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.
In this instalment I spoke to Laurie Goulding about the latest Horus Heresy anthology – The Burden of Loyalty, which is available to order right now. As most of you will probably know, Laurie was until recently the series editor for the Horus Heresy at Black Library, and this is the final anthology that he edited while he was in that role.
This is an ever so slightly longer Rapid Fire interview than usual, which seemed appropriate as there are so many individual stories to talk about within the anthology, and as Laurie was so closely involved in the Horus Heresy for so long. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!
Without further ado let’s crack on with the interview – over to Laurie.
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The Burden of Loyalty?
Laurie Goulding: It’s a Horus Heresy anthology, thematically set as we enter the final stages of the war. The stories deliberately cover a wide range of events and characters, because that’s the nature of what the Heresy has become – everyone is committed, no one has a clear idea of who will be the key players, because there are now so many of them involved…
ToW: Why these stories? Is there a particular theme to this anthology?
LG: In short, loyalty! Nick Kyme and I exchanged quite a few emails trying to find the right title – I had some really terrible suggestions that I’m not willing to share now, but we knew loyalty had to feature in there somewhere, and I think BL rightly settled on that title in the end. As a theme, it came from the choices of stories I felt I wanted to include, and seeing these characters doing what they think is right, what they believe is expected of them, even though there’s a damn good chance that they’ll be painted as the bad guys if their side loses. That goes for the loyalists and traitors alike. It’s all shades of grey by now, no one has the moral high ground any longer.
It’s been a long road to get to this point in the overall arc of the Heresy, and while we (the readers, the fans) have the luxurious benefit of knowing where, when and how the war will end, the characters don’t. There are plenty of personal tragedies and crises that might have been forgotten by the Imperium as a whole as events moved on – but that doesn’t make these struggles any less important if we want to understand what must, inevitably, come next.
ToW: Is there anything in particular that you’d recommend readers make sure they’ve read before reading this? Any spoilers for earlier stories?
LG: No, pretty much anyone who has kept up to date with the main numbered series will actually find many of these are preludes or prequels. Into Exile and Ordo Sinister both lead into the Webway, in Master of Mankind and Old Earth, while my story The Heart of the Pharos is pretty much ‘chapter zero’ of Pharos by Guy Haley.
I was also very conscious of wanting to create a collection that felt like an exciting goodie bag of stories rather than a collector’s checklist of rarities. I remember, as like THE Heresy uber-fan, receiving my advance copy of Tales of Heresy from Dan Abnett, months and months before it was released. It was amazing to see all these different tales, different viewpoints, different outcomes, but it felt like a solid book in its own right. Christian Dunn and I experimented with some different styles of anthology editing for a while, and it’s something I’m now very passionate about. Books like Mark of Calth, Shattered Legions, those are specially curated journeys through the lore, in a way that a single novel or storyline couldn’t capture.
I was very keen to present the little mini-arc of the Mechanicum in this book, from the evacuation following the Death of Innocence right through to the ‘coup’ in the Council of Terra – it felt like a good, strong way to lead into the foundation of the Adeptus Titanicus across several apparently unlinked stories, seeing the changing of attitudes and dogma in the wider priesthood. That was something Alan Bligh and I had been planning for a long time, as soon as he told me that the Forge World guys were working on reviving the game under that name. I think some people out there would be amazed just how closely he and I worked on this stuff back in the day, how much he guided the BL side of the Heresy, and how much we in turn helped him to align the gaming material with existing lore.
He was a great, talented guy. Very sadly missed.
ToW: How does this fit in chronologically, with the rest of the series? If someone’s starting reading from the beginning now, where would you suggest this fits for their reading order?
LG: Oh, I would always recommend reading stories or listening to audios in the order they are released – that’s generally the closest way to get the editors’ and authors’ truest vision of the series… with a few exceptions, deliberate or… otherwise.
If someone wanted a real breakdown of this anthology, I’d recommend dipping in around these points for the closest thing to a ‘chronological’ order:
The Thirteenth Wolf – immediately after A Thousand Sons.
Into Exile – immediately after Mechanicum.
Cybernetica – after Mechanicum.
Ordo Sinister – immediately before The Master of Mankind.
The Heart of the Pharos – immediately before Pharos.
Wolf King – after Prospero Burns and the Garro audios, before Vengeful Spirit.
The Binary Succession – soon before The Master of Mankind.
Perpetual – after Mark of Calth.
ToW: Why should readers pick this anthology up, out of all the different Heresy books? What makes it stand out?
LG: I don’t know if the official answer is “So you have all the numbered volumes”… but there is an element of completionism to reading a series that has been running for this long. Some fans will already have all these stories as digital shorts, or audio CDs, or limited edition novellas, and that’s cool – but there’s something to be said for the intertextual significance of certain narrative elements, when placed together in a certain order, in an anthology.
There are some hidden parallels and similarities between certain stories in this book, that were the result of very deliberate choices on my part, as the series editor. The authors and I worked together very closely on every single sentence and paragraph on every page, but only when you see things juxtaposed in a literal sense will some of the wider meanings start to creep from the gaps between the stories.
Yeah, there’s some implied comments about the war, about the ‘history’ of it, how we as humans choose what to believe as suits our own perspectives, even with our toy soldiers. It might be science fiction/science fantasy, but there’s still a good deal of social commentary in the Heresy, once you dig down a little deeper than the bolters and chainswords…
In fact, when I was checking the prose version of The Binary Succession back against the audio, it felt like a real gut-punch when you hear some anonymous, hateful little Council delegate shout “Go back to Mars!” from the upper tiers of the chamber. I mentioned to David Annandale afterwards – with the world the way it is now, that line no longer feels like Warhammer-y escapism. But we couldn’t have predicted that when he was writing it.
ToW: This particular anthology includes two novellas along with six short stories. Do you think the length of the component stories has an impact on how the overall collection feels? Does including novellas change the dynamic of the book?
LG: It absolutely does. I remember, years ago, I think maybe 2006, I was travelling with my family to Skye for Christmas, and I came down with actual, proper flu while we were on the road. I was reading an H.P. Lovecraft anthology, in fact it’s right by my shoulder on the shelf right now – The Dreams in the Witch House & Other Weird Stories. So I’m all feverish, propped up on a hotel bed, reading this book, and I get to ‘THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH’ (all in caps, too!) This story is about a hundred pages, where most of the previous ones had been pretty short, maybe ten at the very most. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there’s this mad stream of consciousness story about cats and the moon and… I had no idea what was happening anymore.
I think that was when I realised, you need to set a tone, a flow to things, if you want an audience to come with you on the stories you’re telling. There are expectations about what could happen next, especially if they think they know the ending.
I genuinely believe that a well placed cut-to-black can change the entire tone of a TV episode or film, or sudden silence can drop you hard out of music or audio drama. The true craft is in using the gaps and the beats as much as what you actually write, or create. James Swallow uses that to FANTASTIC effect in his audio work, and he and I tinkered with chapters and sections in Fear to Tread to hit just the right moments of tension and suspense. Guy Haley in Pharos too, he totally knows when to end a chapter!
BL have done anthologies featuring novellas as ‘headliner’ stories, or with nothing but novellas, but now I generally prefer to let the storylines of the various pieces speak for themselves. If it makes sense to step from a short to a novella, then back to a 1,000-word flash, then that’s the journey we should undertake, to make it satisfying and interesting for the reader. There should be nothing arbitrary about it, nothing accidental.
I would say, also, a good novella shouldn’t just be a really long short story. There needs to be some kind of different presentation, somewhere shy of being a short novel, that helps pace it out. Lovecraft failed me with ‘…KADATH’!
ToW: Four of the stories were originally audio dramas – how do you think these prose versions compare to the originals?
LG: Now, you know I love audio dramas. I love listening to them, writing them, editing them. All these Black Library audios (including mine) were converted to scripts, but the original short stories were commissioned with audio opportunities and ideas built into them. For example, The Thirteenth Wolf was about using sorcerous portals and taking us to crazy, Realm of Chaos style landscapes, one after another.
But when I came to edit this book, I rediscovered a few extra lines here and there that had been cut from each scene, or narration that had become dialogue. If you listen along to the audio drama while reading the prose version, you can almost see the editorial and directorial processes unfolding before you. Attribution of speech, description of combat, none of that makes it into the sound mix in quite the same way.
When I was a kid, I never really understood why my Roald Dahl stories on tape had ‘Dramatised by…’ as a credit. Now I’ve been doing that task professionally for about seven years, I know just how much work goes on behind the scenes, in turning prose into full-cast audio!
BL are doing great work with their audio ranges, I’m really excited to see what’s coming next.
ToW: You mentioned that you wrote one of those audio dramas, The Heart of the Pharos. How does that fit in with the rest of the Heresy series, and your other work?
LG: Heh, I actually want to make something quite clear, here – I was pretty uncomfortable with including a story I wrote in an anthology I edited. However, Nick pointed out, quite rightly, how much longer after the audio version would we want to release it, before it starts to feel like it simply doesn’t fit anymore? If we reached the Siege, and then bundled my story into an anthology edited by someone else way down the line, it’d be like saying “Hey, remember there was a prelude audio to that novel you read years ago? Well, here it is in prose, finally! Enjoy!”
And you know what? It does fit the theme. You have the whole Imperium Secundus arc being one massive exploration of misinformed loyalty, and these poor young lads in the XIII Legion wanting to do their part and do their duty, in spite of the very real possibility that there is something very dangerous and ancient down there. (And no, it really was not the tyranids.)
This story is a stealthy sideways nod to the Scythes of the Emperor stuff that I worked on in Warhammer 40,000. Dan Abnett was asking for some way to link Sotha to the Chapter for The Unremembered Empire, so we settled on their founding master being a neophyte Scout at the time of the Heresy. I think the name Oberdeii came from notes that Richard Williams and I exchanged back in 2011? Like, really rough, basic notes about where the Scythes came from, where they might go, through my writings or through whoever picked them up after me.
If anyone wanted the full tale of the founding of the Scythes of the Emperor, I’d recommend they start with The Unremembered Empire, on to The Heart of the Pharos and Pharos, then skip about a thousand years of daddy issues and grab my sort-of-40k short story The Aegidan Oath. From there, it’s only a short galactic cycle to the coming of the Kraken, and the beginning of the end.
Until next time, of course.
***
Huge thanks as always to Laurie for taking the time to answer these questions. You can find my original reviews of almost all of the individual stories from The Burden of Loyalty on the main Horus Heresy page on Track of Words. If you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews, you can find those here.
If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, on Facebook or Twitter, or by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com.