I’ve been on a Warhammer 40k bend over the last few months, and today I’d like to talk about the Ciaphas Cain novel series I’ve just finished.
WARNING: Very mild spoilers for the Ciaphas Cain series ahead.
For those of you who don’t know the Warhammer 40k setting: It’s an utterly dystopian future of eternal war, originally developed as the background for a tabletop wargame. Humanity has spread throughout much of the galaxy under the rule of the superhuman emperor leading superhuman armies on a massive crusade. After a civil war, said emperor is bound to the Golden Throne after having been mortally wounded. It’s somewhat keeping him alive. After he was bound to the throne, he became the God-Emperor and a religion around worshiping him grew up throughout the empire. A myriad of foes, both demons from the Warp and alien races beset the massive empire in what’s basically one big war of attrition. The empire is propped up by the fanatical religion around the God-Emperor and all the in-setting alternatives being no better at all.
In short, Warhammer 40k could definitely be the “see also” for the term “grimdark” in the dictionary.
Now Sandy Mitchell, the Ciaphas Cain series’ author, does something great here: He inserts exactly the right amount of humor into that dystopia. Not too little, but also not so much that it turns into slapstick. Normally, the only humor in the setting is about the very “comedic sidekick” Ork faction, or the fact that the stewards of the setting, Games Workshop, decided to rename a lot of everyday things to make them trademark-able. And just the sheer, overwrought ways in which the setting is utterly horrible to its inhabitants.
The titular character, Ciaphas Cain, is a commissar. And if that word conjures up visions of Soviet political officers in WW2, you have exactly the right image. It’s just that Cain isn’t a fanatic. In fact, he doesn’t particularly want to be a commissar. He would be a lot more comfortable in a way safer job. He spends the entire series trying to find a safe desk job somewhere far in the rear of the many conflicts humanity is embroiled in. And he tries really hard to get there. Whenever there is a large pitched battle, you can be sure to find him inspecting some tertiary defenses or answering the call for help of an outlying settlement far away from the main action. And every single time, he ends up in the very center of the action. By the end of the first short story, he has earned the title of Hero of the Imperium. To his utter surprise. He doesn’t like the title very much - mostly because it makes other people assume that he is an actual hero and put him into the most dangerous assignments.
This setup could have easily become extremely obnoxious, with the author doing the sadly more and more common thing of not actually telling you whether the main character is actually a hero or an arsehole. And rubbing your nose in the fact that you don’t know every three paragraphs. No, I found Mitchell’s portrayal of a guy looking for a quiet posting and stumbling into being the hero of the hour quite believable.
The books are written as Cain’s memoirs, so most of them are written from Cain’s PoV only. But these memoirs are also supposedly edited by Inquisitor Amberley Vale of the Ordo Xenos, his paramour. This adds to the humor of it all, as she adds copious footnotes, adding some higher level sections so the reader knows what’s happening outside Cain’s immediate surroundings.
The books loosely follow Cain’s career, from briefly being attached to a field artillery unit through the Valhallan 597th, his posting for many of the novels, to his retirement as an instructor for future commissars. The books are mostly straightforward military sci-fi, lots of ground battles against pretty much all of the setting’s adversaries. I think the only one which doesn’t make an appearance are the Drukhari. Being a commissar, most of the books are allowing a detailed view into the inner workings of the Imperial Guard, the empire’s non-superhuman stock troopers. But it also contains quite some plots involving the Imperial Inquisition as well as the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Overall, there’s quite some variety in the stories, although they all of course end with Cain somehow saving the day. He is the main character, and these are his memoirs after all. 😉
One point I’m still not 100% sure about is whether I’d propose the series as an entrypoint to the setting as a whole. I think they’re well written and will likely make any reader wanting more of it, but they’re also relatively light on infodumping about the setting. I’ve been in and out of 40k since the first Dawn of War game back in the late 2000s, so I find it a bit difficult to judge whether somebody fresh to the setting would enjoy them as much as I did.
So, concerning enjoyment: Yupp, I liked them. I’m generally a sucker for book series more than standalone books, so I can get used to the characters. And there was enough of a recurring cast to make it very comfy a few books in. But with enough variety to not become too boring. I also quite enjoyed the “these are his memoirs, lightly edited” writing style.
So in short, if you already know the setting and you haven’t read the Ciaphas Cain books yet, they get a very warm recommendation from me.