Babel Clash

Paul, I was very pleased to see volumes of your Adversary Cycle return to print after several years out-of-print.  The 2nd Adversary novel doubles as the 1st Repairman Jack novel, but Jack isn’t a prominent figure in this cycle.

Many fans may be less familiar with the Adversary Cycle.  It was finished back in the early ’90’s.  Can you speak to how it feels to have these books back in print or the process to get them back on the shelves again?

How did your experiences with the Adversary Cycle affect your creative approach to the Repairman Jack series?

Paul, in your latest “adult” Repairman Jack novel, you tackle a topic that couldn’t have been easy.  Jack is tangled up in a mystery involving 9/11 conspiracies, an alternative history regarding the collapse of the Twin Towers and Osama bin Laden.

Was tackling these topics a difficult choice?  What was at the root of the decision to take the story in this direction?  Were you happy with how it turned out?

With the Repairman Jack series approaching its 15th volume, I get asked about this a lot.  I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I did not want to start a series at the time I wrote The Tomb.

Some background: After The Keep I started a new novel that stalled.  One night I had this frustration dream about being trapped on a rooftop and chased by something.  No matter what I did I couldn’t kill it.  I woke up in a sweat and knew I had to use that. But it wouldn’t fit in the current book, so I started fresh.

I had to come up with a character who could survive that scene, but for the hell of it I decided to turn all the cliches for an action hero on their collective heads.  I wanted the anti-Jason Bourne.   No special forces training - he’s not a former Ranger or SEAL - no history with the CIA or any government agency, no black ops skills, no training of any kind.  Everything he knows is self taught or learned on the street.

Okay.  Then I took it a step further and made him an anarchistic urban mercenary with no identity.  He has no SSN and has never paid taxes.  He can’t call up old buddies in the government to run a set of prints or a license plate for him.  He’s on his own, on a wire, with no safety net.

When I finished The Tomb I knew I had a series character on my hands, but I didn’t want to do a series.  I had my next 2 novels written out in my head.  So I left him bleeding to death at the end of the book.

But he wouldn’t die.  The Tomb never went out of print and readers bugged me for years for a sequel.  Finally, 14 years later, I gave it to them.  He’s since taken over my writing career.

How to create an iconic series hero? Start by smashing all the icons.

Borders in one of the few stores that maintains a distinct Horror section.  At Waldenbooks, horror titles find a home in fantasy or general fiction.  B&N shelves their King, Koontz and Straub books with general fiction.

Horror fans seem to appreciate our commitment to their genre.  On the flip side, trying to identify which titles belong in which section can be tricky.  We feature Kelley Armstrong in fantasy but Kim Harrison in horror (her adult books anyway).  We often keep an author’s work together.  So Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon is a fantasy, but it’s shelved in horror.  Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Ilium novels stay in Science Fiction, but the Terror and Song of Kali live in Horror.

Sure, it would be nice to shelve a borderline book in two places.  Financially, it could mean buying twice as much inventory.  Technically, our computer system can’t handle it.  Third, we’d risk confusing customers, who might find a title only in horror one week and then only fantasy the next, as one or the other sold out.

As genres blur together (which I encourage, mind you), determining the best home for a title gets trickier.  The line between fantasy and horror is especially blurry.  For better or worse, vampires, werewolves and zombies are everywhere from Young Adult to Romance.  Zombie Romance?  Really?

F. Paul Wilson, our latest guest, has made a nice home for his work in our horror section.  What do you think?  Did we find the right home for Repairman Jack?

Our next guest is F. Paul Wilson, author of the Repairman Jack novels.  His latest, especially for young adult readers, is a Young Repairman Jack novel called Secret Circles.  His latest book in the adult cycle is Ground Zero.  Please join me in welcoming him to Babel Clash and please feel welcome to comment and join in our discussion.

Tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next debate.

Thank you again to Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill for a great conversation.  To all of you who have visited Babel Clash for the first time particularly for Dan and Graham’s conversation, please continue to visit.

So I guess we’re at the packing your suitcase and waiting for a cab to the airport stage of our visit here at Babel Clash, and I’d like to echo what Graham said last night: we’ve had a splendid time, it’s been great meeting you all and chatting to you and, hey! We broke a record too!

I was just checking over the comments from the last post to see if there were any questions left unanswered. I was drawn to Paul’s comment -the point he made was a good one, but I especially enjoyed his admission that “this is by a long way the nerdiest thing I’ve ever posted so forgive me”. I could almost hear the resigned sigh that accompanied it, and I so recognised the feeling: the moment you know you’ve been drawn into, and committed to, the internal logic of a conversation that you know has long since crossed the Nerd Event Horizon. My empathy for Paul’s remark aside, it’s actually a significant characteristic of my work and the over all subject of this fortnight’s digressive discussion. It’s the level of willing immersion you have to embrace if you want to play in someone else’s universe. It’s taking the sort of questions typified by that old cliche, “Who’s stronger? The Thing or the Hulk?” and considering them soberly and thoughtfully, despite all the eye-rolling and the mocking and the digs like, “Why are you taking this so seriously? It’s not real, you freak! It’s only a comic/game/movie/bunch of toy soldiers!” (delete where applicable). Digs like, “It’s not even a proper book.” And “You are so sad, dude.”

And I guess we all know why, don’t we? We’ve all got at least one thing that we take that little bit too seriously. The thing that can actually draw us across the Nerd Event Horizon to engage in serious debates about non-existent things… like hit points or gene seeds or power rings or flux capacitors or jelly babies.

You can make a good case for it being much easier to work in someone else’s universe because a) someone else has already set the rules for you and b) there are lots of other people to ask, but both of those points are based on the false assumption that the rules work and all of those other people agree with one another. You can make a similarly good case for the idea that your own universe is the easiest playground, but it can be lonely there, and cold, and you can get cabin fever, and there’s no one around to stand with you when the wolves start growling outside the door.

I suppose what I want to leave you with more than anything is the idea that tie-in work, when it’s taken seriously, is not a soft option, a quick hack job to earn money. I wouldn’t want to draw a line between my original universes and the ones I’ve been allowed to play in: I have found both rewarding, and if it sounds like I’m bigging-up the latter here on Babel Clash, it’s probably over-compensation. People say some crappy things about tie-in work. It’s only just getting a scrap of the respect it deserves for the industry and craft it involves, and… well, to be honest, if us tie-in writers don’t stand up and explain what goes into it and why it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as a great big pile, then who the hell else is going to?

That final stray question from Marine, seconded by Elizabeth - yes, I menaced poor Ben with an axe and told him to keep Loken’s ‘death’ vague. And if I told you guys how he was going to make it off Istvaan, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?

On behalf of me and Graham, thanks again everyone, and thanks to Morgan and Babel Clash for having us. We’ll both be checking in over the rest of today to catch any final comments. But this doesn’t have to be the end, oh no! If you look to the right or below, you’ll see links to our home pages, where you’ll find our blogs. You can come and have chats like this with us there, where we will be prepared to speak about all aspects of anything. I kid you not. My particular area of expertise is digression. So, party at our place! Let’s go!

One last thing. I was struck by how many of you have said that the enthusiasm of our posts over the last fortnight have inspired you to write your own stories or even novels. That’s pretty amazing. Off you go, find some universes… your own or otherwise.

So, Saturday morning here in the UK, really early, still dark, crisp and cold. Don’t know what woke me. Maybe it was the giant-size Hollywood-style full moon lighting the edges of the cloud banks as it sets; more likely the telepathic tremors letting me know how popular our stint here at Babel Clash has been. Well, how gratifying is that?

It’s the last few days of our stay here, and I thought we’d be pretty relaxed about it and use the time to answer any (within reason!) questions you might have left, however idle they may be.

Let me start today by picking up on a few comments that appeared in the last couple of days alongside Graham’s fantastic posts (I agree with you, Philip!) about working on the Heresy.

Cor - you mention Loken. As far as I’m concerned, Loken’s not dead.

Richard - in 30K, there’s a sense of possibility, about an aspirational future for Mankind, however directed and controlled. In 40K, it’s everything Mankind can do just to hold on to what he’s got.

Cees - I think one of the things that all the Heresy authors have tried to look at is not WHAT happens but HOW and WHY. As you say, we know Caesar’s fate - the interest lies in finding out the surprises and secret twists that led to it. I was going to mention the movie Titanic then, as an example of something being remarkably successful even though we know what’s going to happen in the end, but if I do, the next thing you know it’ll be all Irish Jigs and life drawings, and I’ll be forced to send for the cheese police.

Jay - your idea actually made me stop and think for a moment. There is something very interesting about instruments ultimately resenting the inferior things that created them. However, Graham’s rebuttal was spot on - as was Big’s, in a completely different spirit. “Yeah, I know we said we were okay with the no-kids thing, but we’re really not…” made me laugh: it’s a mainstream, prime-time drama subplot meets shooty-death-kill in space. It’s Calista Flockhart in carapace armor. It’s Kristin Davis on a Golden Throne (with scatter cushions).

Frank - you know, of course, once you’ve fallen to Chaos, there’s nothing to say that Slaanesh can’t adjust your desires, tastes and… well, anatomy.

Graham’s blog yesterday talked specifically about the “Prospero Books” and how they came to be written (in the case of mine, STILL being written). Joking aside, the picture is surprisingly accurate. We’d enjoyed writing the first two books in the HH series so much, passing notions and characters back and forth, that we approached these with a more deliberate intent. Both of us assumed I’d be Magnus and he’d be Russ. I’ve never liked the Space Wolves much. Don’t get me wrong - they’re great in the game, just brilliant, but in terms of crafting fiction around them, they always seem to be too… well, vikings in space, really. Too on the nose. Too much what they appear to be in an SF context where that shouldn’t be realistic.

Anyway, that’s eventually why I thought I ought to write their side: it would be too easy to take the sorcerer-astartes and write inside my comfort zone. I realised I needed to face my demons and tackle the challenge. And I wanted to give Graham a proper creative choice, monkey knife fight in the car park or no monkey knife fight in the car park.

It was the right choice to make. I am a brother of wolves now, and I own an axe.

And I’m not kidding.

Philip mentioned yesterday the fact that it’s a shame my half of the pairing won’t be seen until next year. Graham’s half, A Thousand Sons, is indeed already out. My half, Prospero Burns, will be available for pre-order in the latter part of this year. It‘s had to be postponed in the schedule, and I can’t say how sorry I am about that. No matter how well you plan things, you can’t predict everything. Last autumn, while I was working on the book, I started to suffer seizures. Several months of CAT scans and MRIs finally revealed that I had developed epilepsy. Now I’m learning to live with the condition, which has involved making all sorts of changes in my lifestyle, not all of them unwelcome. Right now, I’m really getting back into the swing of things and building momentum in my work again. I’m not making light of epilepsy, but that eventual diagnosis came as a huge relief: the seizures could have been evidence of something a great deal more… how can I put it? A great deal more drastic. But, as you can imagine, Prospero Burns did get a little disrupted at the end of last year.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I’m really sorry that Prospero Burns is late, and I’m also sorry about anything else that’s run over a little, and the convention appearances I’ve had to cancel, and I’m sorry to Graham that our working relationship on the Prospero books, though great fun and very productive, wasn’t QUITE what we were imagining.

I’ll try to make it worth waiting for.

Oh, and fyi - in terms of writing tips: monkey knife fights in car parks can be a very useful creative tool if used correctly.

Hey Dan & Graham,

Congratulations on setting a new record for us here at Babel Clash.  We’ve had more visitors during your stint on Babel Clash than we have ever had before.  Take a bow, gentlemen.

I think that says a lot about your skills, how much your fans appreciate your work and the enduring popularity of stories such as the Horus Heresy.  Also, your posts have been great.  That helps, too.

And thank you to all of our guests, who’ve made the past two weeks a record.  Please keep reading and know that your comments are always welcome.

All right, with a couple of days left for these guys, I’ll step out of the way and let them close up their run here on Babel Clash with their usual style.  Guys, please feel welcome to talk about any other projects that you have in the works, or if you have more to share about Horus Heresy, then I suspect that you will find a receptive audience.

Yesterday I talked about the feel of how we approached writing stories set during the Horus Heresy, what made them different and how we made sure you knew you were reading one when you picked it up. Today I’m going to take a look at how they informed the writing of A Thousand Sons, my latest Heresy novel. All sounds very academic, doesn’t it, but trust me, it’s just me looking at why A Thousand Sons was such a fun novel to write and why you’ll enjoy it so much.

The Razing of Prospero is one of the big boy events of the Heresy, a milestone in the road that you can’t ignore because it’s a gigantic, 2001-style slab of monolithic goodness. The rich seam of storytelling potential made it a juicy prospect, and after numerous monkey knife fights in the car part to sort out who got to tell it, Dan and myself stood triumphant. Afterwards, we both looked at each other warily, like two gunfighters waiting for the other to make his move. Slowly, and with infinite patience, Dan’s pen finger twitched and he said in a gravely baritone, “I don’t like Space Wolves.” I looked him up and down to see if this was an elaborate bluff, a sly way of putting me off balance, but no, he seemed serious.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll write the Space Wolves side of things.”

“Well, okay then,” replied Dan. “I’ll do the Thousand Sons. It’s settled.”

“Yup, sure is.”

“Good.”

‘Uh-huh”

Except something strange happened next. We talked over the story of Prospero, examined the motives of the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves, asked lots of awkward questions about the set-up and rationale behind some of the decisions the key players in this drama were making. Some of it didn’t make sense, or seemed, at the very least, wilfully dense. But the more we examined the story, turning it this way and that, the more we found hidden layers, secret possibilities and truths in the heart of each Legion we hadn’t suspected. Over the course of the afternoon, I could feel a sick feeling in my gut, knowing now that I wanted to tell the story of the Thousand Sons. I glanced over at Dan, thankfully seeing a similar uneasy cast to his features. Towards the end of the day we looked at each other.

Both of us spoke at the same time.

“Wanna switch?”

Okay, that’s not quite how it happened, but it’s not far off. The more we learned, the more we realised exactly how much we wanted to explore the legions we ended up writing about. And let me tell you, having read the first third or so of Prospero Burns, I’m immensely glad Dan’s doing the Space Wolf side of the equation. These are Wolves like you’ve never seen them, unlike any depiction you’ve ever seen. Yet they are utterly, absolutely recognisable as Space Wolves. Contradiction? Absolutely. And yet they’re spot on.

I set to work on A Thousand Sons a while ago, making sure I put plenty of time in up front to really get into the nuts and bolts of who the Thousand Sons were. What made them tick, how were they organised and what character would they have? I wanted to make them more than just a legion of Librarians. I wanted to give them a character unique amongst the Astartes, a character that was different in every way from the legions we’d seen before. I’d have failed if they ended up as a legion that fought and behaved like any other, with their only difference being that they wore red and shouted, “For Magnus!” instead of “For Horus!”

They needed to walk differently, talk differently, act differently and fight differently. After all, if you have access to all these funky psychic powers, you’re not going to just walk straight into the enemy’s gunfire, are you? You’re going to be cleverer than that. To that end, I put serious couch time into working out who these guys were, working out a back story for the legion and each of its captains that gave them flavour beyond anything that would appear in the book itself. More than just sorting the characters out for the synopsis, this meant coming up with battles they’d fought in, secrets they’d mastered, places they’d been and powers they’d employed. It took a while to get to a place I was happy with (as my editors can testify…), but it made the writing so much richer. I thought about the essence of their character, and looked beyond simply the Egyptian angle. Did I draw inspiration from that aspect? Of course, but I went beyond that. I drew in elements from Aztec, Khmer and all manner of esoteric cultures. After all, the idea of a legion like the Thousand Sons supping from only one cup of knowledge seemed absurd. There’s no such thing as too much knowledge to them.

All this paid off when I started writing the book, though it means I had lots of new concepts to get across very early in the book. I was showing each chapter to Dan as I went along, and, early on, he made the very excellent point that perhaps I shouldn’t try and explain all these new concepts, that perhaps – being a Thousand Sons novel, and therefore beholden to mysteries – it might be a good idea to throw those concepts out there and leave them unexplained and mysterious, to leave the reader in the same place as anyone encountering the Thousand Sons would be. A little bit wary, a little bit unsettled, and left with the feeling that they know fantastical secrets they’re not telling you. It was a simple change, but one that really informed the vibe of the book.

It also meant that for quite some time there wasn’t a shot fired in anger. A lot of the Heresy books start with a bang, well, several bangs, but it was many chapters in before someone even draws a pistol. At first I was a little worried about this. Was the book too slow, was it dragging its feet towards some action? The more I thought about this, the more I realised that it was exactly right that A Thousand Sons held back on its blazing bolters, as it fitted the character of the legion perfectly. These weren’t guys who went charging in with guns aflame and chainswords raised to hack the enemy down. These are warriors, yeah, but they’re also scholars who want to know things first. If they can lean from you before they have to kill you, then you best believe that’s what they’ll do. It also means it complements the character of the Space Wolves, killers who are the perfect weapon of destruction and a legion bred for devastation.

This isn’t a book about a legion that falls to Chaos, its one that takes a roundabout route there. Did the Thousand Sons jump or were they pushed? That’s one of the central questions of the Thousand Sons, and one I felt there was great dramatic potential to be mined in its exploration. I didn’t want to tell a story of madness and obsession leading to the dark place, I’d already done that with Fulgrim, this was going to be a story where I took characters who’ve been vilified over the years and bring them back to a place of understanding. To that end, I picked Ahriman as my main character, and over the course of the book, I came to really like him. I saw the hunger for knowledge in him that drove Magnus, but also the humility the primarch lacked. I invested more in Ahriman’s character so that when the fate of the legion is finally sealed, you’re left with the sinking feeling that it could all so easily have been avoided.

As I said yesterday, the mortal characters are important to what makes the Heresy tick, and A Thousand Sons is no exception. Again, Remembrancers play a big part in the story, though not in the same way as we’ve seen them before. These guys are, in their own way, questing for knowledge, but it’s knowledge the Thousand Sons would rather not be widely disseminated since it’s about them. Given their history with the Imperium and their near self-destruction, that’s understandable. Yet they can’t help but warm to their youthful questioning and this forges a bond that’s about as close to friendship as it’s possible for Astartes and mortals to form.

A Thousand Sons is a long book, the longest in the Heresy series so far, and there’s a lot going on. Some bits of it you know (or think you do) but lots of other bits are new. We see some new characters, some old ones and some scenes from ‘history’ in a new light. As is our mantra for the Heresy books, I’ve brought something new and surprising to the table, and taken what you’ve heard, what you think you know and given it an ever so slight tweak so that the convenient shapes you’ve been given just aren’t quite right.

And of course, it ends in a stonking great battle.

Dan and I have talked at a bit about how we get together with the other authors and editors to plan out the kinds of stories and characters we want to tell, the wheres the whys and the whos, but today I’m going to take a meandering look at the first meeting we had. Why? Well because that’s the one where we laid out the rough shape of the playground and some of its basic rules in which those stories would operate. The High Lord of Terra (previously encountered as Alan) spoke to a crowded room of writers and editors about what the crucial differences were between the Heresy era (30K) and the Age of the Imperium (40K). As you might imagine, this turned into a very long day, with a million and one ideas born in that melting pot. But crucially, the best thing we took from that meeting wasn’t specific storylines, but the mood and feel of the place. Where 40K is a shabby palace with shuttered rooms and dusty white sheets covering the furniture, inhabited by faded ghosts and ancient old men, 30K was going to be the first days of that palace, where armies of servants threw open the windows to let the light in, and the owners were stepping into their new home with boundless enthusiasm to admire the crisp new décor.

This is key to what made the stories different, made them special. It’s what separates them from 40K books by more than just the names and the characters, it’s what let’s you know you’re not reading a 40K book, you’re reading a Horus Heresy book. We wanted readers to know they were reading a 30K novel as soon as they opened the book and read its first few pages. To that end we looked at what 40K was, how it came to be the way it is and what probably existed before. The early days of the Great Crusade were a time of hope, optimism and enlightenment, were humanity had stared into the abyss of extinction and was about to leap in when the Emperor pulled it back at the last moment. That’s not to say it was the happy family of the Federation of Planets, not even close. Unity had a painful birth, but one that showed the vast majority of people all they could achieve if they just embraced it. Not only that, but there was actual hope that the things humanity aspired to achieve could actually be reached. The light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t a speeding train, it was the promise of an empire of mankind based on learning, growth and progression.

(That’s an idea I went back to explore in Mechanicum, the notion that the Priesthood of Mars were on the brink of changing from a monolithic organisation built on tradition and repetition to one of exploration, discovery and scientific advancement. This borrowed from the conceit that science has freed us from so much pain and death, but also has the potential to destroy us all – either in the fires of awesomely destructive weaponry, or the more Lovecraftian realisation of our own utter insignificance amid terrifying vistas of infinity. That change could have made all the difference to the future course of the Imperium, but, alas, it wasn’t to be.)

Of course no empires are ever built without bloodshed, and that’s where the Astartes come in. The Astartes are warriors so far removed from humanity that they are, for all intents and purposes, no longer human. Astartes were always going to be at the core of the Horus Heresy story, as the rebellion began as an inter-legion civil war and spread from there. But it was always going to be more than that. It was going to be about people and what it meant for them. In 40K, the people of the Imperium are little more than footnotes, tally marks on a bureaucrat’s ledger, resources to be expended and tithes to be claimed. Whole worlds can vanish, in the fires of invasion or in clerical typo in the dusty halls of the Administratum. It’s a cruel place, a dark place, a place you would never, ever, want to visit. Human life is cheap, and it’s the one currency the Imperium has in almost limitless abundance. And it’s not shy about spending it. We often throw civilians into the mix of 40K novels and then horribly slaughter thousands of them, but they’re little more than straw men to be cut down in droves to show the awfulness of the galaxy. In short, they often don’t matter.

That’s not the case In 30K. People do matter. When people die in 30K it matters because they’re the ones building the Imperium, the ones spreading out into the stars to reclaim what was lost in the hell of Old Night (a lovely term coined by Mr Abnett, I believe). And talking of people brings me to the remembrancers, another great invention that feels wholly natural in the broad tapestry of the Heresy books. No, these guys and girls aren’t genetically-engineered post humans with biceps like boulders and guns that are basically rocket launchers, they’re just fleshy bags of meat and blood that break easily. And that’s what makes them compelling characters to add to the mix of a Heresy novel. In 30K we see interaction between humans and Astartes through their eyes. It’s still a big deal for mortals to be around Astartes, to meet and talk to them, but it happens. They can even become friends. Just look at Loken and Karkasy, Ahriman and Lemuel (what do you mean you haven’t read A Thousand Sons yet? Okay, okay…I’ll talk about that tomorrow…). The point is, that the horrible divisions wracking 40K haven’t yet split the Imperium into its factionalised state. Mortals still matter to Astartes, and the two exist, side by side, in a – more or less – united front in 30K. All that is lost when the Astartes make war on one another. The bond of trust between humanity and the Astartes is severed, and no-one will ever look at them in the same way again. Gav Thorpe’s excellent audio drama, Raven’s Flight, explores this idea more fully, so if you haven’t already checked it out, do so with all possible speed.

To my mind, it’s the humanity that makes 30K such a sea change from 40K. People care about things that you and I can identify with. Happiness is a possibility in 30K, where in 40K you’re every waking moment is concerned with worshipping the Emperor, working in whatever hellish manufactory you’re stuck in or worrying about being killed by a daemon, xenos beast, piratical raider or even your own rulers. It’s a world where everyone lives in fear, and conventional wisdom tells us that fearful populaces are easier to control. I imagine it’s like living under the constant surveillance of the Stasi or KGB, compared to living in a utopian society where the human spirit is to be celebrated, not crushed. Not a fun place to be.

The Heresy is, as has been said many times, a tragedy, an epic fall from grace brought about by the fatal flaw of its protagonist. But it’s about so much more than just Horus’s downfall, it’s about the terrible waste of a wonderful idea that never came to fruition. Who knows what might have been achieved if Horus hadn’t been seduced by Chaos, or if the Astartes hadn’t turned on one another like rabid dogs. The ultimate success of the Emperor’s grand dream was within touching distance when it was snatched away. You could see it, you could smell it, but just as you were reaching for it, a clawed hand snatched it away and smashed it into pieces that can never be put back together, no matter how hard you try. You might have all the broken shards, but without the glue to hold it in place, you’re always having to stand there holding it so it doesn’t fall apart again. And that’s not progress, that’s stagnation. The watchword for 40K.

30K is progress, 40K is stagnation. That’s about all I need to say.