I’ve been working my way through The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy: Primarchs, and a few different modern series like Cain and Vaults of Terra. I just started A Thousand Sons in HH but have read up to Jagatai Khan in HH:P. I’ve also got a loose sense of modern Inquisition, psykers, and chaos (albeit tainted by Cain’s descriptions in many cases). I read Magnus the Red probably before finishing the opening HH trilogy (mostly because I’ve tried to start HH a few times and have read up to book five before).
I don’t understand what I missed in Magnus the Red and Battle for the Abyss that should have made me realize Magnus would go hard for chaos. Almost immediately when we meet Magnus in Thousand Sons it’s clear he’s going to go too far, he’s too cocky, and he doesn’t respect the warp. Before that, he really seemed like a sympathetic character, misunderstood by fellow Astartes, but in line with the level of warp you see the Imperium use in 40k. I’ve got a few questions.
- Did I misread Magnus the Red? Are there chaos signs there?
- Should I have not been sympathetic to all the jabs about the Council of Nikea?
- Was the hope that Horus placed in Magnus, maybe even Magnus’s visit during his Nurgle thing, a clue I should have recognized?
- Am I supposed to like Leman Russ more than Magnus and side with Russ in his distaste? (The whole Canis Helix thing in Leman Russ which I read first confused the fuck out of me when I read the flesh taint scene with Russ in Thousand Sons).
I haven't read the Primarch series myself, but one thing you have to bear in mind is that these are different authors writing the same characters, often years apart. It's not always going to jive perfectly.
Magnus is interesting to me because for the most part he is an unwilling participant on the side of chaos. He submitted himself to servitude because he was cast aside by the "good" guys, and the ruinous powers were the only thing that could save his Sons. My theory is that he did this to bide time and maybe find a better solution one day, but for now he's stuck being the goodest bad guy, so to speak.
Also worth remembering that the primarchs are flaaaawwwed individuals whose actions don't always make sense (blame the quality of writing on that one if you want.) I don't really like Russ because he's kind of a big dumb hypocrite concerning psykers, but at the same time he would go to the ends of the earth for his legion.
The different authors is a huge source of frustration for me sometimes when they don’t have a unified direction. In the first ten HH books there are something like five different answers to “do Astartes feel fear” none of which work with each other. It’s not a question of different narrators viewing events differently like Garro vs Loken, it’s wildly different explanations for something that each takes as fact.
I think you’d enjoy Magnus the Red with your perspective. I think it meshes really well. All of those novels are really short too, so far all well under 200 pages. tbh it feels like cheating because I can pound those.
Edit re Russ psyker: yeah halfway through Thousand Sons and him with his shaman on Ullanor was really jarring.