'Brave champions and the forces of the Imperium battle alien beasts and mechanical tyrants accross the gulf of space.
'On the hive world of Targian, Zelia Lor helps her mother search for ancient tech, digging up treasures of the past on the wind-blown plains. They are happy. They are safe. All that changes when the Necrons attack. Without warning, a host of robotic ships appear in the skies above Targian and rip the planet apart. Separated from her mother, Zelia must escape the doomed world, her only hope a scrambled transmission promising safety at a mysterious place known only as the Emperor’s Seat. Launched in an escape pod, she crashes on an icy wasteland far, far from home. But Zelia is not alone. She is joined by a rag-tag group of survivors – the street-tough juve Talen, gadget-obsessed Martian boy Mekki and super-intelligent alien-ape, Fleapit.'
Kids fiction probably isn't the firs thing that you'll think of when someone talks about Games Workshop literature, with the majority of the Black Library publications being aimed at older audiences, big tomes full of horror, gore, and universe spanning stories. So when the Warhammer Adventures stories were first announced I was very intrigued. I wanted to know how they were going to translate the grim darkness of the 41st millennium into something that would be appropriate for kids, yet still felt like it could be part of the Warhammer universe.
One of the things that the series really has going for it, that made me realise that they were probably going to pull off this difficult task well, was the fact that the Warhammer 40,000 series was going to be written by Cavan Scott. Scott has a lot of experience writing fiction aimed at younger readers, and his work on the Star Wars: Adventures in Wild Space series was stuff that I found particularly enjoyable, where he was able to craft a more kid friendly version of that universe without it feeling like it lost anything from the more 'adult' material. If he could do that with Star Wars, why not Warhammer?
Attack of the Necron begins of the hive world of Targian, where Zelia Lor and her mother have travelled for their latest archaeological expedition. Travelling around the Imperium, Zelia and her mother, along with the martian boy Mekki, and Lexmechanic Erasmus, move from world to world excavating ancient ruins to find old tech and secrets from the past. Unfortunately, it's during their latest dig that the planet comes under attack from the ancient and mysterious living machine race, the Necrons.
After the Necrons appear on the planet things quickly descend into chaos, with the skeletal machines bringing death and destruction with them. Zelia and her companions, along with everyone on the planet, begin a desperate journey to get off world, running from the hordes of nigh unkillable alien machines that stalk the streets of the Hive City, killing all in their wake. This is where Scott really shows how he's able to marry the more child focused storytelling with darker nature of the Warhammer universe, as he's able to bring the death and destruction of the Necrons into the story without having to water them down.
The Necrons kill a lot of people, not just in large, mass scale destruction that feels detached from things, but on a one to one level, and readers see characters killed, sometimes in front of the child heroes of book. Now, the fact that the Necrons use weapons that disintegrate their enemies does mean that this is a bit more sanitised than say if it were Tyranids ripping people to bloody pieces, but this is still a story where thousands, perhaps even millions or more, are killed, and the readers aren't shielded away from those facts.
Whilst Zelia and Mekki seem to be shielded from the more brutal parts of this, seeing much of the destruction from a distance, Talen, the young gang member who joins them, is confronted with the brutality of these events, watching people killed right in front of him. This isn't something that just gets brushed aside either, as Talen spends time during the story a sobbing mess, near traumatised from knowing that everyone he's ever known and cared for is probably dead, and having seen the brutality of the Necrons up close and personal. It would have been easy for this kind of thing to be made light or, or even ignored all together, so showing how these events are a serious trauma is a surprising inclusion; one that I'm hoping will be explored in more detail over subsequent books in the series.
Despite packing a lot of action and story in the relatively short book, Scott was also able to develop the core group of characters pretty well, and by the end of the book you're left with a pretty good sense of what each of the kids are like, and what they bring to the team. Perhaps the least developed is Flegan-Pala, also called Fleapit, the Jokaero who joins the story towards the end. He's an interesting character, especially due to the fact that he's not human, and because of his very different nature he remains one of the more mysterious members of the group. By the end of the book I got the sense that he was only tolerating the young teens, rather than liking them, and am definitely interested to see how this strained relationship grows over subsequent books, and if he will come to genuinely warm to them or not.
The book leaves a lot of story elements hanging, with a central quest for the teens to make their mission in the next book, but also introduces a mysterious element in the final pages that could lead to some very interesting and possibly dangerous things for the group in the future; and finding out if this new figure will be an enemy or ally is something that's very exciting.
Attack of the Necron is a great start to this series, one that not only sets the tone for what readers are to expect, but also clearly establishes the main characters and the central quest for the upcoming instalments.
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