RAPID FIRE: John French Talks The Solar War

Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with Black Library authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.

This time around it’s a slightly longer instalment than usual, as I spoke to John French about his novel The Solar War, book one in the new Siege of Terra mini-series which concludes the Horus Heresy. As befits such a huge book – both physically and metaphorically – I wanted to try and dig down into a little more detail than usual. For everyone who didn’t get hold of a copy of the Limited Edition hardback, I hope this gives a useful and exciting insight into what you can expect from this novel! The Solar War is available to order in standard hardback/ebook/audiobook editions right now.

As usual, let’s crack straight on with the questions and John’s answers.

Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The Solar War?

John French: It’s the six weeks that it takes Horus to get his forces from not being in the Solar System to the first shells falling on the surface of Terra. How do you do that? That’s what The Solar War is about. It’s an almost impossible task. The Solar System is vast, old and heavily fortified, and even for Horus with all of his forces…how he does that is a question, and this book answers that question.

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?

JF: There’s a huge number of characters! The primary characters – the characters who you follow closely through the book – include…

Mersadie Oliton, who started the series really. She’s back, and begins the story on a prison ship off Uranus. She and all the other prisoners have been moved from where we last saw her – the unnamed fortress orbiting Titan – for obvious reasons, [slight SPOILER alert] as Titan isn’t there any more. It’s been moved off and is being used to incubate the Grey Knights. She has a particular goal, which involves getting back to Terra.

Then you have Abaddon, the first Captain of the Sons of Horus, who is commanding one of the main portions of the invasion heading into the core of the system. He’s a major character in the book, and we get to see some of his pre-Space Marine past as well.

We also have Sigismund, who’s sent by his primarch Rogal Dorn to the edge of the Solar System, to the outer battlements if you like, to be the first to face the enemy. He’s a major character who we follow through the arc.

There’s also the Admiral of the Solar Fleet, a human called Su-Kassen from the Jovian Void Clans. She’s the major means by which we see what’s going on in the Imperial Palace on Terra, in the command rooms.

They’re the characters who carry most of the story weight, but then there’s the other significant who still do an awful lot. Just minor characters, people like Ahriman, Malcador, Loken, Horus Aximand, Jubal Khan, and a scattering of others. Oh, and we get to see the Emperor and Horus in the Warp! Plus a bunch of others who I’ve almost certainly forgotten about.

A bit of a segue about Abaddon, though. There’s a HUGE logistical problem facing Horus, which is that you can’t jump a fleet out of the warp and into the middle of the Solar System. The laws of how exiting and getting into the Warp work mean that (normally) you can’t do that – your ships will be pulled apart by competing forces and so on. If you’re to invade a star system what you normally have to do is drop your ships at the edge of the system, beyond what’s called the Mandeville Point, and then move in-system.

The Solar System is a bit different, because there are two points – no-one knows quite why they’re there – called the Elysian Gate and the Kthonic Gate. These are stable points where you can safely exit the Warp further inside the system. It’s inevitable that Horus is going to take these, but even then it’s going to be tough going. What he does, then, is send Abaddon in command of his elite Sons of Horus forces, and a large chunk of Dark Mechanicum, and through huge blood sacrifices (and the fact that he’s imbued with the power of the Warp at this point) catapults them much further into the Solar System, above the plane of orbit. [AWESOME]

ToW: Why this story – what excited you most about this part of the Siege specifically?

JF: It was a bit of a puzzle-box. There were certain facts which were known, and other things which were unknown, and then lots of weird snippets floating around in old background like “on the thirteenth day of Secundus, the bombardment began”, and how about six weeks or so after the beginning of the new year the traitor forces land on Terra. I was interested because of the puzzle of how and why all of this came together, and why it mattered.

Also what got me really excited was the emphasis on void warfare, and that it sets up a lot of the themes of the Siege. A lot of the metaphysics at play for the Siege are established in this book. Things like the fact that it isn’t just a physical war. To put it at its absolute simplest, the Chaos gods have poured all of their strength into this moment and place to try and destroy the Emperor. They can’t really do it – he’s still too strong for that – but they can weaken him on that spiritual plane. They can then send somebody down – a vessel – to do in the physical world what they can’t do in the Warp, which is end it in the old-fashioned way. With knives and blood.

It sets up the fact that everything in the Siege works on those two levels. The physical has an impact in the Warp, the Warp has an impact on reality. It’s a war that’s being waged on two fronts, one you can’t see and one that you can see and touch and feel. Setting that up was very, very cool.

ToW: What are the key Heresy story arcs that you’d recommend readers be familiar with before reading this?

JF: Well people who are familiar with the whole Heresy story will get a lot out of these books [i.e. the Siege as a whole] and the recognisable characters. There are lots of callbacks which fans of the series will see and go ‘wow! They’re finally capping off these threads – I never realised that this thing which started fifteen years and sixty-odd books ago was going to end up in this way.”

But…all those things are enhancements – you don’t need to have read everything. There isn’t a requirement to go back and read it all. I would say that for these the most important books are probably actually the first few – Horus Rising, False Gods and Galaxy in Flames. There are a few others which are important each in their own ways, and there are callbacks across the series – you’ll get more from the Ahriman bit by knowing what happened in A Thousand Sons and The Crimson King, and more from some of the stuff with Sigismund from having read The Crimson Fist and Praetorian Dorn. Jubal Khan’s story will be more familiar for people who have read The Path of Heaven…all those things help but I don’t think they’re 100% necessary.

If people are intrigued I would say don’t worry about the backlist, just start here and dive in with book one of the Siege.

ToW: Linked to that, how much of a sequel is this to some or all of your own previous Heresy stories, in terms of featuring themes or character arcs from elsewhere?

JF: A little bit, yeah. There are some characters and situations where I thought “yeah, it’ll be really good to see these people again”, but a lot of them are secondary or additional characters. People like Boreas, the First Lieutenant of the Templars [Imperial Fists] who appears in Riven, and to a certain extent Su-Kassen who had a walk-on part in Praetorian of Dorn and I always thought was intriguing. Characters like Andromeda-17 from Praetorian of Dorn, and so on.

Actually though, when we were planning this out – as people will hopefully see when they read the book – the selection of which characters get a lot of the spotlight really follows from where we wanted the arc to go. For example I got to write Ahriman in the Horus Heresy, which was unusual! That was less because it was me, though, but because there’s a particular set of events which are put into play and work best if shown from the point of view of someone who has the psychic abilities and insight of Ahriman. That’s why he’s there.

All of us involved in writing the Siege agreed that we had to have Mersadie Oliton in this story, and the same with Sigismund. We also all decided that it was really time to put Abaddon front and centre. It’s interesting, though, and I can’t say too much about it but in the books coming up there are character that I wrote into other novels I’ve done in the Heresy series who crop up in the Siege – and vice versa.

ToW: What was your preparation like for this book – how much research did you have to do in order to make sure you had all of the details right?

JF: It was huge! It was a month at least, maybe five to six weeks, and I read everything I could – everything that had been written about the Siege of Terra, about the Solar System in 40k as well as during the Heresy and the Great Crusade. I poured all of that into a document, the summary of which I think was 40-odd pages long. That was really useful, as I ordered all of the notes relative to the planets and planetoids going in and out from the system so I could look and see where all of the reference notes were to all of the books and extracts for any part of the system as I went through and worked.

Then I started drawing maps of the Solar System, which took me about two and a half weeks, before I spent about a week looking at all this stuff and figuring out what the problems are that Horus needs to overcome. How would he try and do this, and how would Rogal Dorn try to counter it? Then how would Horus counter the counters? What’s his strategy, what’s the loyalists’ strategy? What would they do with the fleets we know are there? What would they be thinking, how would they tackle things?

I then sort of put that into motion and figured out what the broad sweep of the six weeks of battle would be, and then I figured out what the arc of the story should be. The battle is the story but it’s not just the battle – there are layers to it. Then I had a year planner; one of the advantages of it being set on Terra is that it basically follows our calendar cycle! That meant I plotted out day by day what was happening in the Solar System for that six week period – what progress was being made, who’d done what and what happened where, which story arc falls where. Things like when Luna falls, when the war properly breaks out around Mars, all of these things.

I took all of that to one of the Siege of Terra meetings and presented it to everybody. Some people had some thoughts, we made some changes, but it pretty much stood at that point. One of the difficult things then was having done all of that and figured everything out, some of it doesn’t appear in the book, or it appears very briefly. I’ve got whole notes on what Horus was thinking, what the loyalists were thinking, things which didn’t get much detail in the book. It’s already a big book, already bulging at the seams with story!

ToW: How do you convey the sense of scale and complexity for these massive space battles while still retaining drama and character?

JF: I think it’s about balancing the personal view and the big macro view. Having the macro view but always rooting it back down to a series of individuals who are inside that battle. I think the most pointed example of that is a sequence where another character – a hauler merchant from one of the void city stations around Uranus – is caught in the middle of the first stages as the Iron Warriors come through the Elysian Gate. You see it all from a very personal point of view, from a character who’s trying to get everything he can onto the system- but not warp-capable ship he has, and get away.

For him at that moment the battle that’s going on around him isn’t about ‘this class of ship is firing broadsides against this’. He casts off the ship and something just slices through the four kilometre-wide space station he’s called home for the last five years, and all of the vox communications he’s been hearing just go dead. That’s one way of showing it, you go very subjective and zoomed in but balance that against a view which is really broad so that the reader can see the big picture but then also look at it through a tiny, narrow window which feels much more personal.

ToW: How was writing this in comparison with your previous Heresy stories? Is there a greater need for cohesive writing styles during the Siege, across the 8-book mini-series?

JF: One of the fortunate things about going first is that I didn’t worry too much about style. In some ways I was figuring that out, and there are questions that still crop up in meetings about how we deal with certain thematic ideas. For example I adopted a way of cutting away from the main narrative to what’s going on in the Warp, using metaphorical and symbolic imagery, and that’s something which people started adopting as how they’re going to do it – in slightly different ways appropriate to the narrative and each writer. That’s a convention, a motif to use.

So I didn’t really worry too much about that, but there was a huge sense of pressure thinking ‘this is the Siege of Terra. Oh my goodness, we’re here!’ As the first book in particular, this has to be right, and not just that it has to be good. It’s taken us years, sixty-odd books and millions of words – there will be people reading this who started at the beginning, there are people (myself included) who have grown a lot older during the course of it. We have to make it good!

I was very conscious that there were certain things I was setting up, like the through-thread characters – how they were being set up and where they were going. If I found something interesting in what they were doing I was very conscious to highlight that out to everyone else. Things like some of the story motifs that are going on. In terms of the exact style, however, I didn’t worry about things too much.

ToW: What do you hope Horus Heresy fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?

JF: I hope that they get two things, one of which is a sense of closure on some story threads, a pay-off for some things that they’ve seen unfold over a long, long time. Closure in all kinds of senses. We’re going to pay off some things from a LONG way back, and some newer things as well, and a lot of people are going to die! A lot of named characters are going to die – we know who but we don’t always know where exactly.

The second thing that I hope they get at the same time is a huge injection of excitement for the books that come after this, that will take us into the end of the Siege and the Heresy overall.

ToW: Looking back on the Horus Heresy series, how do you feel now that we’re on the home strait?

JF: In all honesty I have mixed feelings. A lot of it is to do with very real-life, human stuff. I was 24 or 25 when the first Heresy book came out, and I never really thought I’d end up writing one. I’ve grown a lot older in those times. I’ve made friends because of this series, and seen it become absolutely huge. I’ve poured millions of words into it myself, spent hours and days on it, made friends, and had a friend die in the course of it. It means a lot, and it feels really amazing to be here.

At the same time I suppose the mixed part of it is that part of me doesn’t quite want it to end. Then it puts this capstone on the last goodness-knows how many years. I wrote something similar to that in the afterword to the book, actually. There are fans out there who have grown up, got married, had kids over the course of this series. There are people for whom this is their favourite novel line, there are people who unfortunately never got to see the end of it. So when you actually reach the end of something like that there’s something very human about it. It’s the kind of ride you only get to go on once, as a reader or a writer.

ToW: If you can talk at all about the Heresy meetings, was there a particular topic or character which was especially hotly debated?

JF: Probably not that I can say! What we’re doing with the Siege is not just a set of standalone books, or even standalone arcs with connections – it’s a series. It’s difficult to say much about what was hotly debated because people would wonder why! There’s genuinely a sense of spoilers about the series, in a way that there hasn’t really been before with the Heresy. All of the aspects – what’s going to happen, who’s doing which bit, what do we get to see – all of that is spoilers! It’s worth waiting to see what’s going to happen when we get there.

ToW: What moment are you most looking forward to reading about in the words of the author that’s going to write it?

JF: Again I can’t really answer that! There are several, some of which are parts that we figured out in the meetings. There was one particular example, just this ecstatic moment of ridiculous revelation when we realised we could do something and half the room was shouting! It was just creative mayhem. I can’t wait to see some of these things pay off, and there are also some things that we just got to in the meetings and thought ‘well we’ve been looking at this the wrong way. Actually, if you put together the source material like this then things completely change.’

ToW: Are you working on any further Horus Heresy/Siege of Terra stories?

JF: Nothing that I can talk about at the moment!

ToW: Heresy aside, what else are you working on at the moment?

JF: I’ve been doing an awful lot of short stories for The Horusian Wars, so they will hopefully appear soon. At the end of last year I wrote the third episode in the Agent of the Throne series, Ashes and Oaths, which is coming out in May. I’m hopefully going to be doing more of those in the near future.

I’m working on a HUGE audio project at the moment for Warhammer 40,000, which I can’t say what the title is because it’s, well a secret…but it’s a big one in every sense. And, at some point, when all the dust on this settles, I need to finish off the Horusian Wars trilogy.

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As always, I’d like to say a huge thank you to John for taking the time out of his schedule to chat to me and answer these questions. As I said earlier, I hope this has got you excited to read the book – if you’re interested you can also read my review of it right here.

Click here to order The Solar War.

Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.