In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground…
So began the 1983 hit action-adventure series The A-Team on NBC, a series which would go on to run for five years. The show put together the unusual members of an Army Special Forces team led by Lt. Col. John “Hannibal” Smith, a brilliant and charismatic tactician. Episodes tended to follow a fairly rote formula: the team encounters a problem and prevails through a combination of superb planning and clever improvisation.
The grim darkness of the far future is quite a bit removed from an 80’s tv show, but I couldn’t help but think of it frequently as I read Leontus: Lord Solar by Rob Young.
The Story
Leading an invasion to reclaim the Ork-infested Fortuna Minor, Lord Solar- the Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar- finds himself crash-landing in an escape pod on the planet’s surface after everything goes pear-shaped. The Imperial fleet is in full retreat- what units managed to make planetfall are quickly overrun and massacred by slavering Ork hordes.
Lord Solar collects a ragtag band of survivors, including Attilan cavalry troops, a Krieg Sergeant, and a Catachan Medic. As his troops wonder how to merely survive on a hostile world, Lord Solar sets his sights on a bigger prize: how to win.
A Commando Tale
Leontus: Lord Solar shares common DNA with the long tradition of plucky-commandos-behind-enemy-lines stories, from 1955’s The Dam Busters to 2009’s Inglourious Basterds. As he wages a guerrilla war against the Orks looking to re-establish a beachhead through which the Imperium can make a second landing attempt, the Lord Solar must contend with the everpresent twin shortages of men and materiel.
Here is where the story absolutely shines, as Young wields a terrific pen when it comes to writing action stories. His 2023 Longshot was a cracking sniper story set against a T’au occupying force, and Young keeps this novel’s lean 218 pages moving at a brisk pace. There aren’t any long, drawn-out passages of Lord Solar reminiscing about the peaceful life, and unlike recent books like Broken Crusade and Morvenn Vahl: Spear of Faith we aren’t treated to any introspecting segments where a leader works through crippling self-doubt.
The Protagonist
No, Lord Solar is a commander’s commander, fully accepting that the grim cost of war arrives with a butcher’s bill. War is hell and lives will be lost. There’s a terrific scene where he is forced to defend his apparent callousness to one of his more unruly commandos:
‘Our lives are just currency for you to pay the price of victory?’
‘Of course they are!’ the Lord Solar snapped, muscles tensing along his jawline as he glared at Belgutei. ‘My life, your life, the lives of everyone here – they are the bulwark against the darkness. On Fortuna Minor it is the xenos. On the next world it may be the mutant, or the heretic. We will fight until we can fight no longer, and pass our weapons to those that may continue the fight. That is the way of the Astra Militarum.’
Lord Solar is as pragmatic as you’d expect a Lord Commander of the Guard to be, but not at the expense of his humanity (as the tale’s Epilogue makes abundantly clear). He’s also thoroughly a badass, as depicted in this passage as he vanquishes an Ork leader.
‘You’z a good nemesis,’ the ork grunted between pained breaths, his blood spilling out in rhythmic spurts from his ruined arms. ‘I chose good, I did.’
‘I was the greatest threat you ever faced, beast,’ Leontus said through gritted teeth, then he leaned in close. ‘But to the Imperium, you were just another ork!’
That’s some serious Raul Julia/M. Bison “for me, it was Tuesday” vibes right there.
The Supporting Cast
If there’s a weakness with Leontus: Lord Solar it’s that while it allows for its protagonist to shine, it does so somewhat at the expense of the supporting cast. We grow attached to the Gaunt’s Ghosts precisely because Dan Abnett gives them room and space to develop personalities of their own. As a result, when some of them ultimately die, there’s a genuine sense of loss.
Because the secondary characters of Leontus: Lord Solar aren’t given a lot of ink to develop, the reader doesn’t have a lot of reasons to get attached to them. And without that attachment, the story loses much of its emotional stakes. Contrast this with another recent tale of Guard commandos on a hostile world, Victoria Hayward’s sublime Deathworlder. As with Abnett, the individual characters- not just their charismatic leader- drove the narrative forward. As that story approached its conclusion, I was gripped by genuine dread at the prospect of one of the characters I’d come to appreciate getting killed off.
Astra Militarum stories are some of the universe’s most relatable because in a universe of the alien and the super, they are the most like us, the reader. Even given its shorter page count, Leontus: Lord Solar would have benefitted from a “fireside chat” scene where some of the personalities of the supporting cast could have been brought to the fore.
Young has certainly done this before in Longshot where- following a tense battle with T’au forces the Guardsmen main characters get to unwind with the newly-encountered Kintair Rifles while setting up a forward operating base. Alas, we never really get a sense of Arnetz, Sgt. Raust, or even the Attilan Belgutai (though he gets more screen time acting as a foil to Lord Solar).
Overall
Ultimately, Leontus: Lord Solar is good at what it is, which is a ripping action story highlighting its namesake protagonist. You get a nice sense of both his tactical nous and inspirational qualities as he manages to take a small but determined collection of survivors and fashion an effective military force.
His own “A-Team,” as it were.
If the supporting cast comes across as a bit thin, Leontus himself makes up for it by being larger than life- exactly the quality that makes for memorable commanders. Just as we remember Gen. George Patton’s famous “pause that refreshes” over the Rhine River in World War Two, we’ve always enjoyed a bit of the daring and theatrical on the battlefield. In Young’s hands the Lord Commander of the Segmentum Solar delivers.
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