Horus Rising

"Yes. The Horus Heresy is one of the foundational myths of the 40k universe. It’s where everything went bad. It’s viewed as a moment of great optimism. It was a golden age of humanity’s expansion to the edge of the galaxy and Manifest Destiny and all that good stuff, for the Imperium at least – and then unfortunately, half the Imperium turned on the Emperor. And it was a huge galactic-wide Civil War. The Emperor’s sons, the Primarchs, led by Horus, turned on their brothers and ignited the galaxy in this huge war that ultimately broke the Imperium… beyond all repair? – to be determined… And that led to the slow decline and stagnation that ultimately leads to the Imperium, 10,000 years in the Future. So it’s the creation myth, essentially, a time of legend, of Gods walking amongst men and great deeds bestriding worlds, that sort of thing. Hats off to Dan. We all gathered in Nottingham to discuss it: what could this be? What sort of stories should we tell? How is this going to feel like a different beast to straight 40k? Because one of the things that kept coming up over and over again was that these ought to feel like different books, so that you would know just by the tone and the language that this was a Heresy novel. And the lion’s share of the credit for that has to go to Dan. We had this giant meeting with writers, editors, artists, the senior big-wigs at the Workshop, the IP gurus at the time; and we spent a week just exploring the themes of what the Heresy was about, what kind of characters we’d like to see, roughly how long we thought this was going to span, how many books (and on that latter point, we were all wildly wrong.) After that week or so, we had pages upon pages of notes, and then it was all essentially dumped in Dan’s lap – like, “Enjoy, have fun.” So I didn’t envy him the Herculean task that was ahead of him. But also, for all of us who’ve been into this IP for so long, this was – wow. We’re getting to play with the big toys here. So on the one hand, you’ve got huge excitement, and on the other you’ve got, “Oh, I hope I don’t mess this up…” Then Dan went away and did his thing. We were all in contact throughout this, throwing ideas around. I was doing the second book in the series, so Dan and I were in more or less constant contact for a long time while he was penning the book. And then he sent me the manuscript, and it was probably one of the most exciting books that I’ve ever read. Dan’s a top-tier writer anyway, but this was like Dan Abnett on steroids. It was just brilliant. The language felt uniquely suited to this period, and the characters were so vividly drawn so quickly out the box. For example, I remember reading the exchanges between the Space Marines and thinking, “Oh, Dan, Dan, what have you done? You’ve got this all wrong. These Space Marines, the way they’re talking, it just doesn’t feel like the way a Space Marine should talk in the 41st millennium… Oh, wait, you mad bastard genius, of course!” Because they’re not the Space Marines of the 41st millennium. These are the ones who had a lot more freedom in how they expressed themselves. They are Space Marines through and through, but all the centuries of dogma and chains of duty and burden that were placed on them after the Heresy don’t exist yet. Once that switch clicked in my brain, it was perfect – to think of something so fundamentally different about these characters that changed the whole shape and tone of the books, was incredible. Seeing the mythical elements come to life on the page was amazing because in all the writing I’d done up to this point, every time the name Horus was mentioned, it was a byword for treachery, a warrior who spat on his oaths of loyalty. And here we were getting to see Horus as the hero; the man you would have followed into Hell if he’d asked; the wonderful, the humorous, the Emperor’s right hand man who’s trusted above and beyond anyone else. You realize, of course, that this fall doesn’t mean anything if we hate him already. We’ve got to love him for the tragedy of his fall to really be that knife in the heart. And Dan did an amazing job of making Horus a character you loved. I remember reading this and getting towards the end of the book, when it suddenly occurred to me: wait a minute, in my book, I’m going to have to turn him evil. I’m going to have to do a whole lot of really horrible things to him. And now, oh, I don’t want to do that, because I really love Horus! But the story is what it is, you know, you can’t change future-history… We can play with that history, though. That was always one of the watchwords we used with these books: always be bringing something new to the table, some new layers to what people thought they knew. Because we’re telling a story where everybody ‘knows’ the ending. They know Horus goes bad, that there’s a big battle on Earth at the end, that the Emperor defeats him, yada yada. So there were loads of points along the way in the story where we knew that readers were going to know how things shake out. We needed to add something more to it, something that makes this victory or defeat more emotional, more revealing; some revelation within this story that casts things in a whole new light. Dan laid an amazing set of foundations. And he was very generous as a writer. In a lot of the back and forth we were doing, I was saying things like, “Can I get you to set up this thing so I can then pay it off here?” One of the joys of writing a book that you’ve planned out and have had in your head for so long is getting to pay off a lot of the moments you set up earlier on; there’s real joy in writing that final payoff to these scenes. And Dan set them all up for us to then knock down in the second and third books, and many more since then. As a reader, it was a transformative book. I know that sounds very grand, but it was; it really rewired portions of my brain, in terms of the kind of story that we could tell and how I certainly needed to really dig deep to continue the story in a way that felt worthy of what had gone before it, and also then set up what would be in the third book. So as a book, it’s exciting for all the things that happen on the page, and it’s exciting for what it was doing to us as readers and writers. You could not have asked for a better book to kick this whole series off. The Space Marines are genetically engineered super soldiers. They’re seven-foot tall giants that were once twelve or thirteen-year-old boys, implanted with all sorts of specialized organs to make them faster, bigger, stronger, more resilient – to the point where they are essentially like walking tanks. They’re armoured in the best warplate the Imperium can provide. They’re armed with the most devastating weapons. Each one of them is a force to be reckoned with, that could take on a hundred soldiers on their own, but if you organize them into a Chapter of their battle brothers, who they’ve fought alongside for decades or centuries, then these are the ultimate warriors. Their tagline is ‘and they shall know no fear’ because they are the most fearsome, most disciplined, lethal army in the Imperium’s arsenal. Back in the Horus Heresy era, they were organized in legions, tens of thousands strong; but after the Heresy, they were broken up into smaller Chapters. The thought was, given this giant war we’ve just had, maybe we shouldn’t concentrate so much power in one man’s hands. Each chapter is roughly a thousand warriors, and they are essentially autonomous fighting machineries that are called upon by the Imperium, or petitioned by planetary governors or whatever, to come to their aid. And if they’re lucky, they might answer. The Imperial Guard, the Astra Militarum, are ordinary men and women who are recruited, press-ganged or volunteered. They’re you and I, conscripted into a regular army, handed a lasgun and pointed at the enemy, and that’s about it. You get some training, and some of them are specialized… So you have people like the Catachans, who are expert jungle fighters; or the Death Korps of Krieg who are expert siege engineers and guys who fight in the trenches and the mud and the blood of up-close and personal combat; or Elysian drop troops, who are great aerial paras."