The Best Warhammer 40k Books

Let’s start at the beginning: what is the world of Warhammer 40k?

It’s the 41st millennium. The tagline of the game says it all: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” The Imperium of Man, which is a galactic-spanning empire in the 41st millennium, is ruled with an iron fist by the God Emperor of mankind and his armies of the Astra Militarum, the Space Marines, the Sisters of Battle, the Adeptus Mechanicus… They maintain his domain and protect it from invasions from without and within: from rapacious alien species, from traitors, and from those who they once they counted as allies, but are now their most hated foes. It’s a galaxy of darkness; of war; of the Gothic dark ages but with lasers.

The tabletop games and the books are set in this world. How do the two relate? Are they both contributing facts to the canon, or do the games lead…?

It’s a mix of both, and the pendulum swings wildly sometimes. The game and the tabletop and the miniatures and so on are the main drivers of the story and the lore, and anything properly official comes out of the design studio in Nottingham. The books are layers of story and mythology that add on to that, because obviously there’s lots more that a novel can do. It can go places the tabletop can’t, and explore things in a lot more depth than the tabletop is able to easily do. You can really spend a lot of time with the characters, and properly get into the warp and weft of the world and the people who live there, and what it takes to exist in a society like that.

So for the most part, the studio is the main driver of the story, and the books are supplemental to that; they add depth and richness to the world. But sometimes the authors have done stuff that the players, the readers and the designers really respond to, and those end up feeding back into the main mythology. A lot of the terminology that we’ve used in the books has worked its way back into the army books, and the Codex that players use to create their armies. And the Horus Heresy novels have driven the creation of models and rule books… They’ve wagged the dog and been wagged by the dog at certain times. It’s a healthy mix.

As writers and contributors to this IP, we love it. I wouldn’t write in it if I didn’t. So we’re trying to push the boundaries here and there with things, but we’re always respectful of it, because it’s a shared IP – you can’t go around breaking all the toys and then expecting everybody to play nice with you. It’s a nice, respectful balance.

From 2000 to 2007 I worked in the Games Workshop Design Studio, so I’ve straddled both lines. I’m always very aware that this is a game. But when I write, the game does not exist. This is a world with characters and so on. And if you can riff off a rule in the game that a player might recognize, that shows a level of understanding that they trust; it shows that you know this world, and they’re in safe hands. With IP tie-in writing, a lot of what the reader enjoys is knowing that you know the lore, and there’s a trust in you to tell a good story first and foremost, but also not completely break what they imagine things are from the game. You’re generally not going to see a tiny goblin defeating a demon prince or something like that. I mean, the dice could favour it, but it’s highly unlikely. That trust between the reader and you, knowing that you know what you’re talking about, that you love the universe as much as they do, is something that really helps with the storytelling in these books.

We’ve already touched on the huge contribution of the Horus Heresy series, so let’s start with your first choice – a story set 10,000 years before the world of the game. Tell us about Horus Rising by Dan Abnett.

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.

It’s a lot of pressure to write that origin book, I imagine.

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.

It must have been quite a moment, to see that origin story written out in full…

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.

Let’s go forward again into the 41st millennium, and meet Space Marines after the fall in your second choice… Before we do, could we quickly explain some of these terms, the major players – how the Space Marines differ from the Militarum?

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.

Great, thank you. Let’s talk about some Space Marines, then: could you introduce your second choice, Gav Thorpe’s Angels of Darkness?

Angels of Darkness is, again, a book that upended a lot of my assumptions, and a lot of the readers’ assumptions as well. The Dark Angels is a fan favourite chapter of the Space Marines – the first army I collected was Dark Angels – and they’d always been presented as these very stoic medieval monks in robes, a sort of Freemasonry, inner circle, secrets-within-secrets vibe. And there’s one line in this book that has just stuck with me over the twenty-odd years since it was published, which, when I say it out loud, just makes me want to crumble to dust…

It’s a two-pronged story. There’s an Interrogator-Chaplain of the Dark Angels, Chaplain Boreas, who is the main character. Interrogator-Chaplains are the ones who hunt the Fallen – and the Fallen are Dark Angels from the Horus Heresy era, ten thousand years ago, who were swept up in time and space. They were the ones who officially betrayed the Emperor and the Lion back in the day – the Lion being the Primarch of the Dark Angels. He’s their leader, their God amongst men, from back in the Horus Heresy days. So one thread is Boreas interrogating Astelan, who’s one of the Fallen he’s captured, and the other thread is Astelan recounting his story of how he came to be Boreas’ prisoner. And it’s the back and forth between them that makes this book so special to me.

A lot of 40k novels back in the early 2000s were… I don’t want to say ‘simple’ as if that’s a bad thing, but they were fairly straightforward action novels in a lot of ways. Angels of Darkness is one of the books that really challenged that paradigm. There’s real storytelling and characters here, and sure there are plenty of battles, but that’s not the main thrust. The main conflict is from these two characters having this interrogation conversation over the period of one long, dark night of the soul, and the way the power dynamic changes between them with each new revelation that comes out. You’re not quite sure, as the story progresses, who’s actually in the wrong here. They’ve both made very questionable decisions over their lives.

What was the line you mentioned, the one that stuck with you?

Ah… Astelan is talking about the time during the Horus Heresy when the Lion was coming towards Terra, to the siege, to break the traitor lines and save the day. One of the background pieces was that the Lion didn’t get there in time. Warp travel delayed him. And there’s a line in the book where Astelan talks about how the Lion was there, and could have got there in time. To which Boreas says, “Why didn’t he then?” And Asterlan says, “Well, it’s obvious. He was waiting to see who won.” And that just was like a bolt exploding in my head. The idea that the Lion might have waited to see? So that if Horus had won, he could say, “I was always for you”… The doubt that sowed within the Dark Angels! Astelan, of course, could be lying. That’s his specialty, he is a master manipulator. But all through the book, all of his best lies have got that kernel of truth to them, and Boreas has to try and unpick what is true and what is false throughout this. That line effectively is the coup de grace for him, when he realizes that a lot of the truths he’s held on to all these years have now been cast into doubt. Is he lying? Is he telling the truth? Neither explanation is particularly comforting to him.

It was a real wow-moment for me. By this point, I’d written maybe one or two novels; and a lot of what was driving us at the time, in terms of writing, was to try and do something more than straightforward novels of the game. We wanted to tell stories that were worth reading, whether you liked 40k or not – these were going to be just good science fiction stories that were fun to read because they had plenty of action, but had something deeper to them. Back then, the label of a tie-in novel was not thought of as a particularly good one; people thought that these novels potentially were just cash-ins. And we’re not writing them for that! Gav and I both worked in the Design Studio at that point, we were gainfully employed. This was never a cash grab from anyone’s point of view. We really wanted to broaden the mythology, and tell cool stories that were thematically richer and deeper than you might have expected from a novel based on a tabletop game of toy soldiers. And this was one of the books that I credit for really doing that well.

Your own book, Storm of Iron, hops between the Imperium soldiers’ and Chaos soldiers’ point of view – and there are individuals from Chaos I was really rooting for. Could you tell us a little about creating the world of the enemy?

Yes. First of all, to set the scene for Chaos: take everything about Space Marines, but evil. These are the guys who are likewise genetically engineered. They fought the Horus Heresy back in the day, fled Terra when Horus was defeated, and retreated to a place called the Eye of Terror, a gigantic warp anomaly two stars to the left of Earth. This is a place of roiling chaos and madness and demons and so on, and time is not a linear thing there – you could be in there for what you think is five minutes, and when you emerge, a thousand years has passed. So these guys now have the extra benefits, shall we say, of a chaos power infusing them with dark energy, or mutations, or blessings of the dark gods, or demon weapons – all that sort of thing.

Storm of Iron came out of a frustration I had: the bad guys got short shrift in our books. At one point, the bad guys always lost. That annoyed me! These guys fought alongside their Primarchs. They marched across half the galaxy. They’ve had hundreds, potentially thousands, of years of experience to hone their craft, and have become more powerful thanks to the various Chaos powers. And they kept losing. They would turn up in a book saying, “I am the Chosen of the Dark Gods”, and then they’d be stabbed, and that’d be the end of that. I always felt they were portrayed as almost bumbling idiots, as foils, just to show how cool the Imperium was. But these guys are just as dangerous as the Imperium, if not more so. The only reason that they’re not murdering us all is that there’s way less of them than there are of the Space Marines and the Militarum. But they are deadly, deadly foes. So I really wanted to do a book where not only did we follow the bad guys, but they won.

In addition to feeling that the bad guys were somewhat cartoony from time to time, I’d always felt that if the bad guys don’t win sometimes, then they cease to become a threat. You don’t ever read a book with Chaos in it wondering if they’ll win. And then that sense of peril for our heroes is much, much less.

I wrote a story to show just how ruthless they are, and how organized, despite the word chaos in there. The Iron Warriors especially are an army who did not particularly dedicate themselves to any one God, so they’re not like frothing Berzerkers who follow Khorn. They’re not hedonistic weirdos who follow Slaanesh or diseased followers of Nurgle. They follow Chaos as a whole, and they’ve hung on to their discipline and their ranks and the organization that they had back in the day. They’re the lawful evil of chaos, essentially. And I really wanted to see them win.

And the particular strengths of the Iron Warriors are important here, right?

Yes. Their big schtick is sieges. They’re very good at waging them, they’re very good at surviving them. So I wanted to show them doing what it was they did best, and that sort of relentless grind of a siege, the structure of how a siege normally plays out, felt like it really neatly mapped onto the structure of a book: the rising escalation each time, the fact that a siege has a rhythm to it, periods of intensity and periods of calm in between while you’re digging the trenches or licking your wounds, and then it’s all fire and blood again. It had a real nice flow of tension and release that really worked for a story as much as it did the battle. And it allowed me to play with the audience a little bit. In a lot of books, you kind of know where it’s going; sure, the bad guys are doing this, but ultimately we’re going to end up in a heroic victory. The siege structure allowed me to pull the readers’ expectations back and forth so that most people would be reading it thinking, “Of course, the Imperium are going to hold the fort. They’re going to repel the Iron Warriors” – and then in other parts, thinking, “Oh no, maybe they’re going to break through at this point” – but then the sudden counterattack… So it was a way to keep the reader guessing until the end, hopefully, what the outcome was going to be. And like most sieges that end in blood rather than surrender, everything is very slow and grindy until it’s not, and then it all happens very, very quickly. So they’re just mashing up against one another, but when that final little bit of the dam breaks, it all comes crashing down – and then suddenly, “Oh, the bad guys won.”

I remember speaking to a bunch of people around the studio when copies of the book started circulating around the building, and I had one guy stop me in the corridors as we were passing through a door and say, “I just finished Storm of Iron!” So I said, “Cool, man…. Did you enjoy it?” And he was flustered for a minute or two, but he said, “Yeah, I did. I enjoyed it, but… but the bad guys won!” And I gave the same sort of explanation I just gave to you, and he said, “But the Imperium always wins.” No they don’t! If they do, where’s the tension, where’s the threat, where’s any kind of feeling of stakes? They have to lose some time, and this just happened to be a perfect way to do that. It was a fun book to write because I think it upended a lot of people’s expectations of what our villains could do.

And it’s multi-layered, too, with all the different points of view…

One thing I like to do with a lot of my books is to have all sorts of strata within the story. So, yes, you are dealing with the commander of the enemy army, and the commander of the fortress; the great and the good, and the villainous and the vile. But you’ve also got the engineers, the guys in the walls, the Space Marines – and you’ve got somebody like Hawke, who is essentially a layabout workshy guy with no intentions of being a hero. He’s just there to punch the clock and hopefully get home at some point. He’s no great lover of the Imperium or patriotic duty. He just wants to live, like a lot of us. He’s a bit of a scumbag in many ways, but he ends up being the guy who saves the day, even though he doesn’t quite intend it that way…

It’s just fun to tell the stories of everybody from the lowest to the highest and everybody in between. And it was the siege setting, again, that allowed me to do that.

It definitely adds to the tension, having so many characters you care about! I don’t want to do any spoilers for Hawke…

Well, he turns up in later books. He gets swept up into my Forges of Mars trilogy. And has he learned the lessons from the days of Storm of Iron? No, not really.

Keeping the character development consistent over such a huge timeline must be a crazy task…

Continuity is one thing when it’s your own characters and your own, say, Graham-verse or Dan-verse. We have a lot of editors who are very on the ball in terms of what our continuity was, or keeping our timelines right. And we had a lot of very open lines of communication, which was encouraged; we would all talk to one another if we wanted to see if our character could fit into somebody else’s book. It was easy enough to ask for it. In 40k we all tend to more or less plough our own furrow, but in the Heresy era, there was a lot of crossover. That connective tissue was really important to sell the idea of this living, breathing universe, where yes, characters could walk from one stage to another, because it would feel weird if they didn’t. That meant a lot of email conversations, a lot of phone conversations, and every three or four months or so we would all meet up at Games Workshop and just talk through what we were planning. Books are not fast things to go through production, so we always had lots of time to share ideas. Every time we’d get together, we’d have a state-of-the-nation discussion about where things were, what pieces were moving, who was on the board, who needed to come on it, who needed to go off it; and from there we would figure out, “Ok, if I’m doing this next story, and that guy there was in your book, he’d be really useful to put in here; or she’d really fit in that book.”

It was fairly easy, relatively speaking, at the beginning of the process. But once we got up to novel 25, 30, 40, 50… that’s when you started to say, “I can’t hold all this in my head. I need to talk to the others.” But it was fun – it was not an onerous task!

One of my favourite things that came out of this, other than the success of the series, was that these became my brothers in arms in the trenches. We all kind of knew each other anyway, from occasional meetings at a book signing or a convention or what have you, but in the Horus Heresy writers’ rooms and communications and events that came out of that, we became really good friends. And the level of trust that came out of that really helped the books. Because all the meetings we had about it had just the right amount of ego in the room, where you felt comfortable saying, “Here’s my idea, and I think it’s bloody brilliant” – and then everybody else would jump on it, hit it with hammers, and throw ideas at it. You were willing to put your idea in the ring, but also willing to have it kicked around the room and reshaped, so it came back to you and you said, “This is way better. This is awesome.” That was a great atmosphere. I’ve seldom worked with such a wonderful bunch of human beings to craft something before. And we made lifelong friends out of that creative process.

Incredible. Your next choice stays with the Militarum – could you tell us about Deathworlder by Victoria Hayward?

This is Victoria’s first novel for Black Library, and it’s a cracker. The Astra Militarum, the Imperial Guard, have had some definitive Guard novels – like Dan’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. But they’re very specific in their time period and their characters and what have you. So Victoria taking on the Catachans was really cool. We hadn’t really seen a huge amount of them, and they’re such an interesting regiment…

The Imperial Guard are often thought of as the cannon fodder – don’t worry about them, there’s millions of them, plenty more where they came from. But the Catachans… Imagine you’ve got every 80s action hero, the bulging muscles and the one-liners, and stuck them in a book. And that’s essentially what Deathworlder is in the best possible way.

It’s a novel about impossible odds, as a lot of 40k books are. The Imperial Guard are stuck in a world that is in the final death throes of being devoured by the Tyranids. The Tyranids are an extra-galactic race of ravenous killers. They devour planets, consume the biomass, and then use that to feed this flesh forge in their hiveship, to craft ever more dangerous organisms. And every part of the fleet is connected – whether it’s the flesh-boring beetles that they fire from their guns, or the giant norn queens, and so on – every one of them is linked in this Gestalt consciousness, the hive mind.

What really appealed to me with this upfront was this was never a book where the good guys were going to triumph. This world was already lost. It starts at the point of “We’re all going to die”… and that’s a really interesting kicking off point. Normally we start with the threat, and now we will go and face that threat, and hilarity and adventures will ensue. Whereas this one starts with, “We’re all going to die. Now what?”

They’re offered a last ray of hope, a Mechanicus facility, where there’s something of vital importance, something more important than the survival of the planet; if they can get it and then get off world. But everybody else is left behind to die, and that’s considered a fair trade. We follow a group of Catachans led by Major Wulf Khan, charged with fulfilling this mission; and on the way, she collects some Cadian survivors from a fortress that was basically overrun and destroyed. It’s a ‘men on a mission’ movie… although there’s actually a lovely balance of male and female characters in this book, which is something we’ve been trying to do for a long time – to bring in a sense that this isn’t just boys’-own-adventure stuff.

So you get to see this group navigate through a world overcome by Tyranids, with spores and bio-organism fogs and pools that are digesting everything and turning it to mulch; and that means everything, the buildings, the people, the food, the fauna, the flora, everything organic is going to be dissolved and eaten. Seeing that up close is fascinating; it’s such an interesting setting for the story. We see their lust for life and survival – because the Catachans come from a world where everything is hostile. It’s like Australia turned up to eleven. Everything there is hostile, poisonous, carnivorous, deadly. But even to the Catachans, this book’s setting is extreme, so we get to see these extremes coming at one another over the course of the book. The fun was in seeing who was going to live to the end…

Victoria did a great job of capturing the spirit of what makes a Catachan warrior – this fatalistic attitude that from the day you’re born, you’re a dead man. You’re in a world that actively wants to kill you at every moment. If you just have to accept that you’re dead, then you can live each day with real vim and vigour. So while they don’t laugh in the face of death and the planet’s destruction, they can cope with it probably better than most other regiments might, who would maybe give in to despair. Victoria did a great job of capturing both their spirit, and how they would react to this; and also the visceral nature of a world in its final death throes.

It’s a really interesting read. And she has an impressive command of some disgusting vocabulary when it comes to horrible bio things melting your flesh…

It sounds like a great example of something you mentioned earlier: the chance to see the psychological realities of living in this grimdark world, which maybe can’t be represented on the tabletop…

There are rules that represent fortitude and fighting skill, but yes, not necessarily mental state, other than leadership. And it’s very easy to almost transpose a plastic miniature into a character in the books, so that they don’t feel the terrors we might feel. How a human would react in this insane universe is often something that can be neglected. But Victoria did the psychology really well, the mental toll that it takes seeing a planet dying around you and your comrades being ripped apart by alien xenomorph predators. That has an effect, even on a Catachan. It highlights the humanity of them, even though they’re larger than life characters.

Let’s talk about your fourth choice, Gordon Rennie’s Execution Hour. In the timeline, this takes us to the Gothic War…

Yes, the Gothic War came out of one of Games Workshop’s games called Battlefleet Gothic, which was a space combat game between gigantic capital ships. It was an age of sail, Napoleonic sea battles sort of thing, but in space. Andy Chambers designed that game, and it was a really good game. Execution Hour came out of one of the periods at the Workshop very early on, when we were actively looking for ways that we could support releases. And Gordon’s a veteran from the comics industry and novels and so on.

The Gothic War features Abaddon, who is the arch-villain of chaos, and it’s one of his largest naval incursions into the Imperium, to break the back of the defenders and gain a foothold in Imperial space. It was this huge sector-spanning conflict to try and hold him back. Execution Hour is a story that tells of one of those giant spaceships – because spaceships in 40k are not the Millennium Falcon; they are gigantic, kilometers-long, floating cathedrals. They’re built like Cologne Cathedral and St Paul’s all in one, flying buttresses and marble statuary and brass and gold-plated filigree down the length of their hulls and so on. They’re immense, huge, stately things.

Very wisely, the book didn’t confine itself just to space: there’s a planet that’s in the path of Abaddon, and it’s full of resources and valuable people and what have you, so they go down to the planet to evacuate them. So it plays on a number of levels: age-of-sail combat in space, with boarding actions and so on, but also the very personal moments of going down to the planet surface to rescue people and bring them home.

A challenge to write.

Gordon really understood that kind of world, because of a lot of the stuff he’s done before. There are World War Two echoes in it, and that translates into the book. It gave a really nice scale to space combat, because a lot of what we’d seen in the films that we all loved was dog fights. George Lucas based many of those things in Star Wars on footage from World War Two of the fighter planes, dog-fighting at Midway and what have you. This book was a great way to show that even the fighters swarming between the capital ships are the size of a triple-decker bus.

I also loved that it had an almost upstairs, downstairs dynamic between the bridge crew and the menials. You have the people below the waterline, the oil-stained men and women who were loading the torpedo tubes and throwing ‘coal’ into the engine. For them this was war at its most callous, because what they did ultimately had little to no effect, and they were at the mercy of people higher up the chain. Is our captain good? Are the gunners good? We can shovel the coal and pull the chains, and hopefully we’ve loaded the torpedo fast enough that they can get the salvo off. But our lives are at the mercy of people we will never meet, never see. And that dispassionate distance between those characters, I think, really added something to the scale of the Imperium, and the scale of the ships – that some of these people would toil in the darkness of a spaceship’s engine room and never see sunlight. They would be born in there and they would die in there, never having set foot on a planet at all.

So this book oozes 40k character, that grim darkness of the far future where you are just grateful for this chance to serve the Emperor. It really hammers home the bleakness of the Imperium. But also these people are surrounded by this belief system, this osmosis of the Imperial mindset, so that it feels like something good to them. It helped really establish the character of 40k beyond a lot of other sci fi, and that’s partly what drew me to 40k way back in the day. A lot of the sci fi we were seeing was very clean, very optimistic. This future is not all clean and silver jumpsuits, it’s not Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, it’s not Star Trek. And don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek with a deep and abiding passion! But they feed different things in me. The Executioner Hour did, for me, a really great job of reinforcing why I loved 40k as a setting, and the way that the characters manoeuvre through this insane universe.

40k’s slogan has given the name to a whole flourishing subgenre of grimdark fantasy… Why do we like to read about these hopeless worlds?

One thing I will take issue with is hopelessness. I love me some grimdark – I’ve written in it for over twenty years – but I never write from the point of view that this is hopeless. If everything is just terrible and dark and you can never win, then it veers, for my purposes, a little too close to just being nihilism. If there’s nothing for these characters to strive for, even if it’s an illusory light at the end of the tunnel that’s actually a train coming towards them, then I think you diminish their heroism. If there’s nothing to fight for, then just lie down and die! None of these characters do that. They always fight. Whether that is just to live another minute longer, or for some noble ideal that they think makes victory or sacrifice worthwhile, then that’s something – that’s hope, even if it’s a forlorn hope.

I think there’s virtue in exploring the most terrible, cruel worlds imaginable, but still seeing people fight for something, regardless of what that is. There’s something noble in that. That’s what really appeals to me, because I love reading and writing heroic fantasy with the emphasis on ‘heroic’. There’s a lot of discussion these days about the Imperium and the Space Marines, asking, are these actually the good guys? Because a lot of what they do is very questionable, and the regime they are propping up by fighting for it also has very questionable values at its heart, in some ways. But it’s the act of fighting for something that you believe in – even if those behind you don’t believe in that, it doesn’t diminish the courage of the characters. I think it gives us hope that even when things are so terrible, more so than we could ever imagine in this world, people still fight for something better. In many ways, that’s aspirational.

Or maybe it’s just that we like to read about people having a worse day than us…

Some terrible, bleak things happen to a lot of my characters. We started this conversation off with the fact that sometimes the bad guys have to win. But with everything, there’s variety of texture that makes things interesting. And if everything’s grimdark all the time, it becomes a bit one-note – just the same as if the good guys always win. So I like to vary everything up. That variety keeps me interested as a writer, and hopefully it keeps people interested as readers. I hope they come to my books thinking, “I’m going to be entertained by a cool story with cool characters, and I don’t know what it’s going to be. Is it going to be something just horrendous and I’m going to need a bath afterwards, or am I going to be inspired to do something?”

We’ve come to your last choice. Please tell us about Chris Wraight’s Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.

Timeline-wise, this book comes even earlier than the Horus Heresy. This predates the coming of the Space Marines on any large scale, and Constantin Valdor is the lord of the Adeptus Custodes, who are the Emperors’ Praetorians – his bodyguards. Each one of them is individually even more powerful and stronger than a Space Marine; there is so much effort and science required to create just one of them. They’re often thought of as emotionless robots, and that’s not true, but they do have absolute control over themselves in ways that the Space Marines don’t. The Space Marines can be angry, they can be grief stricken, they can be indulgent – and some might argue that’s what ultimately leads them to Chaos. But the Custodians are essentially immune to all of that. These are stoic killers and protectors of the Emperor, and Valdor is first and foremost among them.

The book picks up not long after the final death of the Thunder Warriors, who were these crude, barbarous warriors that the Emperor used to conquer Earth and bring it under his rule. The Wars of Unity were fought with these techno-barbarians at his side. And in the winning of this war, they all died.

There’s a character called Uwoma Kandawire who is one of Earth’s politicians. At this point all the old dynasties are still thinking that they are still the rulers of Earth too now, and that’s not so much the case, but they don’t know that yet. The book follows her investigation when she figures something’s not right here. This army of Thunder Warriors, they surely didn’t just all die, just at the last moment; there’s something wrong. Valdor attempts to try and reason with her, to say, “You should let this go. It probably is one of these things best left in the past…” Because they were all murdered. They were barbarians who probably would not have fitted into the new Imperium. And when you have won this global war with these terrible people at your side, you maybe don’t want to be associated with them as you’re ushering in a new golden age of civilization and culture and reason and intellect.

This story is running in parallel with the birth of the Space Marines as a galactic-scale fighting force, because at this time they’re quite few in number, and there’s certainly not enough of them to conquer a galaxy – which is the Emperor’s next stage after securing Earth: to reconquer the galaxy. Back before then, the galaxy was humanity’s, as they’d expanded into space and claimed worlds all across it; and then in the Age of Strife that essentially collapsed overnight. So this was the plan to reclaim the galaxy for humanity, and this is where we first see the Space Marines as a mass-produced fighting force take the field – because some of the Thunder Warriors at the start are still alive, and they are not going quietly into the night. They, along with some other people, decide that the Emperor is becoming a tyrant. This is not what they fought for, and they’re going to tear this down before it gets out of hand. And at that point, the Space Marines are unleashed, and it’s terrifying, even to the Thunder Warriors.

To them, the Space Marines are almost abhorrent. They themselves are Warrior Kings – each of them is a legend who’s fought in 1000 battles, that kind of thing. And these Marine guys are just stamped out of a factory with brutality. There’s no honour, no grace in what they do, no stories are told about their victories. They’re just faceless warriors who kill. Of course, they will become heroes with names and battles, but to the barbarian Warrior Kings, they are this grey, faceless, numberless host, crushing them underfoot.

This book did a really great job of establishing the vibe of what Earth was like before it became the Terra that we know from 40k. We pass from one period to the other – a line in the sand moment, where the Imperium changes in a heartbeat from one thing to another. And it teases the arrival of the Primarchs, because at this point they have been scattered to the four winds, and nobody knows where they are.

Valdor and Malcador, who is sort-of the Emperor’s counsellor, are chatting about how these guys are just Marines, just tools, just weapons – but they start to see something in the Emperor. He’s looking for the Primarchs, and thinking of them as his sons. Valdor sees trouble in that. He knows that’s not what these people should be to the Emperor, because the minute there’s a personal connection that opens the door to potential jealousies, rivalries, bitternesses and so on. He’s above all that, and so his people will always be loyal. The minute you bring anything else into the mix, the more variables there are, the more chances there are of something spinning out of control. That’s what Valdor’s afraid of, and the book does a great job of taking us from one paradigm of the Imperium into something completely different. It’s presented as a great dawning of a new age, but you see it for what it is: a dark step on our path to destruction.

Chris is just a wonderful writer. It’s a great way of threading the needle, knowing what is coming as we do – because a bunch of the Heresy novels were long out by this point. So to take a step back, to go behind that moment and tell that story… Again, it’s about bringing something new to the table, bringing a new lens to that moment, and suddenly it puts a whole different spin on everything that comes after it. That’s something we always try to do with the Heresy books.

We talked earlier about how the books could bring in psychological complexity – there’s room here for moral and political complexity too, then.

Yes. The lines are very often very black and white: if the Tyranids are coming to eat you, there’s not really much in the way of moral debate you’re going to have with your enemy. Or the orks are coming ten-thousand strong – yes, well, we have to fight them, that’s the end of it. Whereas in this book, the Imperium is still one planet, and the characters there have not yet been strait-jacketed by the chains and the dogma of the 41st millennium. So there’s still the idea that there can be dissent, there can be opposing political views, there can be opposing moral choices; and those are things that the Imperium of the 41st millennium either does not tolerate or views with great suspicion, because if you’re not pulling for the team, then clearly you are the enemy. This novel allowed for that political complexity, and it’s just a really great book. I think Chris is at his best when he’s dealing with the complexities of people and those relationships, and how they shift and change, in parallel to the great tides of history moving around them.

We’ll have to end there – I feel we’ve only just begun. There’s a lot to explore here.

Yes – this conversation has taken us into some really nice, deeper moments. That’s always what I like about these stories – that we get to tell stories about people amongst the guns and the bombs and the swords. We’re telling stories about people in a mad universe, and how they navigate this in ways that hopefully will resonate with the readers. Because while this universe is hopefully a million miles from the daily life that any of us will experience, the relationships, and the shifting dynamics of people, and the trying – hopefully, if you’re a hero – to do the right thing no matter what the odds are, is something that people can latch on to. That’s a universal constant, that we all want to be better and do the right thing. And that’s why it’s so interesting – because these characters are under pressures that are far greater than anything we will ever know.