Hello and welcome to the second half of this two-part interview with author John French, looking back over the eight years since John and I first spoke (about his Tallarn stories) and discussing some of the landmarks in his career over that time. If you haven’t already read part one, check that out to read about John’s overall reflections on the last eight years, and some of his thoughts on the Horus Heresy and the Siege of Terra. In this second part we’re going to cover the Horusian Wars series, John’s Cado Ezechiar stories for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, the Ahriman series, the intriguing Letters from an Unknown Land stories over on John’s website, and plenty more.
Without further ado, let’s get back into it.
ToW: Let’s talk about the Horusian Wars – what was the spark for that series? Why choose to write about the Inquisition, Covenant in particular, and this story specifically?
JF: So the first answer is easy – I love Inquisitors as characters in 40k, and everything about them! So getting the chance to write about them was just, “Yes please!”. In terms of Covenant, when the Inquisitor game came out in 2001 he was the inquisitor I bought on that release day. There was a tiny paragraph in the book about him being a young, hardline daemon hunter. The model was incredible, and there’d never been a story about him, so I wanted to tell a story around him.
The spark was really that I wanted to tell an unrelentingly 40k story. I mean, the Inquisition are the people who are insane enough to prosper in an insane universe, enough that they can somehow know the truth and still function, even if they’re entirely flawed, cracked on a psychological level, dysfunctional and so on. But also wielding incredible power! As a writer I wanted to tell that story in a world where you’re moving through a John Blanche drawing, tapping into that energy and feel. Most of the short stories came out of that approach – hence all the names of them. They’re almost the equivalent of tarot card names, and of John Blanche character sketches.
ToW: I wanted to ask about the short stories, because you’d written the whole Ahriman: Exodus anthology, and Tallarn was very much a multiple format project. But to me, the Horusian Wars felt like the natural progression of that – you’ve got novels, so many short stories, and then this separate but connected audio series. So what is it about this approach that appeals so much to you?
JF: For a start, I really like writing in different formats. I love writing audio, and I love the different ways you can tell a story. The Mistress of Threads is an epistolary short story told via the 40k equivalent of letters. That’s me playing around with the edges of possibility that I really enjoy, working with those mediums and different techniques within them.
Also, I like creating a sense of a universe. Not 40k as a whole, but a section of it – a section of time, the characters within it, and the events that happen. And with something like that, you can look at it through all kinds of windows and get something different. And it’s interesting that you mentioned Tallarn, because that was the same approach – you can see it from all these sides, from all these different perspectives, because like any major event, everything looks very different depending on where you’re looking at it from. That’s probably one of my writing philosophies. I really like the idea that you could see a character from different points of view, and someone that was friendly in one context is terrifying in another, seems callous in another, seems humane to somebody else, seems in the right, and then seems in the wrong. In Tallarn, no one knows for another 10,000 years why Perturabo and the Iron Warriors did what they did. It just seems like the wrath of this capricious being who simply turned up and decided to ruin this world. But he was being very methodical from his point of view:
‘I’ve just had a very bad encounter with the powers of the warp [in Angel Exterminatus – ToW]. I am fundamentally about the application of force and weaponry, and I’ve now got this insight that there are weapons within that warp-based system which can be used…therefore I must have one in order to fulfil what I need to do – which is wielding weapons and applying force. There’s one, I’m going to go and get it. The planet has a minimum population on it; I’ll wipe everything clean, and that will make it simple because then we can just spend our time actually looking for the weapon.’
And from that point, it makes complete sense. From everybody else’s point of view, it makes no sense whatsoever. I wanted to show that, and then show, for example, how the Alpha Legion saw it, how Horus was seeing it, how the Loyalists on the ground were seeing it.
Then you come to the Horusian Wars, and everything here depends on how you look at it. All those different perspectives, down to the main character, who you only get to know through everyone else’s eyes. The wonderful thing about 40k inquisitors is the concept of faction wars within the Inquisition. They’re all trying to answer this endless question of how to save humanity in this utterly destroyed future, and their ideas are all bad – they’re all crackers. But everything depends on how you look at it. From the Horusians’ point of view, their plan is to make an avatar of Chaos and then use that to turn the power of Chaos on itself and enslave Chaos (because it can never be defeated) for the benefit of the survival of mankind. That’s an utterly ludicrous plan. But is it any more ludicrous than hoping that everything will just be alright if you keep everything the way it is at the moment, which is what the Amalathians want to do? Is it any more crackers than the resurrectionist creed of the Thorians, who want to enable the rebirth of the Emperor, who will lead them on a new Great Crusade and put everything right?
All of these are terrible plans…but doing nothing is also a terrible plan! So in the main Horusian Wars series, Covenant is dealing with these questions about people trying to find vessels of the Emperor’s power, and saints, and all the super high level stuff. Whereas Agents of the Throne is much more like two levels down from that. It’s Covenant saying to Ianthe: ‘There’s a problem over there. I can’t spare the time to go and fix it myself, because it’s not that important…but it is still really important. So you go do that – that’s your job.’
ToW: Let’s talk more about Agents of the Throne. As you mentioned earlier, the first one – Blood and Lies – won you a Scribe Award! What did those audios mean to you, and what impact have they had?
JF: It’s probably my favourite work, in terms of both how it came out and how much fun it was to write. There’s sometimes a disconnect between how fun something is to write and how well it comes out – how satisfied you are with it. I think it’s a truism that sometimes the things that are hardest and least enjoyable to write, can be the best on the page for the reader. But I absolutely loved writing Agents of the Throne, and I love working in the audio format. And it was produced just absolutely magnificently! It was one of the rare occasions where everything lined up. And so, yeah, I think it’s probably my favourite thing that I’ve done, which is really weird, isn’t it? You have the huge monumental other things, but it’s these little audio dramas over here that are my personal favourite.
It’s also a really ground-level story, which I enjoy. It’s similar to the approach I took when I came to writing Age of Sigmar with The Hollow King. I deliberately approached Cado Ezechiar with a view on things which focused on the ground level; even though they might touch on his world, the concerns of gods and demigods and so on are not right up against him. He’s mostly interacting with people who are just trying to get on with their lives. So when those big pressures start to come in, you see it from a different point of view, and you realise quite how sinister they are. In the case of Agent of the Throne, it’s a cult that has got into the local enforcers, or it’s something weird going on in a prison complex. In Ashes and Oaths, when you meet another inquisitor you get the sense of Ianthe’s world expanding past where it was before, and it’s immediately terrifying and invasive. You feel the level of power, as opposed to me just saying, “They’re really powerful, look at all the stuff they can do”. If they push their hand down into this much more ground-level view, you get a sense of quite how terrifying that is.
And yeah, it’s really odd winning a Scribe Award. I was very surprised to be on the shortlist, and then I think Gav Thorpe let me know that I’d won! He sent me a text going, “You’ve only gone and won a Scribe Award, haven’t you?” And I really wasn’t expecting that, which is probably the best way of these things happening. It felt really good and still does. I’m still very proud of it.
ToW: Let’s talk about Cado, then. You said before that you’ve always liked Fantasy, and this is your first foray into Age of Sigmar. You didn’t write any Warhammer Fantasy, did you?
JF: No. Weirdly, the first pitch I ever did for Black Library – my first rejected pitch – was a story with vampires, in what’s now the Old World. It luckily never saw the light of day! But yeah, this is the first time I’ve gone into fantasy. It’s very nice, actually. I really enjoy it.
ToW: At the time you’d written so much Heresy and 40k, so why was that the right moment to jump into AoS?
ToW: It was a bit of a confluence – I was thinking about exploring something different and Black Library were looking for new characters at that point – like Guy Haley’s Drekki Flynt – who could inhabit the Mortal Realms at that sort of ground level. They really liked the idea of this vagabond vampire, and what he could show us about the realms. And they were very generous with support and working with me and the ideas I had. It was a real pleasure.
I really like the setting. It’s got a real freshness to it, an excitement and sense of possibility. It’s got that real Warhammer richness to it too. Warhammer, for me, always has the feeling of somewhere that is real – if you were to actually go there, all of that texture and detail would be endless and would just keep on going. And it was exciting to be able to go into that and to tell stories within it.
ToW: Most of my favourite Age of Sigmar books are travelogues – they tell a great story, but in doing so they explore somewhere you haven’t seen before. Do you think that’s something that 40k doesn’t really do as much?
JF: That’s a really good question. I would almost put the counter case, though – I think it does. I tried to do some of it, actually, in the Horusian Wars, where you go from planet to planet. The second book, Incarnation, is set just on one planet, but the first one, Resurrection, jumps between at least two or three. But because of the nature of travel in 40k, what actually happens by necessity is that you end up with it being about a ship because you’re always going to go back to it. The ship remains a constant. The Ahriman series goes all over the place in the Eye of Terror, then out and then back in, but because you have the ships there as a constant – even if you change which ships they are – you feel as if you are in the same place. The city that you’re exploring is the ship, and that city travels with you.
Whereas in something like Age of Sigmar, you’ve got geographical travel. If you’re riding a beast or walking from A to B, you’ll see stuff, you get a literal sense of travel. Even if you go through a realmgate, you don’t go into an enclosed room, never look out of it, then leave via another door and find yourself in a different place. Because that’s narratively what a ship is – especially in 40k because you can’t even look out the window!
ToW: Can you see yourself writing more AOS, or at least more non-40K, non-science fiction, non-Heresy sort of fiction?
JF: As much as these things can be predicted, yeah, I’d love to. As long as they’ll keep inviting me back!
ToW: So it’s not a case of itch scratched, back to 40K?
JF: No, I don’t think so. Looking back over eight years, thirteen books, I’ve learned to never say never. Take Ahriman, for example. I originally had a notion of writing another Ahriman series, but over time I got to a point where I thought, “I don’t know if I can do it.” I thought it might still happen, but there was also a fairly even chance that that was it for me and Ahriman. And yet, it wasn’t! You just don’t know.
ToW: I wanted to ask about Ahriman because he’s hands down my favourite 40k character. After Key of Infinity came out I was hoping there would be more novels, so it’s been great to see Eternal and Undying come out since! Was there something in particular that brought you back to this character though, once you’d finished the first trilogy?
[SPOILER WARNING: if you haven’t read Ahriman Unchanged, you might want to skip this next bit…]
JF: I think for a long time, my head was occupied with other things. But even when I wrote Key of Infinity, I was asking myself what the third thing could be. Because quite often, in order to make a novel or a series like that work, you need to have more than one thing going on – you need three big things.You need the thing that Ahriman is trying to do, you need his unique and different opponent, and then you need the third big thing that would spoil, interfere, enhance, and complicate all of that. And it was then that I twigged that Helio Isidoros could not be allowed to just sit there as a success. While Ahriman had obviously got back one of his brothers, it had to be deeply flawed. And of course Ahriman’s inescapable arc revolves around the idea that none of the Thousand Sons can escape their fate – they’re doomed to repeat these patterns in different ways. It goes all the way back to the Emperor – he tries to solve lots of stuff, and in doing so he creates the doom of his own creation. Magnus tries to solve his own problem, and creates the doom of his own legion and everything he values. Ahriman tries to solve the problem of the flesh curse with the Rubric, and dooms everything that he was trying to save. And so when he tries a second time, it has to be made worse by what he has done – it has to be. And as soon as I had that idea of all these problems – just like with Magnus – bubbling up behind him and ripping the cloth out from underneath him, I knew I had a good arc. And then you add in the Necrons, the possibility of the Necron time technology, even limited and flawed as it is, and that’s an interesting thing to do.
ToW: And obviously, we had to have more of everybody’s favourite monster, Ctesias.
JF: Yes! The utter bastard that is Ctesias, who exemplifies a few things in the Thousand Songs, one of which being that they’re not all naive and noble. He doesn’t believe that they are wronged – he was in it for the power, and is still in it for the power. He’s just coldly pragmatic on that level. But he’s also a hideous liar; he lies to himself continually. He has all these opportunities to leave Ahriman, and even says to himself ‘I should go now, I’m not into this.’ But he doesn’t.
ToW: In contrast to Ctesias there’s also Ignis, who’s a very different character…but in a certain sense, isn’t Ignis just as much of a monster as Ctesias?
JF: Yeah, Ignis probably doesn’t think about the rights or wrongs or the idealism of things. He doesn’t consider himself monstrous, but he’s still monstrous in the things that he does. And that’s the thing, they’re all monstrous!
Ctesias would say, ‘I’m going to kill you, because I need something from killing you. No regrets.’
Ahriman would say, ‘I’m really sorry, you’ve got to die.’
And Ignis wouldn’t even say anything. It would just be a case of, ‘calculations require this death’. Done. For him, it would just be a function of the cosmic truth of symmetry and occult ratios and mathematics. Feelings don’t even come into it. It’s just a fact. And that’s really monstrous!
ToW: I would love to talk more about Ahriman – maybe we’ll do that another time. For now though, is there definitely going to be a third book to wrap up the second trilogy?
JF: It’s not a trilogy actually, it’s a duology. But I’d love to do more Ahriman at some point!
ToW: To move away from Black Library, in a 2022 guest post you talked about using your website to give readers something that would entertain and inform, and for both of those things to have some overarching drive and idea behind them. A year and a half later, can you talk any more about your Letters from an Unknown Land project?
JF: Yeah, all of that is true – I have a series of overarching ideas behind it. As people who have read the stories have probably picked up on by now, it’s all about a world that has suffered some kind of occult calamity. If you piece together the various bits, back to the first one (New Gods, Old Sins), you can see that it was something to do with the ruling families of various kingdoms. In one of the latest stories, Palace of Crows, it becomes much clearer that something was done by the rulers of these kingdoms which basically caused a magical cataclysm.
There are two questions that have been driving this from the beginning. The first one is simply, ‘what did they do?’ There’s a certain level of cosmic horror aspect to things, but what was it that these people actually did to this world? And the second question, which is hidden in plain sight, is ‘who the hell are these letters to, and why?’ There are a couple of hints in some of the stories where it’s clear that the narrator isn’t just a letter writer – in particular Kalik, who so far is one of the principal letter writers. And there are other letter writers – the latest story, The Palace of Crows, isn’t written by Kalik. There’s another, currently unpublished, one called The Tower of Quills, which isn’t either of those two, and which offers a little bit more insight into who these people are writing to. At some point though, we’re going to find out more about what happened, and who these letters are addressed to, and at that point the question starts to become, ‘what’s going to happen?’
I’m also indulging the other part of what I like to do in my writing, which is making people work for the story. I’m gradually building up this world, and in some ways this is a real application of what I’ve been talking about in a series of articles I’ve written about world building. There’s no map, there are no timelines – instead the world is built from fragments of stories, and eye-level details. And so the world becomes bigger, more textured and more realised, as the questions of the overall story slowly emerge.
ToW: That ties nicely back into the Tallarn interview, where you talked about wanting to tell stories that are less than straightforward. You mentioned that “it might be fun to do something simple for a change” – did you ever decide to tackle something simple?
JF: No, not really! I mean, I quite often put deliberate boundaries on what I’m writing. With Cado, for example, I decided that we’re going to follow one character’s POV, and that we’re not jumping between places or characters and times. The story is always going forward – there are flashbacks, of course, and there are weird magical dream sequences, but not too many. But even if I’m writing something fairly simple – like a story about a wandering Soulblight vampire trying to find redemption and hunt down the person that destroyed his kingdom – there has to be a level of unseen stuff going on, which will hopefully pay off for the readers in the future. I realised that I just like doing that. And I think what a lot of people enjoy in my writing are things like the moments in Ahriman: Sorcerer, where you hit the end of it and realise why Astraeus has ended up the way he is. And in Praetorian of Dorn, when you realise what Silonius is, and when that payoff kicks in. I really enjoy that level of complexity.
But then with something like Letters from an Unknown Land, we’re talking about another level of complexity again. Part of the fun is figuring out how it works! Look at Simon Stålenhag, who did Tales from the Loop, or things like the Magnus Archives podcast. They provide this beautiful, relentless, drip by drip by drip building of a story. If anyone hasn’t encountered either of those two things, improve your lives, go and consume them – they’re brilliant.
ToW: You talked a bit before about how much you enjoy creative collaboration. Whether it’s with Letters from an Unknown Land or something totally different, do you think you’re in a position to find people to collaborate with, to recapture some of that excitement in your original work?
JF: I would love to, yeah, and I’m looking to do it. With truly great collaboration though, there’s always a bit of magic, a bit of synchronicity and serendipity. Coming full circle to mention Alan Bligh again – because I think he should always be mentioned – he was a once in a lifetime friend, an incredible creative, and an incredible person to collaborate with. And we just happened to coincide, to end up working in the same office. How does that happen?
There was a point in time where myself, my great friend Mike Mason – who is the Call of Cthulhu Creative Director for Chaosium – and Alan, were all doing non-writing jobs within five metres of each other. There’s a certain element of the stars aligning to add the magic to these kinds of things.
So, yes, I’d love to do more collaborative stuff, and I’m looking to do that in various ways. I’m very aware, though, that there is always an element of luck in all these things, and I’ve already been lucky several times over…but hopefully a little bit more!
ToW: To finish off, let’s look forward to how you want the next eight years to go. How do you see that going?
JF: Well, I don’t tend to think too far ahead in detail. I think apart from anything else, the last eight years shows that it’s really difficult to predict the future, no matter what your intent. To quote my own material – fate only exists in retrospect!
There’s loads I want to do. Writing in Warhammer is – and I really do mean this – an ongoing privilege, and one that I hope to keep going for as long as they would like me to. And I’m exploring my own fiction, not just in Letters from an Unknown Land, but in novels and in other media. But there’s one thing in particular I would like to do, which is to come back to audio dramas.
There’s some really interesting stuff that’s being done. You look at what Audible’s doing on their audio originals, and some of what BBC’s doing on BBC Sounds and so on, and a lot of new production companies on other platforms – I mentioned The Magnus Archives from Rusty Quill earlier. The format is a long, long way from dead. In fact I think it is, actually, experiencing the beginning of the golden age. So yeah, I’d love for things to somehow align so that I can do more of that!
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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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Once again, I’d like to say a huge thanks to John for chatting to me in such depth, and for helping me to mark the milestone of 2,000 posts on Track of Words!
I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this interview – I’ve certainly had fun putting it together! In case you’ve got this far and haven’t read the first part of the interview, you can find that here.
If you’re on the lookout for more about John French, here’s some further reading:
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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