OK, let me confess at the outset to a bad case of Danlove. I mean, how can I, as a writer, not fall down in abject awe before the Abnett, tapping away ‘I am not worthy, I am not worthy’ on whatever keyboard lies closest to hand: the Magna Abnett, after all, sits behind his computer in the, somewhat unlikely, environs of Maidstone, Kent, producing an extraordinary stream of novels, stories, comic books and scripts each year (I once tweeted Dan asking if anyone, apart from him, had read everything he’d written and his wife tweeted back to say she had. I was tempted to say greater love hath no wife than that she read everything her writer husband writers, only with the DanMachine, that would be no hardship). On another point: would a future literary biographer (and I’m sure someone will write the DanBio some day) actually be able to read all Abnett’s work and still have enough years left in his life to write the biography? I fear he or she would need, in true 40k style, some augmentations to get through everything in a liveable span.

So, yes, this is the basis of my Dandoration. How can one man write so much and still maintain the quality that the Abnett almost always does? Surely there must be a team of Dandroids, closeted in his Maidstone mansion, typing away, hunched over keyboards, server motors overheating as the Danman himself sits back, sucking a lho stick and sipping the finest amasec, directing the operations of his minions. And, come to that, Dan, can I be one of your minions?

As to The Unrembered Empire, congratulations to all the Dandroids that worked on it: superhuman Primarchs slugging it out through the ruins of a megacity is what the Horus Heresy is all about, and the Dandroids deliver.