Hello and welcome to the first instalment of an extra-special author interview, where I’m delighted to welcome the fabulous John French back to the site to mark the 2,000th post on Track of Words! Author of the Ahriman series, the Horusian Wars, the Cado Ezechiar series, a host of Horus Heresy and Siege of Terra novels, and so much more, John has been a friend of the site for a long time. In fact, if you go way back to July 2016 John was the very first author I ever interviewed (about his Tallarn stories in the Horus Heresy)! With that in mind, to mark the milestone of post number 2,000 I sat down with John for an in-depth, retrospective interview looking back at his work and his career over the last eight years since we first spoke.
In fact, this ended up being such a long and in-depth chat (and I could happily have asked John loads more questions) that I’ve had to split the interview into two parts. So in this first part (post number 2,000) we take a look back over the last 8 years as a whole before focusing on the Horus Heresy and the siege of Terra – and there was so much to talk about even on just these topics! Keep an eye out for part two coming soon, in which we cover the Horusian Wars, Ahriman, Age of Sigmar, and the Letters from an Unknown Land stories that are available on John’s website.
So settle in, get yourself a drink of choice, and join us as we look back over the highs and lows of the last eight years.
ToW: In the eight years since we first spoke, you’ve published 13 Black Library novels, not to mention an anthology, various audio dramas and a whole host of short stories. And that’s before we even get to the stories and articles you’ve been publishing on your website. Looking back now, what have those years been like for you and your career?
John French: Wow, what a good question. That sounds like a lot! That covers a lot of really fundamental stuff for me, I think, and it feels like a lot. In terms of writing for Black Library, just when Tallarn was coming out I was coming up into a really interesting period. I was writing the Horusian Wars, and I was also just about to do Slaves of Darkness, which would then be one of the catapult books into the Siege of Terra.
And then I think about coming into the Siege of Terra, and the incredible rollercoaster of a journey as part of that team. The pandemic, coming out of that, and doing things like coming back to Ahriman, which I didn’t know if I would, and then I wrote some fantasy, which I’ve wanted to do for ages, with Cado Ezechiar and The Hollow King.
That’s the books, but there’s a bunch of stuff that meshes in with all that, and runs adjacent. It’s a bit of a downer I suppose, but Slaves to Darkness is dedicated to Alan Bligh, who of course passed away right at the beginning of that period. He was such a good friend and influence on me and on my life. That absence sort of ripples throughout the next eight years in terms of both my personal and creative life.
It’s really strange, because in the hardbacks of the Horus Heresy books you always do an afterword, and I end up having to apologise to the editors going, “yes, I’ll talk about the book, but yes, there’s going to be a personal bit at the end again!” I’ve done that on a few of them; in The Solar War, I reflected on just how much the whole Horus Heresy is measured in big chunks of people’s lifetimes, and how much can happen in that kind of length of time.
And then Mortis, which weirdly was a book about despair and hope, and how those two things meet in these characters. I literally finished it as the pandemic just closed in. Dan Abnett and I have talked about this, in terms of the weird synchronicity of books and stories. I was writing about how terrible moments would be seen by the future, and I was looking around me thinking, “well, at some point, this will be in the future history books. This will be a footnote, but it seems just huge and overwhelming right now. But it will be made small by hindsight.”
So yeah, eight years – It’s been incredible, and that length of time seems quite heavy. It’s a big chunk of time, and a chunk of words as well.
ToW: Before we talk about specific books, do you think there’s been a project in these eight years that has had a particular impact on your career trajectory, and really kicked things up a notch?
JF: I think there’s actually a cluster of things. Something I loved doing – and I was slightly shocked that I was able to do – was The Solar War. Going into it I didn’t understand quite how difficult it was going to be, how fulfilling it would be, or quite how much I’d learn from doing it. I don’t think I’ve had an experience like the Siege, and especially kicking it off.
I was lucky to come into it on a kind of creative bubble of things that had given me a creative uplift. There was the Horusian Wars, with Resurrection and also the Agent of the Throne audios, with Blood and Lies winning a Scribe Award. And then Slaves to Darkness, which was one of the cleanest writes I’ve ever had. Then when I came to The Solar War I took the preparation and planning I did up another level – not just plotting it out, or doing research, but doing a vast amount of research and planning.
I think I’ve said in other interviews – it’s like a funnel. You take a vast amount of material, with everything that has been said before. And then you add to it everything that has not been said out loud, but is in the minds of other creatives. And then you think about what shape of story you can tell about this, and that makes it narrower again. Then it’s about what’s feasible within that, and how is that story actually going to be realised in terms of characters, chapters, beats, pacing. So the amount of material gets smaller again, and then you’re down to an actual plan.
I produced huge, multi-page reference documents for myself and the rest of the team, on things like the Sol system and what had been said about it. And maps! It was a level of preparation, before even breaking ground on the book, that I’ve never done before. And that was incredibly demanding, but I learned that the more width and depth you put into something like that, the more it comes out in the book.
That really upped my game, and gave me a completely new perspective. Then writing the book itself was incredibly demanding, on a number of levels. You end up using phrases like ‘cognitive load’ for the number of things you have to be holding in your head when you put finger to keyboard. This project really increased my capacity for being able to handle so much, simply because I needed to!
Then there’s teamwork, as well. There was such incredible camaraderie in the Siege team, which made all the hard work even more worthwhile. I’ve told the story before of when I walked into the last Siege meeting and apparently I literally looked dead! I can’t remember who coined the term, but it ended up being called ‘Siege Face’ – and an author that was in the process of writing a Siege book always had this expression on their face. But going through that experience almost became a right of passage.
I’ve always liked collaborating. I started off writing collaboratively, working on pen and paper RPGs nearly 20 years ago – which is a ludicrously long time ago – where everything is collaborative. You nearly always have a co-writer or a developer. In terms of writing fiction, the Horus Heresy has always been collaborative, but the Siege was even more so. Just how interleaved everything was, how mutually responsible you were for everything, and how supportive everybody was – that was huge.
I think the other thing that has been a huge landmark for me is doing more of my own work and creating my own worlds and stories. So some of that’s on my website, and some of it is novels I’m working on. And it’s great to creatively cut loose and create some things that are purely from inside my own head, and take different approaches to it. Some very different!
I’ve always enjoyed being playful with the creative process. I’m the idiot that decided to write a second person present tense story where the main character was a knife [Athame, from 2013’s Mark of Calth anthology – ToW]! I’ve always enjoyed the experimental aspect of things and I’m really trying to lean into that. So with Letters from an Unknown Land, it’s kind of an epistolary patchwork story. Is it a story? Is it not a story? Is it kind of a travelogue? Is it a travel guide to a fictional world? I’m using a completely different set of tools and approach, and also taking a very long view on that kind of thing.
It’s a very different way of writing stories and creating a world to everything that I’ve done in the past. It’s very fulfilling, and people seem to also enjoy it as well. [Keep an eye out for part two of this interview for more about Letters from and Unknown Land – ToW]
ToW: Having written The Crimson Fist and some short stories, then the various Tallarn stories, you moved on next – in terms of the Heresy – to Praetorian of Dorn followed by Slaves to Darkness. Did that feel like a ramp up of any kind, starting to work on stories which were going to cause shock waves throughout the readership?
JF: That’s a really interesting question. I think actually, for me the biggest weight of thought was less about the size of those moments I was writing or the characters involved, but more about how. I was asked at the time about that moment at the end of Praetorian of Dorn – how did that feel? And I didn’t feel daunted when I was writing it, because at that point I’d got into the narrative and the writing deeply enough that it was one of those beautiful moments which sometimes happens in writing books, where you’re both creating it and watching it happen. I knew what was going to happen, obviously. But the precise words on the page, the pacing, the way the scenes break, all the little details of what’s going to happen…you don’t see that until you’re writing it, and you’re kind of writing it and watching it at the same time. So, I was really lucky that I hit the end point of Praetorian of Dorn in that kind of flow state, which doesn’t happen very often! But yeah, I wasn’t particularly intimidated by it in the lead up either. By that point I’d been working with the Heresy material for a long time, and I knew it really well. I mentioned Alan earlier – I’d been collaborating with him on the ‘Black Books’ at that point for several years, so we had worked with Primarchs, and shown these characters in ways that maybe readers hadn’t seen before.
It was always more about “how am I doing this, on the page in terms of the experience of the reader?” Those are actually the choices that you sweat – “how is this story going to be paced? How is it going to be cut? Which characters are going to be best to include? Who’s the best person to see this story through?”
With Praetorian of Dorn I had half of the idea already – the idea of an Alpha Legion incursion into the Sol system versus the Imperial Fists on the cusp of the Siege. Alan and I talked about it in the very early days of the Black Books, which was more or less parallel with The Crimson Fist. So that had been taking up real estate in my head for a long time before I came to the page.
Slaves to Darkness was the exact reverse of that. We needed to pull the strands of these major traitor characters together, and we needed to put in place these big facts about them – their status or how they were relating to each other, characters who end up not being at the Siege because of choices they make. So all of the pieces were already there but it wasn’t decided it was going to be me doing it. And I was like, “I can do it”. Actually, it was probably a combination of “I can do it” and “I’m free to do it”.
I suppose doing those two books was a ramp up to an extent, but not in terms of big events really. It was more about the length and complexity of the books that there was a ramp up with. Through a bunch of other things like the Ahriman series, which were going on at the same time, I was learning a lot to do with handling quite tricky stories in terms of plot and character, and that gave me a lot of tools that let me hit that ramp and the Siege when that started.
ToW: Praetorian of Dorn was book 39 of the Heresy; I’ve often wondered what it was like coming into the Heresy team partway through. Do you think you brought a different perspective to the second half of the series compared to the authors who had been there from the beginning, given that you came in as both a writer and a fan?
JF: The really interesting thing I remember about coming into the Heresy team was (and other people have talked about this) just being daunted by the people already there. I mean, you’re walking in and sitting down with these people, and it’s like “Hi Dan Abnett, here’s my idea for a modest novella. Any feedback?” You know, “Hi Jim Swallow, how’s that BAFTA and how’s that New York Times bestseller tag doing?” For me personally, I really liked all of them and I wanted to impress them. Thinking about the question you asked earlier, about playing with the big story arcs and being intimidated…looking back on it, it was more about wanting to do that. I wanted to mesh in with these other huge stories that I love.
Certainly coming in as a reader, having consumed that first era of the series, it felt like there was a generation of writers already present. I’d say I’m of the Heresy era that broadly begins with Aaron and includes Chris, Guy and me, and then a few others. In all honesty I don’t know if it necessarily brought a new approach, but when you come into any situation you naturally bring a new insight, or a different insight, to the people that have been there producing what you admire and what you’ve consumed. Everyone brings their own tastes, their own ways of looking at stories, so naturally when you have new people joining the team they’ll bring something different, but I always wanted the work I did to mesh and harmonise and salute the other stories in the series.
So for example, I’ll make absolutely no bones about the end of The Solar War and the presence of Mersadie Oliton – she was the perfect character for that book, but the presence of that character was a of closing of the loop, and the end of her arc with Loken is a deliberate love note to Dan’s writing of Horus Rising, from me.
ToW: In terms of the Siege, you and Dan have the prestige of being the only writers to have written two novels each. Looking back, what does that feel like?
JF: I’m really glad I got to do it. I thought that I’d only get to do one, and then to be asked back to do another one…it feels weird, I’ll be honest. But I’m incredibly grateful, because being part of that team and writing those books felt like something genuinely momentous. It still does, actually. It’s the capstone of what I’m pretty certain is the longest work of continuous fiction in the English language. Probably in any language! The longest complete story ever… and I wrote two of the final pieces. Every time I think about it, I think, “Wow, I got to do that”. We’re coming up soon on 20 years since Horus Rising came out. 20 years! I’ve signed books for people who weren’t alive when Horus Rising came out! So yeah, what a deep, deep privilege.
ToW: If I can put you on the spot…thinking about the Siege as a fan, as a reader, what’s your standout moment of the series?
JF: I think, quite often, it’s the small moments, and I think I have a variety of them. It’s not an individual moment, but in Warhawk you’ve got Ilya Ravallion, who at that point is essentially dying of natural causes and age, talking about immortality to one of the White Scars. That’s a phenomenal moment.
Again, rather than a moment there’s a sequence which Aaron wrote with Kargos Bloodsplitter, where he’s basically not certain who he’s talking to, whether he’s talking to himself, whether people next to him are alive or not, and whether he needs to save the gene-seed of his fallen brothers or not. He looks down and sees all of the gene-seed vials on his thigh are shattered. It’s a beautiful, terrifying character moment, but then it also just reorganises all of what you just thought you read in the previous pages. It’s just fantastic.
And then there’s the moment in Saturnine – clever Dan! – where you as the reader know about this terrible plan that Dorn has put into motion [no spoilers – ToW], and you get the new arrivals arriving at [redacted]. They think they’ve reached safety, and then they’re told where they are. I just remember that moment…and I knew what he was doing, because I’d read the documents, I’d talked in meetings about it. And even then, I hit that moment, and it was that sort of thump of dread at the bottom of your stomach.
But there are so many beautiful little moments in the Siege. I still think that Gav’s rug pull in The First Wall with the raising of the flag was absolutely fantastic – I loved that. But yeah, quite often it’s the lower energy moments for me. I found myself rereading the very end of The End and the Death, with [redacted] and [redacted], which was a wonderful kind of capstone moment. There’s also a sequence right at the beginning of The End of the Death v1, where one of the narrators is talking about the handprints on the walls, and people making plans, and what it means – you set your sign to it and your sigil, and the plan echoes through time. Just from a prose point of view, I read that and I just went, “Wow! I see Dan’s really bringing another level of A-game today!”
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John French is an award winning script writer, novelist, and games designer. He has written over twenty novels over a decade-long career, notably the Ahriman series set in the dystopian far future of Warhammer 40,000, and six novels in the New York Times Bestselling The Horus Heresy series, most recently The Solar War and Mortis. His other work includes cosmic horror in the Lord of Nightmares Trilogy from Fantasy Flight Publishing, and detective fiction in The Last Visitor in Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes from Titan Books (writing as Stephen Henry). He has been a series writer for three animated TV shows and written the scripts for over thirty produced episodes. In the realm of video games, he has a story designer and writer on multiple titles, including Darktide. In 2018 he won a Scribe Award for Best Audio with his script for the drama Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies.
Find out more on John’s website.
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As always, I’d like to say a huge thanks to John for chatting to me – and in particular for taking such a lot of time to talk in this much depth! It was an absolute pleasure to chat for this interview, and I’m delighted we could arrange this for the 2,000th post on Track of Words – it felt like the perfect way to mark that milestone.
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed chatting to John. Keep an eye out for part two of this interview coming soon!
In the meantime, here’s some further reading if you’re on the lookout for more about John French:
John French interviews on Track of Words
John French reviews on Track of Words
More about Letters from an Unknown Land
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