“Let the Galaxy Burn”, edited by Marc Gascoigne and Christian Dunn

765 pages, The Black Library, ISBN-13: 978-1844163427

Let the Galaxy Burn is a collection of short stories set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 science fiction setting (my favorite SciFi setting, if you haven’t figured that out by now). Published by Black Library – Games Workshop’s own publishing branch – it contains thirty eight tales, as well as an introduction and an excerpt from Dan Abnett’s “Eisenhorn” Omnibus. Like most 40K books, Let the Galaxy Burn is made for the fans; as such, it touches on a LOT of topics: xenos, classes, ranks, weapons, factions, chapters, objects, etc., so that if you’re a beginner and know nothing about 40K except that everyone says it’s awesome, you’re gonna pick up this book and right there in the first story you’ll find someone named Khorne, something called a bolter, stuff made out of plasteel and/or ceramite, some goddamn fanatic screaming “Blood for the blood god!”…and soon enough you’re left wondering what in the HELL is going on.

As with all anthologies, the quality varies from story to story. Some were quite well written (the ones from Dan Abnett, William King, Gav Thorpe and Ben Counter in particular), while some were terrible (“Tenebrae” by Mark Brendan, “Small Cogs” by Neil Rutledge, “Unthinking Justice” by Andras Millward and “The Raven’s Claw” by Jonathan Curran all come to mind). Sadly, many of these writers lack elementary knowledge of the 40K universe, and so we’re treated to a bunch of obvious mistakes that any editor worth his salt should’ve fixed before putting this thing into print (What’s that you say? You want examples? Okay: Leman Russ battle tanks being described and used as APCs; an over-two-meters-tall hive tyrant; a male Callidus Assassin; Space Wolf scouts who are also novices; Tzeentch-worshipping Alpha Legionnaires, and so-on and so-forth).

On the other hand, we’re given insight into some under-described facets of the 41^st Millennium, such as the lives of Imperial Navy pilots and slaves, life on some of the more primitive worlds, the insides of Tyranid hive ships, chaos worshippers as protagonists (!), etc. I expected at least one tale starring an Eldar or a Tau (or maybe even an Ork), but no such luck, as all of the stories are either about the Imperium, or the servants of chaos gods. On the whole, Let the Galaxy Burn is a good anthology: the stories are fast paced, the writing is alright for the most part, and the book itself is very affordable, considering its almost eight hundred pages long. Fans of 40K will enjoy the good stories and curse the bad; non-fans will just be confused.

“The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt”, by T.J. Stiles

736 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-1400031740

Well, I give T.J. Stiles all the credit in the world for trying his damndest to humanize “The Commodore” in The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, but he just comes up short. Oh, he tries, alright – lord, how he tries – but the man just comes off as the coldblooded Robber Baron that he was – but, oh, what a Robber Baron! Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island to hard-working but thrifty Dutch-descended parents; he got his start in boating at 16-years-old when he borrowed $100 from his mother to purchase a periauger (that’s a shallow draft, flat-bottomed two-masted sailing vessel with oars, Class); soon, he was ferrying people and goods to New York City, plowing his profits into more sailboats and then, eventually, steamboats. As a competitor, he was as cut-throat as cut-throat could be (some of his enemies actually paid him to discontinue his lines so that they, too, could be Robber Barons). At the age when most men at that time had long-since dropped dead, he abandoned ships and started a new career in railroads; the Commodore started small, and then added more and more lines, consolidating them as he went (before Vanderbilt established the trunk line, the New York Central, it took seventeen trains to ride from New York to Chicago). Many enemies tried to swindle or outsmart the Commodore, but his deep pockets protected him in most situations.

For all of his heartlessness and drive to conqueror, there are many things to be impressed about Cornelius Vanderbilt: he was a strapping fellow who knew how to take command; he was a financial genius when it came to the stock market; he knew ships well enough to produce revolutionary designs that made for safer and economical travel; and he was a patriot, as when, during the American Civil War, he donated and leased a number of ships to the Union and, after Appomattox, helped to heal the wounds between North and South by providing the bond to free Jefferson Davis and to create Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He helped to put New York City on the map as America’s financial capital (for better and for ill), and, although some considered him a scoundrel, he had a personal code of honor; his word was his bond. He battled many men over the years and was betrayed by his friends, but he rarely held a grudge and knew how to separate business from friendship.

Stiles does an admirable job of detailing both the professional and personal life of the Commodore; the business side of things can be fiendishly difficult to comprehend to the uninitiated, while the author also sets the record straight about many myths that have been told about Vanderbilt (although I wish there was as much information about his daughters as his sons-in-law, but there is little about these women on the written record). And for all that, The First Tycoon is strangely bloodless: not badly written or poorly researched, there’s just no verve in the prose (and it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning biography, to boot). But it is informative, make no mistake, as Stiles reveals all about the Gilded Age, the birth pangs of Capitalism and America’s first tycoon.

“Arthur: The King in the West”, by R.W. Dunning

164 pages, Alan Sutton, ISBN-13: 978-0862993986

Sad to say, but the tales surrounding Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are pure fiction, brought to our attention by one Sir Thomas Malory in his seminal work Le Morte d’Arthur, “The Death of Arthur”, in which he gathered (and rewrote!) several existing tales about the Once and Future King, Queen Guinevere, Sir Lancelot du Lac, Merlin and several of the other Knights, as well (for me these tales will always be linked to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, for better or for worse…better, I think). But they are no less entertaining for all that, and R.W. Dunning adds to the enjoyment with his book Arthur: The King in the West. Unlike several of his predecessors who have labored soberly to advance their theories of who the legendary Arthur really was, or which of the many postulated sites is the real Camelot, or so on and so forth, Dunning seasons scholarly debate with some of the tall tales used by past generations of true blue, died-in-the-wool Arthurians to promote themselves and their versions of ancient British history; if some of these accounts are patently absurd, well then there’s so much more fun to be had in reading them. In particular, Dunning focuses on the connections between the Arthur myth and the legends involving the origins of Glastonbury Abbey: to many, questioning the historicity of these links is tantamount to heresy, but by identifying the origins of the many stories and putting them in context with the Abbey’s place in a world of intense competition for prestige and pilgrims, Dunning provides an informative and often amusing look at the art of myth making, yet without forgetting that nearly all legends conceal a kernel of fact. Some may be disappointed because the book offers no radical new conclusions about Arthur’s identity, but then theories enough can already be found, and should a definitive version of the story ever be told, a great deal of the fun will go out of it. In the meantime, Dunning shows that scholarship and legend are not an incompatible pair.