Review of Space Marine by Ian Watson

In my burgeoning exploration of Warhammer fiction, I'm perusing lists, posts, and reddit, trying to find something that pokes its nose above the literally hundreds and hundreds of novels and anthologies published in the universe. I'm scared of all the author names I do not know—authors' styles being the primary reasons books are or aren't enjoyable, regardless content. It was thus seeing Ian Watson's name pop up, a name I'm pleasantly familiar with from other areas of science fiction, that piqued my interest. But the Reddit user's quote for Space Marine (1993) pushed me over the edge: a neon cocaine vision of war's future.

As the title hints, Space Marine is the story of a fresh recruit in the Emperor's galactic army. Needing to escape juvenile delinquency on his backwater planet, Lexandro D'Arquebus signs up to be a marine and starts the inexplicably arduous transformation from human youth to augmented soldier. Extreme pain, extreme body modifications, and extreme psychological indoctrination is just the beginning of D'Arquebus' fractured journey, rawboned recruit to chaotic battlefield.

In telling this story, indeed Watson goes on a mad, cocaine-fueled, fevre dream. To say crazy things happen in Space Marine is putting it mildly—and for proper context to that statement, it is science fiction. Throughout reading the novel, I found my mind drifting to the best Vietnam-related media I've consumed. Everything from the encroaching psychedelic madness of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket to the pill-popping psychosis of Lucius Shepard's soldiers in the brilliant “Salvador”. Watson infuses Space Marine with a similar soldier's tale that spirals into ever-deepening levels of insanity. I imagine that diehard fans of Warhammer dislike how extreme some of the scenes are and how sore thumb-ish it is alongside other Warhammer fiction in terms of style. But for me, it is a fun art piece commenting on the madness of war through a dynamic and brutal science fiction setting—just as Kubrick, Shepard, and others have done.

For readers worried that Watson treats his foray into franchised, IP fiction lightly, fear not. Watson seems to revel in it. His imaginings are as colorful as they are savage. For readers unfamiliar with Ian Watson, his books can be—can be—densely poetic. Stringing together esoteric words in compact, sometimes tough-to-parse sentences, it can be an effort upon occasion. Space Marine is in this mold. Tightly packed sentences with a word that may require a dictionary are encountered often enough.

If there is anything to criticize about Space Marine, one thing could be the relative predictability of the first third/half of the novel. In essence an extended cut scene, readers follow D'Arquebus as he goes from trouble-making teen to freshly trained soldier, ready for the battlefield. Throughout the transition the reader can feel this destination. It's the barbarous nature of D'Arquebus' training and the inhumane physical alterations he goes through that give this section substance. The Warhammer world is harsh, and Watson makes sure the reader understands precisely the degree of humanity space marines give up in order to become part of the warmongering system. This is cyberpunk Rocky with a blow habit getting ready for robo-Apollo.

Another criticism, a better criticism, is that the novel is at times too dynamic. It comes thisclose to breaking the 4th wall on several occasions, so extreme are some of the scene choices. Watson can go all out, in fact occasionally too far. I get that extremism can be an art form, but it needs to be delivered in measured fashion, otherwise it's just an angry shotgun blast—which Space Marine sometimes is.

In the end, Space Marine offsets the gravitas of Warhammer fiction with an absurdist relativism to the brutality of war. Woven throughout Space Marine's visceral soldier trainings and grisly battles are reminders of the cultures of Nazi Germany, Ghengkis Khan, and other warmongering countries have deployed in order to justify their aims for conquering and dominance. Conflating religion, culture, and physical violence, it's all there in bloody “glory”. The book is not for the feint of heart, and Watson's prose style is thick and requires parsing. But beyond this, indeed it offers a neon cocaine vision of war's future that excites the mind as much as eye.