Pre-orders for the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim’s glorious new miniature begin this Saturday, and he’s joined by a brand new novel exploring his return to the 41st Millennium and the impact it has on his Emperor’s Children. Fulgrim: The Perfect Son is an unmissable tale of ambition, treachery, and hubris. We spoke to author Jude Reid to find out more.
Warhammer Community: The return of a Primarch is always a seismic event. What was it like getting to write about such an important character?
Jude Reid: Oh, it was tremendously exciting! Fulgrim’s been a favourite of mine for a very long time, and it was an absolute joy to get to write about such a major character. We’ve seen the return of other Primarchs like Guilliman and Lion El’Jonson relatively recently, and while Fulgrim’s story is a bit different in that he hasn’t exactly been gone gone, this novel brings him back very much into the activities of the 41st Millennium.
I did a lot of research in advance, going back to reading Graeme McNeil’s Fulgrim and Fulgrim: The Palatine Phoenix by Josh Reynolds, and they’re both excellent at showing us the Phoenecian in those particular moments in time. I was keenly aware of wanting to do them (and the character!) justice, but the intervening time since we’ve seen him meant I had the opportunity to explore how he would have changed, and what’s different about him now he’s ascended into his full daemonic glory.
WarCom: How does the return of their gene-father affect the Emperor's Children themselves?
Jude: Well, when we start the book, the Emperor’s Children are a pretty disparate bunch. Without their primarch taking an active interest in them, they’ve fractured into separate warbands, all pursuing their own ambitions and driven by their own cults of personality. As you’d probably expect, a massive series of rivalries and grudges have built up between them. All of that changes when Fulgrim takes an interest again – he comes out of the Warp having decided that it’s time his gene-sons actually started behaving like a legion, and sets them a challenge designed to prove their worth. Except of course it’s Fulgrim, so nothing’s as simple as that, and he has an agenda of his own…
WarCom: Are there any aspects of Chaos that readers can expect to see in a new light?
Jude: There’s a fairly broad range of viewpoints in this novel – an absolute, dyed-in-the-wool evil ancient sorcerer completely committed to the pursuit of power through Chaos, a duelist and champion who actually believes that the Emperor’s Children conquering this planet will be better for it than it staying in the hands of the Imperium, an ordinary citizen of the planet watching her world get torn apart by superhuman warriors who seem to care more about the fight itself than anything they’re fighting over.
Another joy of writing this book was leaning into what’s arguably the most significant cult of Slaanesh in the entire galaxy by this point in the storyline – the Emperor’s Children themselves. These characters are tremendously long-lived by any human metric, and they have a level of personal power that means that they can pretty much have anything that they want – so what would the endless pursuit of ambition actually mean to them? Working out their innermost desires was something that needed to happen early in the story, and the single-minded pursuit of these characters’ ambitions gave them a really strong narrative drive that pushes them through the story.
Then, on the other side of the story, we’ve got the point of view of the Black Templars Emperor’s Champion charged with the defence of the planet, and we get to see the invading legion in all its glorious panoply from the outside. But of course, he’s got needs and wants of his own, and the presence of the living embodiment of ambition on Crucible only brings those into sharper focus.
WarCom: When we talked to you about Creed: Ashes of Cadia, you mentioned that you like to learn something from everything you write. Were there any lessons from Creed, Daemonbreaker, and your other novels that were particularly useful when writing Fulgrim: The Perfect Son?
Jude: John French told me once that the experience of writing every book is totally different, and he’s not wrong. There are lessons you can take forward from each one, but in the end each new novel is going to present new challenges and new opportunities of its own, and I’ve never found that more true than with The Perfect Son. Creed: Ashes of Cadia taught me a lot about how to write character, conflict and interaction, with its very close portrayals of a small cast in a relatively close environment – whereas The Perfect Son is a bigger story that takes place over many months with a cast of hundreds of thousands. Telling a story of that scope and extent was a bit of a balancing act – the reader needs to see those moments of epic grandeur, but I think the sheer scale of the story makes focusing in on the actions and motivations of individuals even more important – because it’s on an individual level that we see what’s really at stake here.
The big lesson I learned from Morvenn Vahl was that the first draft of a novel doesn’t have to bear much resemblance to the final draft – her book was the first I’d written where I completely took it apart and put it back together again between the first and second drafts, and it ended up immeasurably better as a result. That realisation gave me permission to write the first draft of this one without worrying too much about where it was going to end up, because I knew a lot of it was going to get rewritten anyway. The actual physical process of writing and how long it takes by its very nature allows your brain to make connections that it doesn’t do when you’re simply plotting out a rough framework for the story, and the less you worry and the more you write, the better it gets.
Daemonbreaker was a lot of fun to write – because it’s so short I really had to be incredibly economical with what I included, and a lot of material ended up on the floor. It’s the book where I really learned how to incorporate the theme into every part of it – in this case, how we leave a legacy in a vast and uncaring universe. In this new title, the theme condensed down into the notion that unchecked ambition and desire destroy everything they touch.
One of the things I always think about when I’m writing is how best to let the reader know what the characters are thinking and feeling. You can just tell them, of course – “Fulgrim was angry!” – but that’s something I can only do sparingly if I want the story to flow. What I find much more elegant is to show characters’ thoughts and feelings not only in internal monologue (which can get pretty tiresome to write as well as read!) but to reveal them through their speech and actions.
I like characters to have people to talk to, ideally people who they’re happy to share their innermost thoughts with – and you might have noticed in my other books the main characters often have a trusted friend or companion they can talk to about what’s going on (at least until they get horribly killed). That was tricky in The Perfect Son – because the nature of the Emperor’s Children means that they don’t really have anyone they trust with their secret plans, so I couldn’t have them talking about that sort of thing very much! What it did mean was that I could show their thoughts becoming actions in different ways depending on who they were talking to – respectful or obsequious to their leaders, mistrustful to their contemporaries, contemptuous to their subordinates, hostile to their enemies. A lot of the time the characters are lying to themselves as well, and it was fun to subtly and not-so-subtly hint about those self-delusions that the characters themselves weren’t wholly aware of. So maybe that’s the learning point I’ll take forward from this one!
WarCom: What makes Fulgrim himself such a compelling character compared to his brothers?
Jude: For me, it’s the tragedy of Fulgrim that makes him so compelling. He’s the brilliant, beautiful third son of a great king, sent out to seek his fortune, and in any other story he’d return in victory to claim his birthright and the acclaim of his subjects – but because this is Warhammer he never does. In the Heresy we see his fall from grace, and when we rejoin him in the 41st Millennium he’s been trapped in an eternal cycle of ambition and failure for so long that it’s become who he is as much as what he does.
No achievement is ever going to be enough for him – no matter what he conquers, who he proves himself to, or how well he shows off his prowess. He’s never satisfied, never able to enjoy the fruits of his labours, and any victory he wins becomes worthless the moment he has it.
He’s this embodiment of eternal ambition and eternal dissatisfaction, always chasing the next prize – the one thing that’ll finally make him happy – and amidst all that he’s a massive four-armed snake monster. There’s some tiny part of him that’s still trying to prove to his family that he’s just as good as all his brothers, that he really does deserve his dad’s favour, and all that frustrated love turns to spite and hatred on a galactic scale. Honestly I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a monster.
WarCom: Without spoilers, are there any scenes that you particularly enjoyed writing?
Jude: With every book I write, there’s always one scene that the whole thing hinges on, and with this one it happens more or less right in the middle of the book. The conquest of Crucible is well underway, Fulgrim’s champions are starting to discover what his real plan is, and he invites them all to his court for what’s essentially a huge party to personally account for their triumphs and failures. The scene started taking shape in my head fairly early on, and I had tremendous fun trying to work out exactly how Fulgrim’s court would look at this point in time and how that splendid excess would be displayed.
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a very quiet, very personal scene between Fulgrim and a former favourite reasonably early in the book, where we get a little glimpse of what he’s like when the armour comes off. Of course he’s still monstrous to the core – maybe even more in this scene than in the more obviously warlike ones – but it was a chance to see him from a very different angle and explore some of the reasons why he commands the tremendous loyalty of his legion.
And then there’s the last scene of the whole novel! I won’t give anything away, but that’s the point where all the layers of lies and deceit are finally peeled away and the truth at the heart of the story is laid bare… Would it be a spoiler to say that it’s not exactly a happy ending?
Thanks Jude! We’re looking forward to finding out what happens for ourselves – and you can too after various editions of the novel hit pre-order this weekend.
