairly fun. Its a daft concept but there wasn't much to it. I would appreciate it if there were more intersting concepts in this book rather than bland philosophical ideas that you can read in any Philosophy 101 textbook.

So at this point you are fed with these characters that doesn't have a motivation and just talk and wait for stuff to happen. Reminds you of a Star Wars Prequel, doesn't it.

Also one of the characters is named : Kanshell

I was constantly thinking that this name is actually : ClamShell

A Clam shell

You hear this name for hundreds of times and don't know why the fuck the guy has a silly name like Clamshell.

Now we have finally reached the end of this horrid shit of a book. In the end chaos happens. Some deamon comes up. Destroys a Vindicator or something. Then some shit happens and the book ends.

This book is boring and uninteresting. Don't read it. Don't even get near it. Fuck you David Annandale. Go write your Philosophy 101 literature somewhere else. Lose your job and become a hobo you boring fuck. Fuck you!

B-but why do you hate me so, lambda-kun?

Go fuck yourself you cunt. Fucking asswipe sucking on Gamesworkshop's ass. Go die in a radioactive waste barrel you fuck.

BAAAW!

Dude, don't cry. Dude. Seriously. Dude. Stop crying. I didn't mean it okay? It's just part of the shtick. I was angry, okay? I didn't mean for you to die. You can keep writing for GW, they all suck these days anyways.

S-seriously, lambda-kun? Did-did you mean it?

Sure, I have lost hope on GW a long time ago. You can write whatever the fuck you want. If it make you better, I didn't liked that Phil Kelly novella too, the tau one. Surely it was better than yours but it was bland also.

Oh, lambda-kun! I knew you wouldn't hate me. I love you.

Yeah, cool. Wait...what!?

Kiss me, lambda-kun.