Babel Clash

Sexual politics may be part of the reticence to write overtly sexual characters but that isn’t the only reason a lot of male fantasy writers shy away from it in my opinion. First and foremost, it’s outside the comfort zone for them – on a basic level, the more you explore female traits and characteristics the easier it is to just get it wrong. That’s one reason why I’m so glad my principle editor is a woman; Lou’s great for bouncing ideas off but I’ve really seen the value of being aware Jo will give me a ‘friendly’ clout round the head if/when I get something wrong on the female characters.

So first we have the fact that it’s one more thing to learn, writing female characters, and the more you explore them the greater the chance female readers will disagree with your efforts. Secondly, the more sexuality we have, the more the book can be classified in someone’s head as something else. I walked into Waterstones today and say a display that said ‘Dark fantasy’ (as I went to rearrange the SFF shelves to make my books more prominent – don’t judge, we all do it!) but what they meant by dark fantasy was actually the romantic fantasy that increasingly is nothing more than erotica with window dressing. That in itself has a readership that often won’t be picking up Stormcaller or Sasha on the next shelf, because it’s only the veneer of fantasy that they want, nothing more.

Thirdly, sex scenes (a likely result of overt sexuality in a novel) in fantasy are often either trite, cliched and at least faintly ridiculous or, well, a bit too gritty and realistic. The one sex scene in Joe Abercombie’s First Law series stuck in the memory for the wrong reasons, as erotic as pigs rutting (if they rut, or is there another term?) and distracted from the rest of the book rather. Unless you make it look like a period drama with overblown romance, you run the risk of having a mix of sweat, mud and bodily fluids that comes across faintly disgusting and weird.

But having said all of that, the more you rounded and real a character, the better their influence on the whole novel. If they’re a sexual person, you can’t hide from that and you’ll embarrass yourself by doing so. Doranei, a major character in the Twilight Reign, only got to that position because a female character, Zhia, started flirting with him and derailed the scene – creating a whole extra plot thread that has hugely benefited the series and that would never have happened without Zhia being sexually aggressive. But with the rise of Twilight and other fantasy romance, are mainstream fantasy books free to do more on that front, or increasingly constrained in what they can show without being looked (even further) down upon?

About Chik-Fil-A and about how there can be this disconnect between mass market writing and “literary” writing.  As far as I’m concerned, if the story entertains then it’s done it’s job.  Sometimes, I read this so-called contemporary literature and am bored out of my mind.  Just because your novel is 8 million pages doesn’t make it good – superfluous paragraphs of literary drivel are superfluous paragraphs of literary drivel even if they come with a Booker Prize.

With that said, I love well-written literature.  Give me Dostoevsky, Austen, Hesse and I am a happy camper.  You can also give me Neal Stephenson or Neil Gaimen and I am in heaven, too.  If I am transported out of my humdrum life for a little while, if I am utterly engaged by what I’m reading, if I laugh and/or maybe cry then it’s a good book.

And I’ll be the first person in line for the sequel.

I’m often asked what’s my favorite book.  I don’t have one.  I like many books for many reasons.

But ask me what has been the best experience of my writing career and I’ve got only one answer.

Hands down: creating and scripting FTL Newsfeed for the Sci-Fi Channel.

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.

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.

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.

I think Angry Robot’s statement is pretty accurate in terms of intent, Morgan: they are ambitiously and enthusiastically pursuing some great material that would be hard to pigeon-hole in traditional ways. I think a cocky mission statement like AR’s simply serves to remind everyone how excitingly broad the possibilities contained within the category “SF and F” really are. And I think that genre writers have always been prepared to take those giant risks, but it’s a lonely life at the keyboard, and sometimes you want your ground to be safe rather than new. It’s energising to find an imprint like Angry Robot that happily wears its awareness of those risks on its sleeve, and is eager to see them being taken. It’s about attitude.

Big’s comments yesterday about Triumff were very nice to hear. Tsar Boris asked about ongoing series versus finite stories: some things (like Gaunt) have always been open-ended, in that I’ve always felt that I’d recognise when it was time to stop when I got there. Others (like Eisenhorn) were going to be finite trilogies from the get go. I think I try to govern how these things grow using a mix of flexibility and quality control. I don’t, for example, know how many Triumff books I’d like to write, but the number is not set. Right now, I’ve written one and I have a great idea for the sequel. Maybe there’ll be a billionty-one. Maybe there’ll be two. There certainly isn’t a neon rule in my head flashing “Triumff = a maximum of four books.”

The Gaunt’s Ghosts series is planned out in three or four book arcs (each arc has a sub-title). All the while I’ve got fresh and exciting ways of continuing the series, I’ll keep going. The moment, and I mean the very moment, I feel I’m just churning out Gaunt stories for the sake of having a new Gaunt book, I’ll stop. It occurs to me that it may be surprising for some people to hear that tie-in series, which are supposed to be driven more by consciously commercial concerns, have creative discernment involved in their production.

Embedded, my next book for Angry Robot, is a return to the hard combat SF that I’m best known for. Freed from the constraints of someone else’s universe, the combat is going to be harder than usual, and I’ve been having wild fun creating a setting that will be unpredictable yet credible. The premise is this: on the frontline of a future war, a journalist is covering the action ‘chipped’ into the head of a serving trooper. When the soldier is killed, the journo - unable to eject his consciousness - has to take control of the body and get home again, reporting live feed all the way.

See? You want to read it already, don’t you?

The universe of my novel Triumff existed in my head for about two decades before I got it into a printed form. It didn’t take that much longer to reach publication than my 40K books because the universe took so much more time to design, but the contrast is useful from the perspective of the jobbing writer. A key advantage of working in someone else’s universe is that it already exists. You climb aboard, you make a creative space for yourself, you benefit from (and, if you’re doing your job right, contribute to) the ongoing momentum. Coming out of nowhere twenty years ago, I’d probably have had great difficulty selling Triumff to anyone, and if I’d managed it, it would have probably have gone out so low key it would have vanished again. Twenty years later, with a track record and past credits, I was a better prospect. Triumff isn’t being sent out over the top on its own.

Oh, and this is a crucial thing: twenty years later, Triumff is a much better book.

Triumff has benefited from the time I’ve spent in other people’s universes, both in the evolution of my actual writing chops and the development of my ‘brand’ as an author writing different things with cross-appeal to overlapping audiences.

And that’s the last time I intend to talk like a marketing manager in this blog. These are the sort of things you probably want to consider less publicly, or maybe chat about with an agent (if you have one).

Let’s talk about Triumff some more, and make sausages again. I’d always loved Elizabethan England as a setting, and I wanted to work out a way to set a (light-hearted? maybe?) novel there. But I also wanted to find a way to be a little, how can I put it, post-modern with it. I wanted to be able to make arch comments. I wanted to be a little knowing. This also might be explained by the simple fact that I was too lazy to do such thorough research there wouldn’t be any anachronisms, but I don’t like to admit that.

The easiest way to do ‘post-modern Elizabethan’ was to create an Elizabethan Age in modern times. Once I was on the path of alternate history, I needed a trigger event: the Thing That Happened that changed history from the one we’re familiar with having lived through it. The trigger turned out to be magic. In the universe of Sir Rupert Triumff, the Renaissance rediscovered magic, not art. The great empire of Elizabeth the First capitalised on this ‘technology’, became the pre-eminent world power (Liz One married Phil of Spain for new World consolidation purposes) and the rest was (alternate) history.

I could, I know, talk about humour in Triumff, because that’s a key theme, but while I’m prepared to make figurative sausages and refer to myself as a ‘brand’ without irony, I cannot bring myself to do so. There really is nothing more painful than someone explaining the mechanism of his jokes. For a start, it involves him selecting the things he believes to be examples of genuine funny. Oh god, it makes me clench just thinking about it.

I will say this: I was chuckling when I wrote Triumff, in the same way that I chuckle when I write my long running Euro hitmen comic strip Sinister Dexter in 2000AD, and people have been kind enough to tell me both have made them laugh a great deal. If the humour (that I’m not talking about) in either one works, I believe it’s because it operates in relation to its world setting, and the world setting works. Twenty-First Century Elizabethan London (in Triumff) and the massive European supercity of Downlode (in Sinister Dexter) are both very real places, in my head, that I work hard to realise for the reader.

Triumff’s success (and it’s yet to go on sale in the US, so American readers have all that excitement to come) has meant that my third book for Angry Robot will be a sequel, named The Double Falsehood. In the meantime, my second book for Angry Robot will be called Embedded, and will play to my strengths as a writer of Combat SF or, to give it its technical literary term, ‘Shooty-death-kill In Space. More on that next post.