Staring at the sun
Burn baby, burn! BL have let me get my hands on the blog today to extol the fiery virtues of Promethean Sun. If you’re one of the lucky few (well, 3,000 actually) who’ve managed to order a copy then you’re in for a fat slice of Salamanders Legionary action.

This is the first story to feature Vulkan in a prominent role (the prominent role, to be exact) and as well as the shooty-death-kill you might well expect, there are also deeper thematic overtones that hopefully enrich the primarch’s character.

Set during the latter years of the Great Crusade, it’s not utterly essential to the ongoing continuity but does set up characters and scenarios I intend to play out in later works. Not least of which is my Ferrus Manus novella (title tbc right now) for The Primarchs. Not heard about this collection yet? Shame on you – call yourself a fan . It’s an anthology of four novellas, each of which feature a primarch and are set during various points of the Horus Heresy era (including Great Crusade).

For some reason, I keep getting the guys who were slaughtered at Isstvan V but hey-ho. Ferrus Manus (and Mortarion, as it happens) both make appearances in Promethean Sun. The Gorgon is most prominent and my Primarchs novella is set during the same combat action and shows what Ferrus got up as Vulkan and co were slogging it through the jungle beating seven shades of shinola out of eldar Exodites riding dinosaurs.

Promethean Sun is really a character piece that explores what it’s like to be Vulkan. It’s a story that straddles two important periods of his life, namely his time on Nocturne when he met the Outlander (and a few years before when he rallied the people against the dark eldar – basically, some of the material as related in the ‘Promethean Opus’ from the established background) and the ‘now’ of the Great Crusade, and how those two periods interact and inform Vulkan’s character.

Speaking of characters, this story is the first time that we meet the Pyre Guard, the seven elite warriors that form the primarch’s honour guard. They were mentioned briefly in the short story ‘Forgotten Sons’, which is in Age of Darkness, but get much more air time (and names) here. I plan on coming back to these heroes of the Legion later.

Those who follow my Warhammer 40,000 Salamander novels will recognise a particular face (Gravius) and another character, Heka’tan, from the aforementioned short is also in the novella.

Through the writing of the piece, I wanted to very loosely connect some dots between the Tome of Fire trilogy and what I’m doing for the Horus Heresy Salamanders. I think that continuity is important – even continuity that extends across ten thousand years – and Promethean Sun was a great opportunity to start to tie projects together with some narrative connective tissue.

It’s weird, as I’m sort of writing the Salamanders on two planes of chronology now; one ‘current’, the other ‘formative’. Rest assured, fans of everything will be rewarded with little Easter eggs of crossover.

My intention with Promethean Sun was to write a story that enriches the background, the character of a hitherto unexplored Legion and their primarch couched within the context of an exciting, dramatic story not to present countless ‘revelations’ that would only be accessible to a small minority – that would just be unfair. That said, there is set-up in here for later stories you won’t find anywhere else and those little bits of crossover I just mentioned.

I say in my personal blog that this is part one of a much longer Horus Heresy saga involving Vulkan and the Salamanders. I have some pretty strong ideas about where I’d like to take the character and what happens to them after the Dropsite Massacre. There are some projects that are in the ‘works’ but at a very, very early stage that will answer this question and throw some light onto this mystery but you’ll have to wait for that.

For now, all I can really say is enjoy Promethean Sun. It’s just the first step on a fiery road. All will be revealed in due course...

- Nick

and BL add a little note on the bottom..

Promethean Sun update

Promethean Sun has been tremendously popular, as you’ll have seen if you’ve visited the site while it’s been on sale. In fact, it’s been so popular that it’s highlighted an issue in the way that the website operates. The immense quantities of Promethean Sun all going through the system at once have actually broken the counter that shows available stock.

This is why we had to remove the product from sale on Friday and are now reviewing all orders & stock level daily – to ensure that everyone who has placed an order will get a copy.

Now that we’re aware of the issue, we’ll be able to fix it for the next limited edition product. With Promethean Sun, we can only apologise for the inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience.

Now for the good news – there are still some copies of Promethean Sun available to buy. If you’ve been unable to get a copy so far, this is your chance!

BrookM wrote:Working my way through Age of Darkness now, so far I'm finding Rules of Engagement not that special, though I did enjoy the simplicity of Liar's Due. Right now I'm reading the Salamanders story by messer Ky'me.

BrookM wrote:
Now the Last Remembrencer, really enjoyed that one. I got to see another character earlier established in the series make a return.

Interview with a Remembrancer, part one


John French is relatively new to the Black Library stable, but he’s already made quite an impact with his short stories ‘Hunted’ and ‘The Last Remembrancer’.



Recently, we summoned him to the darkest depths of the Black Library offices, where he was subjected to a thorough grilling.

BL -What was it like getting published in an anthology?

John - It was awesome! I started reading Black Library books and Inferno! back when it started up – about 15 years ago or however long it was –and I’ve always wanted to be published by Black Library. The pure cheekiness of getting my first printed story to be a Horus Heresy one was just the icing on the cake.

BL – How did you wangle that?

John –By being cheeky! Christian [Dunn] was talking about the work he was doing compiling Age of Darkness and he made an off-hand comment about remembrancers and that sparked off ideas in my head, which cooked around for a week or so.

The next time I spoke to him I said, ‘If you ever let me do a Horus Heresy story I’ve got a title for it, it’ll be called “The Last Remembrancer”’. And he went, ‘You can have that. If we ever let you do it, you can have that title.’ And then the idea kept on going round in my head, this idea of the last remembrancer. What would have happened for this kind of organisation which makes no sense in Warhammer 40,000? This idea of having artists go round and look at things, in that sort of very liberal enlightenment type idea, makes no sense in Warhammer 40,000, so there must have been a point where that disappeared, where the pressures of the Horus Heresy and the demands of having your own side turn on you meant that that just couldn’t be tolerated any more and couldn’t continue to work.

That idea just kept going round and round in my head, who would be involved and how I would get that across. And so I had an idea about how that could happen. I was having another discussion with Christian and I said, ‘I thought a little bit more about that story that you’re never going to let me write and this is what it’ll be’. And he went, ‘Why don’t you write it? No promises that it will get out there but why don’t you give it a go and we’ll see how it turns out.’ Hopefully, it turned out pretty well because it went in the book!

BL – Did you then just write the story straight off after that conversation, or did you write a synopsis?

John – I didn’t write a synopsis for it actually. It’s one of the few stories I didn’t write a synopsis for. I did write another version of it which will never see the light of day, which I suppose was a kind of working synopsis, me figuring out the ideas on the page. And then my wife read that - she reads all of my stuff first - and said, ‘You might want to rewrite it because of all of these problems.’ So I rewrote it and that was pretty much the story that went in the Age of Darkness.

BL – You’ve already had something published already in Hammer and Bolter...

John – ‘Hunted’. It’s in issue four.

BL – Was ‘Hunted’ written after ‘The Last Remembrancer’?

John – No, it was written before. It was the first thing I did. I suppose it was my proving story for Black Library, to show that I could get words down in the right order and not use expletives.

BL – Was that the same, did you just write it straight off the bat?

John – No, that was much more involved. That was 2 outlines, then 4 drafts, I think. I hadn’t really settled on what I wanted to do or what kind of stories BL wanted from me, so that was me pretty much figuring that out. So that was why it took so long. I went through several versions of synopsis, outline and then drafts to get that in, but I think it turned out pretty well in the end.



The interview will conclude tomorrow with John’s thoughts on storytelling, the Warhammer 40,000 universe and some tantalising hints about his future projects.

‘Hunted’ is available in Hammer and Bolter issue 4, available now. ‘The Last Remembrancer’ will appear in Hammer and Bolter issue 7, available on Friday 21st April, in both prose and audio formats.

‘The Last Remembrancer’ also appears in Age of Darkness, available on Friday 21st April as a mass market paperback, an eBook and an unabridged audiobook.

All of the stories from Age of Darkness, including stories by Gav Thorpe, James Swallow and Nick Kyme, will be available for download as individual eBooks and audiobooks.

BL – What sort of stories do you like telling, what are the ones that interest you?

John – I like two things. I like character driven stories; things about people under pressure and how they react to the situations around them and to other people. I like it when you have varying perceptions of the same thing. I think it’s generally true that a character doesn’t see the same world as a reader does. They have a particular reaction to it. So you might objectively say ‘Oh, it’s a Bloodthirster.’ If you know the 40k universe, it’s a Bloodthirster piling down a road towards a unit of Imperial Guardsmen. The Imperial Guardsmen in that unit will have no idea of what’s going on. They’ll just see this thing that’s kind of a bestial construct and their senses will be overwhelmed. And it will be one of the most terrifying, most bizarre experiences ever. That view as opposed to the view of ‘Oh it’s a Bloodthirster,’ is what really interests me.

I also like clever stories. I like stories with twists in them or that have a point. That’s what interests me. I’m probably better at the clever stuff than I am at the character stuff, but it interests me to try and put it in. And I like dialogue; I love dialogue, which is a giveaway for ‘The Last Remembrancer’, because it’s essentially three men in a room, talking.

BL – What have you got planned next?

John – I’m doing a novella called ‘Fateweaver’, which is a Space Marine Battles novella, part of the Architect of Fate arc, which is four linked novellas all based around the containment of a series of daemonic and Chaos Space Marine incursions around the Eye of Terror.

Mine is based on an astropathic relay station being defended from a daemonic attack by a tiny force of White Consuls, and funnily enough does involve Fateweaver, of the two-headed bird fame, in quite a large role. I suppose, really it’s a story about siege but it’s also a story about what Space Marines are and what they’re for and, I suppose, it’s also an awful lot about the bleakness of the 40K universe.

In contrast to something like the Horus Heresy, at the time they don’t realise it but Space Marines believe that they’re fighting for a great future for this expanding boundary of the Imperium. Warhammer 40,000 is much more about humanity being on the back foot, there’s a good chance that it won’t survive for even maybe a few more decades by the end of the 41st millennium. So it’s much more a ‘What price is survival?’ story with Space Marines being at the forefront of that.

BL – Do you think that view of it being bleak informs the sorts of stories you write?

John –My wife jokes that I should put a funny bit with a dog in every story. I keep explaining that I can’t and that they won’t have happy endings and that I can’t get a nice joke in there. I think bleak stories are what the setting is about. There are fragments of humanity, there is room for the odd bit of humour but it’s a bleak, grim setting.

BL – Do you think stories set in the 41st Millennium are bleaker than those set in the Horus Heresy era?

John – I think it’s how you look at it. With Warhammer 40,000 you are already into this place where mankind knows that it’s on the brink of extinction. They are one rogue alpha psyker or major daemonic incursion away from death. They know that they’re there. Heresy stories are just as bleak, but the early ones, where they don’t realise that they’re stood on this precipice – they are very bleak. In fact, they’re more bleak because they don’t realise what’s just about to happen to them. So all the optimism is false; it’s the last great party on the eve of destruction. It’s that naivety. They still have hope and that hope, we know, is going to be quite swiftly broken.

BL – And on that cheery note, what advice would you give to anyone wanting to start writing for Black Library?

John – It’s all the old favourites. Write an awful lot. Spend time in front of the keyboard trying to get stories down. A lot of it though, I think, is get people to give you properly harsh feedback on what you write, and listen to it. You don’t necessarily have to act on it, but be open to it. But I think the most important thing for me was figuring out what I was good at writing and how that fitted into Black Library stories. So figuring out what stories you enjoy telling, what you’re good at.

BL – Anything else you want to add?

John – Hi mum!

BL – Thanks, John.



‘Hunted’ is available in Hammer and Bolter issue 4, available now. ‘The Last Remembrancer’ will appear in Hammer and Bolter issue 7, available on Friday 22nd April, in both prose and audio formats.

‘The Last Remembrancer’ also appears in Age of Darkness, available on Friday 22nd April as a mass market paperback, an eBook and an unabridged audiobook.

All of the stories from Age of Darkness, including stories by Dan Abnett, Graham McNeill and Aaron Dembski-Bowden, will be available for download as individual eBooks and audiobooks.

BrookM wrote: The dragons and their glimpses into the past are most interesting.