Babel Clash

Yesterday I talked about the feel of how we approached writing stories set during the Horus Heresy, what made them different and how we made sure you knew you were reading one when you picked it up. Today I’m going to take a look at how they informed the writing of A Thousand Sons, my latest Heresy novel. All sounds very academic, doesn’t it, but trust me, it’s just me looking at why A Thousand Sons was such a fun novel to write and why you’ll enjoy it so much.

The Razing of Prospero is one of the big boy events of the Heresy, a milestone in the road that you can’t ignore because it’s a gigantic, 2001-style slab of monolithic goodness. The rich seam of storytelling potential made it a juicy prospect, and after numerous monkey knife fights in the car part to sort out who got to tell it, Dan and myself stood triumphant. Afterwards, we both looked at each other warily, like two gunfighters waiting for the other to make his move. Slowly, and with infinite patience, Dan’s pen finger twitched and he said in a gravely baritone, “I don’t like Space Wolves.” I looked him up and down to see if this was an elaborate bluff, a sly way of putting me off balance, but no, he seemed serious.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll write the Space Wolves side of things.”

“Well, okay then,” replied Dan. “I’ll do the Thousand Sons. It’s settled.”

“Yup, sure is.”

“Good.”

‘Uh-huh”

Except something strange happened next. We talked over the story of Prospero, examined the motives of the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves, asked lots of awkward questions about the set-up and rationale behind some of the decisions the key players in this drama were making. Some of it didn’t make sense, or seemed, at the very least, wilfully dense. But the more we examined the story, turning it this way and that, the more we found hidden layers, secret possibilities and truths in the heart of each Legion we hadn’t suspected. Over the course of the afternoon, I could feel a sick feeling in my gut, knowing now that I wanted to tell the story of the Thousand Sons. I glanced over at Dan, thankfully seeing a similar uneasy cast to his features. Towards the end of the day we looked at each other.

Both of us spoke at the same time.

“Wanna switch?”

Okay, that’s not quite how it happened, but it’s not far off. The more we learned, the more we realised exactly how much we wanted to explore the legions we ended up writing about. And let me tell you, having read the first third or so of Prospero Burns, I’m immensely glad Dan’s doing the Space Wolf side of the equation. These are Wolves like you’ve never seen them, unlike any depiction you’ve ever seen. Yet they are utterly, absolutely recognisable as Space Wolves. Contradiction? Absolutely. And yet they’re spot on.

I set to work on A Thousand Sons a while ago, making sure I put plenty of time in up front to really get into the nuts and bolts of who the Thousand Sons were. What made them tick, how were they organised and what character would they have? I wanted to make them more than just a legion of Librarians. I wanted to give them a character unique amongst the Astartes, a character that was different in every way from the legions we’d seen before. I’d have failed if they ended up as a legion that fought and behaved like any other, with their only difference being that they wore red and shouted, “For Magnus!” instead of “For Horus!”

They needed to walk differently, talk differently, act differently and fight differently. After all, if you have access to all these funky psychic powers, you’re not going to just walk straight into the enemy’s gunfire, are you? You’re going to be cleverer than that. To that end, I put serious couch time into working out who these guys were, working out a back story for the legion and each of its captains that gave them flavour beyond anything that would appear in the book itself. More than just sorting the characters out for the synopsis, this meant coming up with battles they’d fought in, secrets they’d mastered, places they’d been and powers they’d employed. It took a while to get to a place I was happy with (as my editors can testify…), but it made the writing so much richer. I thought about the essence of their character, and looked beyond simply the Egyptian angle. Did I draw inspiration from that aspect? Of course, but I went beyond that. I drew in elements from Aztec, Khmer and all manner of esoteric cultures. After all, the idea of a legion like the Thousand Sons supping from only one cup of knowledge seemed absurd. There’s no such thing as too much knowledge to them.

All this paid off when I started writing the book, though it means I had lots of new concepts to get across very early in the book. I was showing each chapter to Dan as I went along, and, early on, he made the very excellent point that perhaps I shouldn’t try and explain all these new concepts, that perhaps – being a Thousand Sons novel, and therefore beholden to mysteries – it might be a good idea to throw those concepts out there and leave them unexplained and mysterious, to leave the reader in the same place as anyone encountering the Thousand Sons would be. A little bit wary, a little bit unsettled, and left with the feeling that they know fantastical secrets they’re not telling you. It was a simple change, but one that really informed the vibe of the book.

It also meant that for quite some time there wasn’t a shot fired in anger. A lot of the Heresy books start with a bang, well, several bangs, but it was many chapters in before someone even draws a pistol. At first I was a little worried about this. Was the book too slow, was it dragging its feet towards some action? The more I thought about this, the more I realised that it was exactly right that A Thousand Sons held back on its blazing bolters, as it fitted the character of the legion perfectly. These weren’t guys who went charging in with guns aflame and chainswords raised to hack the enemy down. These are warriors, yeah, but they’re also scholars who want to know things first. If they can lean from you before they have to kill you, then you best believe that’s what they’ll do. It also means it complements the character of the Space Wolves, killers who are the perfect weapon of destruction and a legion bred for devastation.

This isn’t a book about a legion that falls to Chaos, its one that takes a roundabout route there. Did the Thousand Sons jump or were they pushed? That’s one of the central questions of the Thousand Sons, and one I felt there was great dramatic potential to be mined in its exploration. I didn’t want to tell a story of madness and obsession leading to the dark place, I’d already done that with Fulgrim, this was going to be a story where I took characters who’ve been vilified over the years and bring them back to a place of understanding. To that end, I picked Ahriman as my main character, and over the course of the book, I came to really like him. I saw the hunger for knowledge in him that drove Magnus, but also the humility the primarch lacked. I invested more in Ahriman’s character so that when the fate of the legion is finally sealed, you’re left with the sinking feeling that it could all so easily have been avoided.

As I said yesterday, the mortal characters are important to what makes the Heresy tick, and A Thousand Sons is no exception. Again, Remembrancers play a big part in the story, though not in the same way as we’ve seen them before. These guys are, in their own way, questing for knowledge, but it’s knowledge the Thousand Sons would rather not be widely disseminated since it’s about them. Given their history with the Imperium and their near self-destruction, that’s understandable. Yet they can’t help but warm to their youthful questioning and this forges a bond that’s about as close to friendship as it’s possible for Astartes and mortals to form.

A Thousand Sons is a long book, the longest in the Heresy series so far, and there’s a lot going on. Some bits of it you know (or think you do) but lots of other bits are new. We see some new characters, some old ones and some scenes from ‘history’ in a new light. As is our mantra for the Heresy books, I’ve brought something new and surprising to the table, and taken what you’ve heard, what you think you know and given it an ever so slight tweak so that the convenient shapes you’ve been given just aren’t quite right.

And of course, it ends in a stonking great battle.

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