If there is one writer that I enjoy reading in the 40k universe, it's Dan Abnett. You wont see me discussing many more writers. Yesterday Dan Abnett discussed his latest Horus Heresy book, Prospero Burns. In it we get to read about Leman Russ, the Primarch of the Space Wolves. I am not a very fast go out and get every novel reader, but I do eventually get to them. This will be one of those books, and I look forward to reading it.
Here is Dan Abnett discussing his latest book and Space Wolves.
Dan: One of the big challenges I set myself when writing Prospero Burns was to try to portray the Space Wolves as more than simply feral and deadly warriors. I mean, they HAVE to be feral and deadly, but I want the reader to have a little more empathy with them than that. It's too easy to read them as brutish and cartoonish.
It's also too easy to spoil everything by making them too touchy-feely, and therefore dilute the whole Space Wolf riff. I'm pretty pleased with the balance I've struck: I'm really looking forward to see what Space Wolf fans and players think. The Wolves are absolutely the stone killers they always have been, mighty and resolute and stoical, but there's also now a sense of a grim special purpose to them, a reason for why they are so vicious and uncompromising. Plus, they're smarter and wiser than you might imagine.
Space Wolf players might also like to bear in mind that this is set in the very early days of the Legion, no more than a century after their foundation, and at a time when even the Fang is not 'finished'. We're so used, in 40K, to Chapters being 'immortal institutions' - they've been around 10,000 years, they're never going to end or change. But all the Space Marines are new in the Horus Heresy. No real longevity has been established, no traditions. They are learning about themselves, discovering if the concept of the Space Marine is just the latest stage of the arms race or something more enduring and permanent. It makes the Wolves, even Russ, less secure and also a LOT more ambitious. They want to prove themselves and woe betide you if you're dumb enough to get in their way.
I hope readers enjoy Prospero Burns. As a counterpoint to Graham's wonderful A Thousand Sons, it may make people sympathetic towards the killers rather than the victims. History is written by whoever's left alive after the event, and opinions may vary... I personally can't wait to get back to Fenris.