The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Oh, the Horus Heresy isn’t quite over yet. Horus’s ambitions haven’t dried up and vanished, and the Imperium still has to deal with the Chaos-deluded primarch making his way to Terra, but the malignant forces of the warp have achieved their ultimate aim. Humanity’s chance to free itself of the warp has been lost. No matter what happens from now on, no matter how hard the Imperium fights against itself, against its enemies, the laughter of mad gods will echo behind the veil.

But this isn’t news to you, I’m sure. The central tenet of Warhammer 40,000 has always been the pitting of humankind against itself, the oldest lore hearkening back to that angelic rebellion called the Horus Heresy, where humanity began its long, inevitable decline. Warhammer 40,000 has always been about how the centre cannot hold; about raging against the dying of the light.

The Imperium of the Dark Millennium, ten thousand years after the Heresy, can’t beat its foes. That was never on the cards. Warhammer 40,000 is the kind of setting where your sins risk breeding very real daemons, where so much knowledge has been lost or sealed away as heretical or dangerous, and above all: where humankind devours itself, day by day, feeding thousands of psykers into the soul-engines of the Golden Throne to maintain the last flicker of the Emperor’s divine will. This is a species sacrificing its future for its present, destroying its own evolution into a psychic race because to evolve, to ascend, is to shine like a beacon to the creatures of the underworld.

Almost every xenos threat besieging the dying Imperium of Man would be enough, on its own, to eventually seal the empire’s fate – yet one damnation takes thematic primacy and always has. Predatory alien hordes endlessly eat away at the Imperium’s borders, but it’s the taint of Chaos that holds a blade to the throat of every man, woman, and child.

The Emperor knew this. Freeing humanity from reliance – heck, from as much contact as possible – with the warp was the species only chance at long-term survival. With the death of that dream comes the long, drawn-out death rattle of the species.

What a cheery thought.

Heavy stuff, right? I can’t even begin to frame the context for how many involved discussions and back-and-forths with various loremasters I had during the planning and writing of this book. I’ve read every single word ever published about the Emperor, and talked about it all about, say, eight squillion times. When you’re writing a novel about the greatest figure of unimaginable mystery in the entire setting – in either of its main eras – then of course you’re going to need to treat it with some care.

There were no mandates on what had to be included and what needed to be excluded, but I went into it with a fairly tight focus on the things I wanted to show, and the things I wanted to avoid at all costs.

The former is obvious. Pretty much everything I wanted to show has been shown; unless you started here then you’ve probably just read the book and are now making your way through my rambling thoughts.

The latter is a far trickier deal. I’m sure this novel will divide people in terms of its reception. In many ways it can’t help but do that given its subject matter, and I’m accordingly braced for it.

The fact is (let’s rip this band-aid off right now) I didn’t want to reveal anything about the Emperor as any kind of definitive, objective truth. I don’t think anyone should, either - partly because understanding the Emperor’s nature and origins hasn’t been important for three decades of enjoyment in the supremely popular setting (and it’s never going to be necessary for that), and partly because, well, no answer will ever be satisfying enough or believable enough for everybody. Nothing will match everyone’s massively varied perceptions of the setting, and that’s as it should be. It’s Warhammer 40,000, after all. No one faction is “right” in the setting, it’s all just levels of ignorance and occlusion.

Between you and me? I find the idea of a single, objective truth for any 40K mystery a little tedious. The fun has always been in exploring the possibility and likelihood of various angles. Could the Emperor have been born from the souls of primitive shamans? Is he a Dark Age construct aping human form, left out to enact his will over the now-ignorant species? Was he a manipulative overlord and tyrant who knew everything of Chaos? Was he just a good man whose intellect strained to work alongside the levels of those beneath him, and was he ultimately failed by lesser beings?

All of them might be true. None of them might be true.