Cadia Stands!

An epic journey through the last days of Cadia with heaps of well known characters and some new ones that you are genuinely rooting for! It’s a long read for a Warhammer 40k book but it held my attention and even made me quite emotional- I really enjoyed it and would recommend it.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

A better audio treatment for a solid enough story

I'm pleased Black LIbrary saw fit to re-release this audiobook with David Seddon to replace Mark Elstob—who did the original narration and populated the battle for Cadia with grating, silly voices that bore no relation to the characters in previous productions. David Seddon is a good narrator and perhaps crucially for a Cadia-based story, he has a solid command of the accents of North-East England (for anyone unfamiliar with previous audiobooks, it's a kind a verbal shorthand of W40k audiobooks that all Cadians are from the North East, in the same way that all Tanith are Scots or Irish).

Anyone familiar with W40k lore already knows the events of the fall of Cadia, but Robert Rath populates the bare bones with rich characterisation, fleshing out and making figures such as Ursarkar E. Creed into human, flawed and interesting characters.
However, at twenty hours, the limits of my interest were hit before this audiobook ended—just like with the End And The Death, the problem is that while it's fun to be on the journey, when you already know how the story ends, there's not much in the way of tension or 'will-they-won't they' anxiety that even a skilled author like Rath can raise as the endgame approaches.

The second reason The Fall of Cadia was not as fun to me as it could've been is the continual buffing-up of Abaddon The Despoiler, who is, yet again, depicted as a brilliant general who can do no wrong (in the same way every past Black Crusade has been rewritten as a brilliant strategic victory) who explicitly refuses the gifts of the Chaos Gods i.e. he has no superpowers, Yet, he unaccountably wades through loyalist space marines, dispatching two or three with a every blow, and is impervious to weapons fire which mysteriously misses him. Daddy's old terminator suit must be some serious plot armour. Abaddon's an interesting character when you see him politicking to hold the various alliances of the Black Legion together, but when he's the bad guy, the Black Library policy seems to be that he has to be bigged-up at every opportunity. It annoys me because it's illogical and inconsistent and it's bad storytelling: characters who don't make mistakes and cannot fail are not interesting. At the end of the day, Abaddon's a space marine, not a primarch. He has no Chaos gifts, yet by some accident of history, he's the head baddie of Chaos, so he needs to be positioned as buff enough to pose a credible threat to Guilliman or the Lion.

Maybe it's just me, but I've read enough stories about guardsmen being slaughtered wholesale by Chaos marines just to prove how OP they are. The best bits of Fall of Cadia for me are the handful of moments when the plucky Cadians get their own back, and actually dispatch a few chaos marines—nice to know it's actually a thing that normal people are allowed to kill them, otherwise you'd wonder why the Astra Militarum even existed.

Nonetheless, rants aside—David Seddon's excellent, and this is good fun for lore-junkies that puts much-needed flesh on the bare bones of established history, but the inevitability of the plot means the Fall of Cadia falls some way short of the brilliance of Rath's The Infinite and the Divine.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful