Space Marines and shaping worlds
With the recent release of Space Marine as part of our new Print on Demand service we took the opportunity to chat with the author of this now legendary novel Ian Watson.
Space Marine was first published in 1993 but the manuscript was finished a couple of years before that. Do you recall the reason for this delay?
The first medieval Warhammer fiction, and the Dark Future books by Kim Newman writing as Jack Yeovil, and the first 40K fiction by me were all published by GW Books edited by David Pringle in Brighton. David Pringle edited the leading British SF magazine Interzone, and prevailed upon some of his stable of writers to provide the then-owner of Games Workshop, Bryan Ansell, with his dream come true of 'real books by real authors' set in Bryan’s beloved Warhammer domains. This arrangement came to an end in about 1991, and new management at GW spent a while before settling on the media packagers Boxtree as a new publisher. (This was long before the Black Library.) So some books got delayed, such as also the second volume of my Inquisition War trilogy, and Space Marine.
How much input did Games Workshop have into the plot of the book? Did they request any changes once they saw the finished manuscript?
The original idea behind Space Marine was that it would be a collective novel written by half a dozen authors charting the career of a particular Space Marine, a sort of linked anthology. So GW organised a get-together of potential writers at GW HQ in Nottingham, followed by rather good food and vino, to sort out a plan. I vaguely recall Kim Newman being there, and Barry Bayley, and Storm Constantine and Brian Stableford amongst others. I volunteered to do the set-up story, establishing the main characters and background, which I duly did, using Necromunda as a starting point. But then none of the other authors seemed keen on continuing with any particular urgency, so I simply carried on and finished the book.
Peering through the mists of time, I seem to recall GW feeling that maybe I should modify a few little delights in Space Marine such as the highly appropriate and much relished bum-branding episode, but they never actually instructed me or Boxtree about this, so the book was published just the way I wrote it; of which I’m jolly glad. Thus, perhaps, its popularity, or do I mean notoriety?
GW seemed quite happy at first at any rate, since a big section of Space Marine appeared in White Dwarf 165 in Sept 1993, although I do seem to recall a murmur in my ear that the section appeared because an important article on games rules wasn’t ready on time, and consequently the pages needed to be filled. Never mind! A collector’s item, issue 165 (for me, anyway)!
Did you have plans for any other Warhammer 40,000 novels beyond those that you completed?
I did have a further Inquisition War novel in mind, because by the end of Chaos Child one of my characters was insane, another was hopelessly lost, and a third was dead, and I had come to care for the characters, so I thought I should get them out of these particular scrapes, even though in the world of 40K there aren’t exactly going to be happy endings in the usual sense, and all will remain whelmed in darkness. If I were ever to write such a book, for the sake of consistency it would really need to use the tech and organisational structures of the Inquisition, Harlequin, and Chaos Child, which mightn’t delight the games designers too much since almost 20 years has gone by in the evolution of the games.
Looking back now, would you say you were still happy with Space Marine or, knowing what you know now, would you change anything about it?
Personally I’d change nothing about the book itself, since changing it would lose freshness and spontaneity. I do myself regard Space Marine as part of the Inquisition War series – and indeed it is thus in the gigantic Hungarian language omnibus edition – since my Space Marine, Lexandro d’Arquebus, plays a role in Harlequin and then a major role in Chaos Child.
What sort of background were you given before writing the four books in the series?
GW gave me all the manuals existing as of about 1990 plus printouts of material still under development, regarding Necromunda for instance, and the eldar; not to mention a stream of White Dwarfs where such material was appearing bit by bit. I was very well briefed, and in fact I still have all that material in a couple of boxes. Writing 40K required encyclopaedic study, whereas medieval Warhammer could be generic fantasy within the less enormous medieval Warhammer setting.
Did these books influence any later, original writings?
The book I wrote after the GW ones was my science fantasy epic, The Books of Mana from Gollancz (consisting of Lucky’s Harvest and The Fallen Moon) set on an alien planet inspired by Finnish mythology. This is my only epic, a rather weird one, and indeed it’s really one long book rather than a book and a sequel, for practical reasons of publishing. So I guess something epic and weird carried over from my 40K books. Fans of my 40K fiction might like the Mana books too. (Or might not.) Ah, and now I realise that the Mana epic is probably quite gameable, although I never thought about gameability when I was writing it, nor when writing the 40K books themselves.
Does it amaze you that after all these years the original copies of Space Marine are still much sought after items?
It’s gratifying in one way, as likewise are the many fan emails over the years imploring me to give a clue as to where to get a copy… But when the price on e-Bay sometimes got close to $100 I couldn’t help but feel that I was losing out somewhere… um, could that have been in my pocket? So I hail the reissue with relief!
Do you ever inject yourself into the characters you wrote?
I did my best to hallucinate myself into their roles, despite the fact that a Space Marine isn’t exactly me! On the other hand, it was nobody at all until I first wrote fiction about 40K persons since no writer had done that before, and I wasn’t using role models except perhaps various obsessed individuals in the history of, say, the 14th Century. The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, as historian Barbara Tuchmann referred to that grim epoch in the title of her book which Bryan Ansell loved and told me to read.
Who are more fanatical Games Workshop fans or general SF readers?
GW fans are very enthusiastic and focussed. Games Days (at least the ones I’ve attended) are rousing events, a bit like rallies. And the calibre of art and model work is pretty amazing; this is devotion. The sort of general SF readers who go to conventions are of course enthusiastic, though generally in a milder way, and are interested in a very wide range of stuff, quite a bit of it not even SF. Journalists hoping to poke fun at geeks should avoid SF conventions since they’ll be disappointed; to find fans wearing Spock ears and such they probably need a specialist media convention. I say probably since I don’t go to media cons. I guess Star Trek and Star Wars fans might be a bit fanatical, but I shouldn’t generalise, the way journalists do. To each, his and her own.