Where to Start with 40K Lore: A Reading Order for Newcomers

The worst advice a newcomer to this archive can be given is to start at the beginning. There is no beginning — not one that helps. Warhammer 40,000 has been written for decades by dozens of hands, across hundreds of novels, and its history runs back ten thousand years before its present day. Anyone who tries to read it in order will drown in the first shelf. Yet, reader, I have watched pilgrims enter these stacks lost and leave them fluent, and every one of them did the same thing: they chose a door, not a first page. Here are the four doors I most often recommend, what each will teach you about this galaxy, and the order in which I would walk through them.

A Galaxy Without a First Page

First, the shape of the thing. The main setting is the 41st millennium, and at its heart stands the Imperium of Man: a vast, decaying empire of countless worlds ruled in the name of an Emperor who has spoken to no one for ten thousand years. He sits within the Golden Throne on Terra, sustained by ancient machines, worshipped by trillions as a god. His sons, the primarchs, were once the generals of his Great Crusade to reunite humanity among the stars. Then Horus, the greatest of them, led fully half of the Legions against him in a civil war called the Horus Heresy, and the Imperium has been bleeding ever since.

That gives the lore two great ages. There is the age of the Heresy, which is a myth-cycle of demigods and betrayal, and there is the age of the Imperium, which is what came after: a galaxy of superstition, inquisition, endless war and stubborn human courage. Each door below opens on one of those ages, and each shows a different face of the same empire. None of them requires the others. You can enter by any one, and the rest will make more sense for it.

The First Door: Horus Rising

Dan Abnett’s Horus Rising is the first novel of the Horus Heresy series, and it is the door most readers are pointed towards. It opens roughly two hundred years into the Great Crusade, at the moment of its greatest confidence. The Emperor has withdrawn to Terra and named his favoured son Horus as Warmaster — his sole regent in the field — and the Legions of Space Marines are still bringing lost human worlds into compliance. Our eyes are those of Garviel Loken, captain of the Tenth Company of the Luna Wolves, Horus’s own Legion, who is raised into the Mournival: the four trusted captains who stand closest to the Warmaster and are meant to be the voices he listens to first.

What makes it such a good entrance is that it shows you the Imperium before it rotted. The Emperor’s edicts are secular; the civilians called remembrancers — poets, imagists, documentarists — travel with the fleet to record the crusade for posterity; the Space Marines are sure of their purpose. And yet everything is already quietly wrong. Warrior lodges, secret fraternities learned decades earlier on a feral world called Davin, are spreading through the Legion. The crusade meets the interex, a human civilisation that has made peace with alien species, and the question of whether humanity must conquer everything it finds is answered in blood.

What the Heresy Teaches

Horus Rising teaches you the vocabulary of the whole setting: Legions and primarchs, bolters and Stormbirds, the warp and the Imperial Truth. More than that, it teaches you the central irony of Warhammer 40,000. Every reader knows how this story ends — Horus will turn, and the Emperor will end his war interred on the Golden Throne — while the characters cannot imagine it. Watching Loken admire the Warmaster, knowing what the Warmaster will become, is the particular pleasure and pain of this door.

A word of warning. The Horus Heresy series is enormous, and it does not need to be read entire. The first three books — Horus Rising, then False Gods by Graham McNeill and Galaxy in Flames by Ben Counter — form a natural opening arc. After that, follow the Legions and characters who interest you, and let the rest wait.

The Second Door: Eisenhorn

If Horus Rising shows the Imperium young, Eisenhorn shows it old. The trilogy — Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus, again by Dan Abnett — is the memoir of Gregor Eisenhorn, an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, the branch of the Inquisition that hunts alien threats. Told in his own dry, first-person voice, it opens with an investigation that leads to House Glaw, a noble family with dangerous ambitions, and to the Necroteuch, a proscribed text of immense forbidden knowledge. Eisenhorn destroys it, and even his fellow inquisitors protest that he has robbed them of secrets they might have used.

That argument is the heart of this door. From outside, as Eisenhorn himself observes, an inquisitor is simply an inquisitor, a being of fear; from inside, the Inquisition is riven by clashing philosophies. Eisenhorn begins as a self-declared puritan who distrusts the radicals who would use the enemy’s tools against it. Across three books — through a daemonhost called Cherubael, an untouchable companion named Alizebeth Bequin whose psychic blankness repels the powers of the warp, and decades of pursuit — he slowly becomes the thing he once condemned. By Hereticus, an old friend tells him he is no longer the puritan he once knew. This door teaches you how the Imperium is actually run: by frightened, clever, compromised people.

The Third Door: Gaunt’s Ghosts

The Space Marines are the poster warriors of the setting, but the Imperium is held together by ordinary men and women of the Imperial Guard — now called the Astra Militarum. For them, read First and Only, the first of Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts novels. Its hero is Ibram Gaunt, a commissar-colonel given command of a newly founded regiment from the forest world of Tanith. On the last night of embarkation, a Chaos fleet fell on the planet. Gaunt could lead his troops in a hopeless last stand or save those he could; he chose to get clear, and Tanith died behind them.

The survivors become the Tanith First and Only, nicknamed Gaunt’s Ghosts for their camouflage cloaks and their gift for stealth, and they carry both grief and resentment into the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, a war to liberate a cluster of nearly one hundred inhabited systems. That crusade has its own politics: its first commander, Warmaster Slaydo, fell at the victory of Balhaut, and his chosen successor, Macaroth, now leads it, to the displeasure of rival generals. This door teaches you the human scale of the 41st millennium — mud, trenches, bad orders and loyalty earned the hard way.

The Fourth Door: Dark Imperium

The newest door opens on the setting’s current age. Guy Haley’s Dark Imperium begins after the galaxy has been torn by the Great Rift, a warp-storm that divides the Imperium in two, and after something the Imperium had thought impossible: the return of a primarch. Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines, struck down long ago in the war the Heresy began, wakes nearly ten thousand years later to find himself Lord Commander and Regent of an empire he barely recognises. He has launched the Indomitus Crusade, bolstered by the new Primaris Space Marines, and the novel opens as its first phase closes and he turns home to Ultramar, where Mortarion and the Death Guard are waiting.

What this door teaches is contrast. Guilliman remembers the Imperium as it was in Horus Rising, and he is appalled by what it has become. He insists that his father is not a god; he tells a priest that the Emperor despised the very religion now practised in his name. For a newcomer, there is no better guide to the modern setting than a man seeing it for the first time too. One archival note: the trilogy — Dark Imperium, Plague War and Godblight — has been revised, and accounts differ between editions. The originals set later events a century after the Rift opened, once the crusade had ended; the revisions move them to roughly twelve years after it left Terra.

A Suggested Order

If you want one path, I suggest this. Begin with Eisenhorn or First and Only, which drop you into the 41st millennium at human scale and teach its texture without demanding any history. Then read Horus Rising, and watch the golden age you have already seen the ruins of. Then read Dark Imperium, where a survivor of that golden age walks among the ruins with you. The pattern is present, past, present again, and each book deepens the others.

If one door already calls to you, ignore my order and take it. Readers drawn to demigods and tragedy should begin with Horus Rising. Readers who love detectives and moral grey should begin with Eisenhorn. Readers of war fiction should begin with Gaunt’s Ghosts. Readers who want the setting as it stands today should begin with Dark Imperium. Every one of these books was written to be a first book, and none of them punishes you for not knowing the rest.

Beyond the Page

Many readers eventually want to hold a piece of this galaxy. Warhammer 40,000 is, after all, a tabletop game before it is a library, and the Legions, regiments and inquisitors of these novels all exist as miniatures to build, paint and field. There is no obligation. The books stand alone, and many devoted readers never touch a brush. But if a particular Legion’s colours or a regiment’s cloaks have lodged in your imagination, a starter set and a few paints are the simplest way to find out whether the hobby is for you.

Choose a door, reader, and walk through it without fear of what you do not yet know. No one in this archive began by reading everything. We began, every one of us, with a single book that made the dark seem worth exploring — and the rest of the shelves were waiting when we came back.

Questions from the Archive

Where should I start reading Warhammer 40K lore?

Start wherever your curiosity already points. For the origin of the setting, read Horus Rising by Dan Abnett, the first Horus Heresy novel. For the Imperium from the inside, read Eisenhorn: Xenos. For ordinary soldiers at war, read First and Only, the first Gaunt’s Ghosts novel. For the current era, read Dark Imperium by Guy Haley. Each works as a standalone first book.

Do I need to read the Horus Heresy before Warhammer 40K?

No. The Horus Heresy is set ten thousand years before the main setting, and it is a prequel rather than a prerequisite. Many readers begin in the 41st millennium and go back to the Heresy later, which gives its tragedy a special weight: you already know how the story ends, and you watch the heroes walk towards it.

Is Horus Rising a good first Warhammer book?

It is one of the most common recommendations, and with reason. Horus Rising opens the Horus Heresy series and introduces the Space Marine Legions, the primarchs and the Great Crusade through the eyes of Garviel Loken, a captain of the Luna Wolves. Its drama rests on dramatic irony: the reader knows that Horus will fall, while the characters cannot imagine it.

What order should I read the Eisenhorn books in?

Read the original trilogy in publication order: Xenos, Malleus, then Hereticus, all by Dan Abnett and collected together in the Eisenhorn omnibus. Together they follow Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn over much of his long career. The Ravenor trilogy, which follows Ravenor, a companion at Eisenhorn’s side in the original books, comes naturally afterwards, and later books continue both characters’ stories.

Where does Dark Imperium fit in the Warhammer 40K timeline?

Dark Imperium belongs to the newest era of the setting, after the Great Rift has split the Imperium in two and the primarch Roboute Guilliman has returned. It opens after the first phase of his Indomitus Crusade and follows his return to Ultramar. Note that the trilogy was later revised: the revised editions move some events earlier in the timeline than the originals.