by Dan Abnett
I tried to mix up the way I wrote that action too. I hope that’s obvious and that it worked. Some fights are straight, ‘cinematic’ accounts (e.g. Sanguinius against the Titans). Others are tight, point of view (e.g. most of Loken’s fights). Others are wide-angle and impressionistic (e.g. the first repulse at Colossi, at the start of part two). Others are intense, terse, relentless (e.g. Camba Diaz at the bridge), where the prose itself breaks down under the assault. Some are incredibly matter-of-fact (e.g. Krole), while others don’t really describe the fight at hand at all (e.g. Abaddon’s stream of consciousness ‘bargaining’ in the kill-zone).
I reasoned that if I wrote all the action in the same way, it would just become relentlessly dull. You have no idea how fast you use up words like ‘huge’, ‘shoot’, ‘kill’, ‘explode,’ etc. in books like this.
Tone
And that variation extended to the various sections too, not just the fights. I wanted the tone to shift with the characters. Sanguinius’ strand, for instance, is written in a ‘chivalric’ manner, using the language of epic and heroic warfare. Piers’ sections are down and dirty. Krole’s are intimate, and both clinically detailed and oddly distracted, a sense emphasised by the use of first person. The Saturnine strand was rendered in a much more ‘modern military’ fashion. And so on.
I think it’s also worth noting the flavour too. Saturnine is, principally, a novel about loyalist victories, but it’s ironic that the biggest ‘defeat’ (Eternity Wall Port) is the most damn heroic, and the biggest victory (beneath Saturnine) is utterly bleak. 1 had expected the final, climactic clash of Loken and co. against the Sons of Horus to be the biggest fight of the book, but when I got there I realised – once again, driven by geography and plot logic – that it had to be an absolutely brutal massacre. To show Dorn’s scheme working, the Saturnine Trap had to be exactly that: merciless killing, a slaughter. If it was tougher than that, more evenly matched (and, to be fair, it does get tougher than that), but if it was tougher than that, it would make Dorn look like an idiot. If the Sons of Horus got in and made any serious gains, it would show Dorn to be an incompetent fool, and in no way deserving of his ‘master defender’ reputation. The point of Saturnine is that it’s a trap that works. Dorn has risked everything on it.
The brutality of the Saturnine thread shows how the loyalists have been pushed to a point they never expected to reach. It’s not glory. It’s survival. It’s vengeance.
The Lore (part 2)
So, with the help of answers from my patient colleagues (you have no idea how dumb some questions were), I worked to fold in the lore. Novels are hard to write, and this was possibly the hardest ever (fun fact: longest too); it was tough to write even a single sentence without stopping to check a detail. ‘What’s this guy’s sword called?’ ‘Is he right-handed?’ ‘Have these two met before?’ ‘Is this the correct word for this thing?’ I have never looked up and cross-checked so much in my life. I said to John French at one point that if I’d been obliged to do this much referencing while working on, say, a major comic crossover event, I’d have quit. It was stupid levels of minutiae. But something kept me going, and I think it was the simple fact that I love Warhammer 40,000 and have become completely committed to finishing – properly – the job we started with Horus Rising.
Let’s face it, there is a certain amount of expectation. The ending needs to deliver.
With Saturnine, I wanted to draw in lots of things – characters, ideas and themes – and put them all together, in some cases, literally (like the bad-ass kill team captains, side by side). I wanted to draw on as many of the other books as I could. I discovered there are different kinds of lore – the ‘big’ lore of the background, the ‘little’ lore that connects it all, and the ‘invisible’ lore of the books themselves. By this, I mean call-backs to the way things have been written before. I guess you could call these ‘Easter Eggs’. I deliberately used phrases that echoed past books, things that only make sense for series readers. You may have noticed them (I feel like I shouldn’t point them out, to be fair), but I mean things like: ‘I was there the day…’, ‘Horus was a fool…’, ‘What are you really afraid of?’ Those are just some of the obvious ones. There are plenty more, some of them side-nods to past events, some of them winks at ongoing themes, like tarot. You either notice them, or you don’t (or you can go back and look for them).
Many of the themes are Easter Eggs too. This ties back to what I was saying at the start: there are things we had to include, and things we had to make sense of. The building blocks of Warhammer 40,000.
Themes
I’ll be honest, I don’t think about ‘themes’ when I’m writing a book. I think it’s counter-productive to the writing process, even though it’s something you’ll find in every ‘how to write’ manual. If you’ve got a hold of the story and the characters, themes sprout anyway. But the theme here is probably ‘truth’, which sounds dire, I know (probably one of the reasons I don’t like to think about ‘themes’). One of the principal things that happens because of the Heresy is the rise of 40K’s religion, the belief in the divine nature of the Emperor. That’s a big thing to pull off – the swing from a very secular society to a very religious one – especially when the readers know that (essentially) the Emperor isn’t a god. It makes all the characters look stupid if they suddenly start believing. I wanted to show, at almost every level, that the siege was a crisis of such magnitude that culture was fracturing under the pressure. Everything was being re-evaluated. In a time so dark, people looked for things to trust, truths to cling to, things to believe in to keep them going. The Emperor, despite His best efforts to avoid it, is becoming that. It’s a necessity, as necessary as Dorn’s increasing ruthlessness. It’s a survival tool.
I wanted to show that the spontaneous rise of a religion isn’t easy, and it isn’t a straight path. Most modern religions (and by that, I mean religious movements that have sprung up in the last couple of millennia) do not have an easy time of it at the start. They struggle against the societies they have been born into, societies that resist change. They work underground, by word of mouth, and they suffer catastrophic setbacks. I deliberately made the Eternity Wall strand of this book the most ‘religious’, in terms of them finding faith, all the while knowing that it was doomed and wasn’t really going to go anywhere. The characters at the port depict the growing mindset that must be prevailing elsewhere, throughout mankind.
They also talk about lies a lot. Everyone talks about truth and lies. Hari comes to understand that Piers’ blatant, unashamed lies are truly important for psychological survival. People grasp at anything that gives them hope. Piers isn’t the only liar, of course – Dorn is too. Dorn understands that it’s got to a point where the truth must be, at the least, controlled, to stave off doom. He commissions a history for psychological effect, but knows it will never be published (similarly, for psychological reasons). He manipulates to get his result. Everyone manipulates: Abaddon, Perturabo, Malcador, Magnus… And everyone who is being manipulated (the Khan, Sanguinius, Loken, etc.) understands that they’re being manipulated, and why. Some characters act in defiance of the truth, such as Niborran and Krole, while some like Piers and Joseph manufacture their own. And I made damn sure the counter-arguments – such as Fo’s and Erda’s – were there to show it wasn’t all blind belief.
I think the point is, there is no one truth. Everyone has their own, fitted to their own purpose. Saturnine, I hope, takes no sides. It doesn’t say ‘this is right’ and ‘this is wrong’… It just shows you what people were thinking, and suggests you make your own decisions. Is the Emperor a man, a monster, a god…? Is He a hero or a villain? Does it even matter at this point? The daemons are here.
Which brings me full circle to the choices I had to make in picking a path through the continuity minefield. In order to make sense, I had to make choices. Like… how could Sanguinius and Angron ‘see’ each other from the battlements (established lore) acros
s a war zone the size of Belgium, and what passed between them? It’s not enough to show that happening. It has to make sense, and deliver for the plot. At the other end of the scale, it was the tiny things, such as Khârn’s ‘kill-counter’. It’s a silly little piece of lore, probably outdated now, but it matters to people. It wasn’t, again, enough to show it – I decided to use it (and foreshadow it), and then make it work for the story.
The story of Ollanius is probably the best example of all. The origins of the myth of the ‘patron saint of the Imperial Guard’ is something we had to show. For years, and several novels, people have assumed that Oll Persson covers that angle. And, in many ways, he does. But there are so many versions of that lore and they each matter to so many people. Some versions don’t work anymore; some miss the point of the story. During Saturnine, I thought ‘what if the myth comes from several places, the way real myths do?’ and that took me to Piers. He shows that one of the myth’s origins is a total lie, but – at the same time – utterly true. He makes up his own myth, and then, when no one’s recording it any longer, does something just as heroic. What gets remembered is the thing that matters, even if it’s not the literal truth. The equivalent, literal truth is what gets forgotten. And on that, Warhammer 40,000 is built.
The building blocks are all there: the Imperial creed, the founding myth of the Guard, the Inquisition and its need to both gather data and suppress it. And so on, and so on… ten thousand years of lore and future history, unspooling from one world-shaking moment.
Dan Abnett, Reykjavik, September 2019
Postscript – There’s a lot to unpack here – 147,000 words’ worth – and, as I said up front, I think that’s a job for the reader, not an afterword, but once I’d started writing this piece, I realised there were so many things I could comment on, like the director’s commentary for a movie. I’ve barely scratched the surface – there’s so much I could point at, or explain, or call attention to, or shine a light on. Like Leetu, for example. But, you know, word count. If there’s one big take-away from this afterword, it’s this: don’t ever, ever ask a writer to dissect his own novel, because we’re not used to talking out loud, and once we get started, boy, do we not shut up.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the ‘High Lords’ – Nick Kyme, Guy Haley, Chris Wraight, John French, Gav Thorpe and Aaron Dembski-Bowden – for efforts above and beyond the call, and also the High Lords Emeritus, Graham McNeill and Jim Swallow. Thank you all for your help and patience.
Serious thanks too to Jacob Youngs (honorary High Lord) and Karen Miksza, Nik Abnett and Jess Woo for first reading and copy edit brilliance, Rachel Harrison for skillfully negotiating art and maps, and to everyone, great and small, Primarch or lasman, who has contributed to the myth of the Horus Heresy over the years.
