A rather cool look at early Games Workshop and their attempts to get Warhammer/40k fiction written. The article's from at a time when Abnett was considered a new author, which is a pity - would've been nice to get the author's view on the success of HH too. Best bit: they reached out (unsuccessfully) to Terry Pratchett at one point! I'm trying to wrap my head around what that'd been like.
Man I have been waiting to read something like this for years. I guess it's never been clear to me how soul crushing it must have been sometimes for British authors to write this stuff. Their great literary tradition and so forth.
There's just so many amazing lines in this thing.
Cheryl recalls, 'I only met [Ansell] a few times, and the thing that struck me most was his desire to live in a gated community with machine guns on the gates so he could keep the riff-raff out. He had a very Texan view of life.'
Or
Meanwhile Ian Watson had begun to find his own way through the 40K maze....'When David [Pringle] originally asked me to join in, he tried to steer me towards 40K because I'm an SF writer not a fantasy writer … So I learned the Encyclopaedia Psychotica Galactica and I wrote a trial 40K short story which initially read a bit like a piss-take. Scourged by David, I then hallucinated myself into the 40K milieu, and began to have enormous mad fun in broodingly, Gothically, luridly going over the top. That's when it all gelled, and the "Inquisition War" trilogy came about.'
Or
Watson told us how war-gaming dates back to HG Wells in 1913, and went on to explain to the startled gathering that Warhammer fiction has a certain integrity because — just as in the Warhammer game — for most of history humanity has been driven by mass psychoses based on power fantasies. "Yes, but look on the bright side!" we all cried.'
Or
The books are fairly central to the GW project these days. David Garnett says, 'I've recently been told by one of the GW shop managers that the big, detailed manuals [which we used as reference] no longer exist — and that the best way for gamers to find out the background to the Warhammer world is through the novels.'
Or
Meanwhile the challenge of complying with the Warhammer universes continues beyond the grave, so to speak. For a long time Black Library remained reluctant about Ian Watson's 'Inquisition War' books. 'My books looked as though they would never be reissued, despite me receiving umpteen e-mails from Desperately Seeking in America, Australia, Germany, wherever. After I had banged on at the Black Library for several years about all these e-mails I had to answer, GW finally decided to reissue my "classics" with fictional prefaces denouncing the books, my suggestion, as tissues of heresy and lies, the ideal solution …
Or
Space Marine won't be returning as, apparently, its central concepts are too far from the changed world of the game, but Black Library are considering making it available online.
Lol, that's putting it diplomatically.Or
Alex Stewart has also gone back to GW. '[After GW] reprinted my old Warhammer story in The Laughter of Dark Gods ... I ended up being invited to do some shorts for Inferno! … They liked the first one so much I'm doing a series for the magazine about the same character [the Flashman-esque Commissar Ciaphas Cain], and I've just signed a contract to spin him off into a novel [to be called For the Emperor!]. I have to say they're a lot more professional and easy to deal with these days … The Stalinist horrors of the Ansell era are long gone ... Feedback is quick and supportive, rewrites are only requested for continuity reasons or to make something work better, and I'm positively encouraged to subvert the source material if I feel like it.'
This shit is priceless. From the creepiness of Ansell's ownership of the universe and how no one shirks away from saying how focused on money GWS was and is....it's kind of affirming as a fan, in a reflective, semi-ugly kind of way. When I joke about GWS space fortresses made of money, welded together with tears....this makes it a little more believable. Maybe that's why, for a fan, the Imperial Cult just rings true.....because it was and still is treated like a cult of worship by GWS. It's a product of fanaticism and zealotry. Life imitating art, or art imitating life.
Kinda makes you wonder what it really means for the company with Age of Sigmar etc...if that zealous fanaticism that has kept the franchise distinct might start to wane as it becomes more diluted by people further removed from the source. If GWS is their fiction and the fiction is GWS....you kind of have to have an oppressive overlord of grimdark gaming don't you? A kinder, friendlier GWS signals the death of the universe as it's been. I suppose that's what some people actually want, so the setting can go somewhere beyond where Ansell left it.
Anyway, this article somewhat reflects a few of my experiences with the Black Library when it was a web forum. (I too had delusions of writing for GWS one day.) Authors would pop in and talk about stuff but anything actually about GWS was always a little guarded....and then they vaporized the forums in favor of a storefront where there was no discussion, contests or correspondence with the staff. That totally broke my heart.
Also I just can't get over how Ian Watson is considered a heretic in modern GWS. The irony is damn near cosmic. The guy who had to shock Ansell now is printable only with a qualifier attached to it. He's written the only 40k novels that, despite all the nasty chaos-inspired shit that's been written over the years, I actually consider lurid.
I guess it's just fascinating to read what people who did not chug the koolaid honestly think about GWS and 40k. Also makes you wonder a little...if this thing you love as fiction is actually someone's idealized, fucked up future.
Author
Topic: WH40K discussion thread: from Tyran's heart I stab at thee. (Read 971684 times)