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.

Dan and I have talked at a bit about how we get together with the other authors and editors to plan out the kinds of stories and characters we want to tell, the wheres the whys and the whos, but today I’m going to take a meandering look at the first meeting we had. Why? Well because that’s the one where we laid out the rough shape of the playground and some of its basic rules in which those stories would operate. The High Lord of Terra (previously encountered as Alan) spoke to a crowded room of writers and editors about what the crucial differences were between the Heresy era (30K) and the Age of the Imperium (40K). As you might imagine, this turned into a very long day, with a million and one ideas born in that melting pot. But crucially, the best thing we took from that meeting wasn’t specific storylines, but the mood and feel of the place. Where 40K is a shabby palace with shuttered rooms and dusty white sheets covering the furniture, inhabited by faded ghosts and ancient old men, 30K was going to be the first days of that palace, where armies of servants threw open the windows to let the light in, and the owners were stepping into their new home with boundless enthusiasm to admire the crisp new décor.

This is key to what made the stories different, made them special. It’s what separates them from 40K books by more than just the names and the characters, it’s what let’s you know you’re not reading a 40K book, you’re reading a Horus Heresy book. We wanted readers to know they were reading a 30K novel as soon as they opened the book and read its first few pages. To that end we looked at what 40K was, how it came to be the way it is and what probably existed before. The early days of the Great Crusade were a time of hope, optimism and enlightenment, were humanity had stared into the abyss of extinction and was about to leap in when the Emperor pulled it back at the last moment. That’s not to say it was the happy family of the Federation of Planets, not even close. Unity had a painful birth, but one that showed the vast majority of people all they could achieve if they just embraced it. Not only that, but there was actual hope that the things humanity aspired to achieve could actually be reached. The light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t a speeding train, it was the promise of an empire of mankind based on learning, growth and progression.

(That’s an idea I went back to explore in Mechanicum, the notion that the Priesthood of Mars were on the brink of changing from a monolithic organisation built on tradition and repetition to one of exploration, discovery and scientific advancement. This borrowed from the conceit that science has freed us from so much pain and death, but also has the potential to destroy us all – either in the fires of awesomely destructive weaponry, or the more Lovecraftian realisation of our own utter insignificance amid terrifying vistas of infinity. That change could have made all the difference to the future course of the Imperium, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.)

Of course no empires are ever built without bloodshed, and that’s where the Astartes come in. The Astartes are warriors so far removed from humanity that they are, for all intents and purposes, no longer human. Astartes were always going to be at the core of the Horus Heresy story, as the rebellion began as an inter-legion civil war and spread from there. But it was always going to be more than that. It was going to be about people and what it meant for them. In 40K, the people of the Imperium are little more than footnotes, tally marks on a bureaucrat’s ledger, resources to be expended and tithes to be claimed. Whole worlds can vanish, in the fires of invasion or in clerical typo in the dusty halls of the Administratum. It’s a cruel place, a dark place, a place you would never, ever, want to visit. Human life is cheap, and it’s the one currency the Imperium has in almost limitless abundance. And it’s not shy about spending it. We often throw civilians into the mix of 40K novels and then horribly slaughter thousands of them, but they’re little more than straw men to be cut down in droves to show the awfulness of the galaxy. In short, they often don’t matter.

That’s not the case In 30K. People do matter. When people die in 30K it matters because they’re the ones building the Imperium, the ones spreading out into the stars to reclaim what was lost in the hell of Old Night (a lovely term coined by Mr Abnett, I believe). And talking of people brings me to the remembrancers, another great invention that feels wholly natural in the broad tapestry of the Heresy books. No, these guys and girls aren’t genetically-engineered post humans with biceps like boulders and guns that are basically rocket launchers, they’re just fleshy bags of meat and blood that break easily. And that’s what makes them compelling characters to add to the mix of a Heresy novel. In 30K we see interaction between humans and Astartes through their eyes. It’s still a big deal for mortals to be around Astartes, to meet and talk to them, but it happens. They can even become friends. Just look at Loken and Karkasy, Ahriman and Lemuel (what do you mean you haven’t read A Thousand Sons yet? Okay, okay…I’ll talk about that tomorrow…). The point is, that the horrible divisions wracking 40K haven’t yet split the Imperium into its factionalised state. Mortals still matter to Astartes, and the two exist, side by side, in a – more or less – united front in 30K. All that is lost when the Astartes make war on one another. The bond of trust between humanity and the Astartes is severed, and no-one will ever look at them in the same way again. Gav Thorpe’s excellent audio drama, Raven’s Flight, explores this idea more fully, so if you haven’t already checked it out, do so with all possible speed.

To my mind, it’s the humanity that makes 30K such a sea change from 40K. People care about things that you and I can identify with. Happiness is a possibility in 30K, where in 40K you’re every waking moment is concerned with worshipping the Emperor, working in whatever hellish manufactory you’re stuck in or worrying about being killed by a daemon, xenos beast, piratical raider or even your own rulers. It’s a world where everyone lives in fear, and conventional wisdom tells us that fearful populaces are easier to control. I imagine it’s like living under the constant surveillance of the Stasi or KGB, compared to living in a utopian society where the human spirit is to be celebrated, not crushed. Not a fun place to be.

The Heresy is, as has been said many times, a tragedy, an epic fall from grace brought about by the fatal flaw of its protagonist. But it’s about so much more than just Horus’s downfall, it’s about the terrible waste of a wonderful idea that never came to fruition. Who knows what might have been achieved if Horus hadn’t been seduced by Chaos, or if the Astartes hadn’t turned on one another like rabid dogs. The ultimate success of the Emperor’s grand dream was within touching distance when it was snatched away. You could see it, you could smell it, but just as you were reaching for it, a clawed hand snatched it away and smashed it into pieces that can never be put back together, no matter how hard you try. You might have all the broken shards, but without the glue to hold it in place, you’re always having to stand there holding it so it doesn’t fall apart again. And that’s not progress, that’s stagnation. The watchword for 40K.

30K is progress, 40K is stagnation. That’s about all I need to say.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently at conventions and signings, aside from, ‘When are you going to get to Legion X?’ or ‘How many books are there going to be in the Horus Heresy?’ (Answers: Eventually, and only the gods of the warp know) is ‘How do you go about writing a book?’

That’s a question that, I suspect, if you asked ten authors, you’d get ten different answers. It’s a process that hasn’t got a right way or a wrong way. The short answer is however it works for you is the right way, but that’s not terribly helpful is it? I remember facing that question when I sat down to write my first novel, Nightbringer. I’d written a bunch of short stories before this, none longer than seven thousand words, and this was my first proper stab at something considerably longer. So with the white page like a giant, empty void and cursor mocking me with every blink, I took a deep breath and figured that I’d just get the first scene done and see where I went with it. Then I did the second scene, and then the third, and by the time I got to around five thousand words, it seemed like a good time to end the chapter. This went on for around ten weeks, with me adding bits and bobs to the book in a more or less rambling, making-it-up-as-I-went fashion. This resulted in a monster book that was far too long to fit within its allotted page-count. Not good. The end result was that I spent a long time cutting back and trimming to make the book work in it’s shorter form. It’s a better book for it, tighter and leaner in plot, and it taught me a valuable lesson.

Plan, plan, and plan some more.

I never go into a novel now without a pretty detailed plan of what happens at any given time. I mean, I always have a synopsis, but these days that’s more of a pitch that tells the good folks at Black Library the kind of book they’re getting, what it will be about in only the most general sense and the kind of vibe they can expect at the finish line. That’s great, and gives them an understanding of what they’re commissioning, but it’s not a lot of help when it comes to the writing of the book. So I make sure I set off with a detailed plan of where the book will twist and turn, and when it’ll make some unexpected u-turns along the way. For me, that’s essential, as I need to know what’s coming so I can write the book with a good idea of what’s happening next. After all, you wouldn’t set out into an unknown wilderness without a decent map, would you?

Having said that, a detailed plan should have enough flex in its bones to allow for the addition of good ideas that come up along the way. Some of the moments I’m most proud of in my books are ones that I had no idea would appear in the book until they turned up. So how do you go about planning a plan?

I like to do a lot of my planning in the swimming pool. At first this was hard on my notepad and laptop, but when I left them at home, things improved. Going back and forth in the water with not a lot to occupy the attention aside from the three grannies going up and down in a grey-haired line, is a great way of getting ideas into a useable order and working through the logic of a scene or progression of events. I usually start with the concept of the novel, such as…it’s a tau invasion of an Imperial world, and the Ultramarines are called in to save the day/it’s the story of the Mechanicum’s civil war on Mars. This then suggests a number of scenes, characters and themes that I’ll scribble down in my notepad. I’ll allow a few days to pass, perhaps working up those ideas, perhaps working on others, just allowing the volatile mix to ferment in my brain before getting pen and pad out again. I have a couple of methods for transforming these ideas into a workable plan. Sometimes I use the post-it notes method of writing the keywords and feelings about a scene on a note and sticking it to my desk at random. Soon I have a desk covered in post-its, which I’ll then rearrange into a more logical order, bearing in mind the pacing and structure of a book, where I want appropriate builds of tension, action and character development. When they look like they’re in the right order, I’ll work this up into a bullet-pointed storyline, fleshing it out as I go along and making sure it all makes sense and that the novel builds in a coherent way.

Sometimes, however, I like to use my A1 pad and scrawl my ideas at random across the page, making sure that there’s no order to it at all. Then, with the space crammed full of ideas and scenes, I’ll start linking them up, figuring out which one needs to happen before another and so on, until the whole page is like a Jackson Pollock painting of looping, intersecting lines or a madman’s scrawl in a Lovecraftian journal. Anyway, it makes sense to me, so that’s all that matters. Like the post-it note method, I’ll then transfer this to a working ‘writing synopsis’ that allows me to see the shape of the novel and how it’s paced. So that’s the planning, now I’ve got to write it.

I work from home, so I have plenty of opportunities for displacement activities and distractions (not least my five-month old son), so I need to try and discipline myself to thinking that I’m actually in an office, with people around me who’ll report me to the boss if I’m not doing any work. So I make sure I start work as close to nine as I can, take an hour’s break at one, then work till around five thirty. Of course it doesn’t always work out that way, but it’s close. Knowing where I am in a book, I spend the evening planning out what I’m going to be writing the next day, so that it can bubble away overnight and be ready to pour out when I start work. Normally that works, and if I get three thousand words a day done then I count that as a good day. Though if freelancing full-time for three and a half years has taught me anything, it’s that day-to-day word counts aren’t important, it’s how you get on during the longer stretch that’s important. I try and reach around fifteen thousand a week, but if I don’t get it one week, I don’t beat myself up about it, as I know I’ll do more than that some other week. Writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint, so I don’t worry too much if going to the shops, having the car serviced or a marathon session of Modern Warfare 2 gets in the way now and again…

One other thing you shouldn’t neglect is that it’s important to be comfortable in your workspace, a place away from distractions with all you need close at hand. That’s why I sometimes like to get out of the house and work in the library or a little tea shop in town. I like to listen to music as I write, but I try and avoid anything with lyrics or songs I really like, as I end up singing along to them or typing the words. So my normal background music is soundtracks from movies: the current favourite being Sleepy Hollow, The Dark Knight, Dracula, Crimson Tide and Gladiator – with a smattering of Conan, and the Quake soundtrack. Or Rammstein, since I don’t speak German, and their music has an appropriately industrial, aggression to it that helps capture the vibe of the dark, gothic worlds I’m writing about.

When you’ve written your first draft, that’s when the real work begins, polishing what you’ve done via feedback from trusted readers and the judicious attention of a copy editor. All this culminates in a second draft that should hopefully be a leaner, sharper and smoother read. I write pretty clean manuscripts, but there’s not one of us out there who doesn’t benefit from other eyes on our work and giving it that last buff before it goes to the printers.

So that’s how I go about writing a book. It’s not perfect, and I’m sure there are other authors who do it very differently. But this way works for me, and it’s done alright by me so far. So, if it ain’t broke, I say don’t fix it.

Hopefully that’s given you a little insight into the creation of a novel, and if you’re planning to write one of your own, then do it. I hear lots of people saying they’ve a great idea for a novel, but very few of them have actually got any words down on paper. It’s easy to talk a good novel, not so easy to do anything with it until you’ve produced something. Fire up the laptop or get the pen out and start writing, it’s the only way you’ll ever do it.

Right, I think that’s enough for today, so I’ll hand back to Dan, who’ll be resuming normal service tomorrow with a juicy post to banish any Monday morning blues.

See you in the comments page.

Well, hello…

Guest blogging on someone else’s site is a juicy prospect, so I’ll start by thanking Dan for the elegance of his handover, and the good folk at Babel Clash for trusting me not to break anything and leave them open to multiple lawsuits. It is rather shiny around here, isn’t it? Lots of features I don’t have on my own website (www.graham-mcneill.com), but I promise not to break anything, and I’ll not abuse my room service privileges. Though I can’t promise I won’t raid the mini-bar. I hope I’ve got my nice shiny icon beside me, but we’ll see what happens when I hit the ‘publish’ button. Dan’s been doing sterling work so far on the blog, but now it’s my turn. I’ve been lurking in the comments pages for the last week like the swotty kid at school, piping up whenever I knew the answer, but now the blog is mine. I can say what I want, and I’m answerable to no-one! Right, so what are we going to talk about today? 

I thought I’d begin by talking about a subject very close to my heart: Ultramarines. Now, some of you are leaning forward, looking interested, but some of you are already yawning at the back. Now, it’s my intention to disabuse you of that notion. A question I was asked a lot when I first started the Ultramarines series was, why them? I mean, they’re boring right? Vanilla? Wrong, wrong and more wrong. There’s wrong, there’s wronger than that, and then there’s the wrongest thing ever. And then there’s the belief that the Ultramarines are boring.

I’ve encountered this many times, and I think it boils down to two factors. The first, nuts and bolts factor, is that Ultramarines are the poster boys for 40K. That’s true for a number of reasons. They’re easy to use on the tabletop, which makes them a perfect choice for introducing people to playing the game. You don’t sit down with a new player and show them an army filled with special rules, exceptions and mind-boggling special abilities. As a result, quite a few younger players start their gaming careers playing Ultramarines. And the stigma begins. The second reason is a factor of the first, they don’t have any special rules, no Red Thirst, Acute Senses, Righteous Zeal or any of the malarkey that makes other Chapters so much fun to play with as your skill and confidence as a gamer grows. But they’re still Space Marines, seven-foot tall genetically engineered killing machines. And where those other Chapters have their angsty darkness, the Ultramarines are heroes. And therein lies the appeal of the Ultramarines to me. They’re heroes. They remember the original role of the Space Marines as the protectors of humanity. Over the centuries, many other Chapters have come to regard humans as somehow inferior to them, as ants who can’t protect themselves and need the Space Marines to haul their backsides out of whatever peril they’ve gotten themselves into this week. But not the Ultramarines, no sir!

The Ultramarines remember that they were created to keep the galaxy safe for the human race; that their entire raison d’etre was to conquer the galaxy and defend the frontiers of human space against all-comers. They illustrate the millennia of honourable service to the Emperor and humanity. They are arch-conservatives, putting tradition and history before adaptation and evolution. The Chapter’s history links the present with the great deeds and glories of the past. They illustrate the ideal of a Space Marine Chapter and the importance of discipline and organisation. The Ultramarines, and Uriel Ventris in particular, know that they exist to serve humanity, not the other way round.

In my eyes, this makes them one of the most heroic Chapters around, since they are now totally divorced from the human race by virtue of their genetic enhancements, yet they still fulfil the role for which they were created. To me, it humanises the Ultramarines, and while I know that some people prefer their Astartes to be inhuman monsters or so aloof from human nature that they become like automatons, they’re not the Astartes I care to write about. Neither interpretation is wrong (and there are Chapters like that) but I want my Astartes to be different; to be so removed from their genetic heritage that they find it hard to relate to humans on most normal levels, but who still retain their humanity. These are warriors who willingly gave up their chance to live a normal life for an eternity of battle and bloodshed. That they live apart from the rest of humanity is important because this speaks of the sacrifices they’ve made in order to better serve their masters (the Emperor and humanity). This kind of sacrifice is part of what makes the Astartes heroic, more so than their skill and power! And if that doesn’t make them heroes, then I don’t know what does.

I came up with the character of Uriel many years ago, imagining him to be the embodiment of what makes the Ultramarines who they are. A Chapter that bases its entire organisation on a ten thousand year old book, but which lives in an ever-changing galaxy. How would they deal with that, and what would be the consequences of choosing to do things in a different way? It opened up a lot of dramatic potential, to see how Uriel dealt with fluid battlefield situations and what that meant for him (and the Chapter) in the wake of his adaptations. I knew I wanted to go strange places with the character, but as Dan mentioned earlier, it’s sometimes a good idea to know the rules and where the boundaries are before you go and break them. That’s why I spent the first novel creating the Ultramarines, establishing them as a ‘by the book’ Chapter, then set about breaking that mould by the end of the second. By the third and fourth books, I’d taken Uriel and the redoubtable Sergeant Pasanius out of their comfort zone into some very un-Ultramarine places. I could only do that since I’d spent the time and effort to set them up in the first place.

Courage and Honour saw them returned to their Chapter, and thus began the countdown to total war that is the book I’m working on at the moment, The Chapter’s Due. In this book, Uriel is once again confronted with his old enemy, Honsou, and the entire Ultramarines Chapter is plunged into a cataclysmic war. From Storm of Iron and through the course of Dead Sky, Black Sun, Honsou became a fan favourite and started demanding more and more screen time. Not bad for a character who was only ever supposed to appear in one, stand-alone, novel… Honsou became, for me, the anti-Uriel, the warrior that Uriel might have become had he continued along the path he’d started down in Warriors of Ultramar. Honsou was a dark mirror for the Ultramarines, a representation of all that was bad about Space Marines who had no code and who weren’t bound to a rigid set of rules. Other Chapters might decry the Ultramarines strict adherence to the aeons-old words of a dead (or is he?) man, but the Ultramarines know that their path is the only one that offers ultimate salvation. Especially given what happened in Ultramar, back during the Horus Heresy…

Over the course of the Ultramarines novels, the characters have grown and developed, though they’ve largely been confined to those in the immediate orbit of Uriel. I’m starting to broaden out the cast to encompass more of the 4th Company, and the Chapter in general. It’s something Dan’s done with great skill and success with the Ghosts, creating a broad swathe of characters of different stripes over the course of many novels, and it’s something I intend to do more of in the Ultramarines books. I want to make them Ultramarines books, not simply Uriel Ventris books. Though we’ll have to see how many of the company are left standing after The Chapter’s Due finishes to see how well that works out.

So, there you have it, the roots of my love for the Ultramarines, and why I think they best epitomise what it means to be a Space Marine. In a completely different tack, tomorrow I’m going to be talking about how I go about taking a novel from a floaty idea drifting through my transom to a wad of pressed cellulose with a pretty cover in your hands. In the meantime, have a great Saturday, and see you tomorrow…