A conversation with Dan and Aaron, part one
Hey, Dan.
So I'm curious about something. You do a bunch of work in a bunch of different licences - and I assume you love them all, because you've gotta be too rich by now to be doing it for the money. (All novelists are rich, right? Right??) But what's the deal with 40K? How come you like it so much? What makes this the one sandpit you like to play around in more than any other?
Hey Aaron-
I have only ever done it for the love. These days, I give all of my earnings away to an offshore Grand Cayman acc- uhm home for needy children. I am virtually a barefoot penitent.
But speaking as an over-rouged, work-for-hire, tie-in whore, 40K appeals to me particularly for simple reasons. It has a unique flavor, and that flavor, no matter what my automatic spell-checker just did to the word ‘flavor’ just then, is very British. It’s dark and sinister and industrially iconoclastic, and also snarky and ironic. It doesn’t have to grow any because it’s got some already.
In the eighties (clarification: nineteen eighties), long before you or the Interweb were born, when I was a young whipper snapper, we amused ourselves during power cuts playing ole playing games. I say ‘we’, I mean sad, geeky boys. I was particularly fond of games called D&D, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu. There was a magazine available at the time for those afflicted with this interest, called White Dwarf, produced by a company that made figures for said RPGs. That company had ideas for games of its own...
In the late nineties when I was approached to write for Black Library, I simply couldn’t resist. It was so evocative, so distinctive. 40K had managed to keep that heady flavor.
What about you? Why do you find it irresistible, because you so obviously do?
I played D&D too, y’know. My first ever character was called Shandaric Darkspell von Shadowblade. I think I was 7 when I started playing him, and about 11 when he croaked at the claws (and breath weapons) of several dragons. Lava was also involved. It was pretty extreme. The family dog was put down in the same year. Guess which one I cried over? I’ll give you a hint. The funeral I was weeping at wasn’t for anything that could wag its tail.
That just goes to show you what a well-adjusted and balanced human being I am. I’ll play ball, though. I’ll answer the damn question. It’s difficult, because part of 40K’s appeal is its immensity, and that makes it wicked-hard to just sum up on a whim.
Essentially, what draws me to 40K is how bleak existence is; how corruption taints absolutely everything; and how all aspects of life are edged by darkness, from a peasant’s harsh existence to supernatural threats most humans would never see. Yet people still live, fight, survive... and that's where stories are found. Degradation is an inevitability, even in the aspects that are intentionally funny. I think that’s sorta powerful. Omnipresent decay is an insidious theme that makes my skin crawl, and 40K has it in spades. It’s what Gormenghast would look like, if Titus Groan had an empire. It’s got the stagnation versus freedom aspects that underlie Peake’s work, it’s got the taint of madness, misery and emotional sensitivity. It’s as gothic as the Sisters of Mercy playing live in Notre Dame Cathedral (which, by the way, would be awesome).
I’m not going to lie; there are elements of the universe that don’t mesh too well with my tastes, but the overwhelming majority of it is – in varying degrees – funny, clever, epic, tragic and brutal. It ramps everything up to 11 and forms a mood and theme like no other setting out there.
Yeah, on the surface it looks like hackery based on toy soldiers. I get that. I’m not blind to the setting’s roots. But 40K – the whole picture – is as deep, moving, witty and well-wrought as any other genre setting out there. Hell, better than most. It’s had 30 years to refine itself, after all.
Almost all of that, naturally, is down to the visions of those doing the writing, doing the refining, forcing the evolution. None of us see it exactly the same way (and how could we? This stuff is immense), but there’s a unified core of understanding and shared immersion.
I admit, there’s something in all this that worries me. And you're definitely the guy to pick up on this. Obviously, we’re doing our own interpretations of a shared setting, and obviously, we want them to be as close to the lore as possible. But some readers will always see things differently, just as we see things differently to other writers. That’s just natural, and is a truth across all tie-in fiction.
Still... does it suck to see the words 'Abnett-verse' stuck together like that? When does individual perception become error? When does personal interpretation become missing the point? Because I’m a fragile little flower, Dan. That’d hurt my feelings, no matter how much Jim Swallow and our beloved editors tell me to grow a pair.
Just so I don't bark up the wrong creek without a metaphor, are you asking me if I'm disappointed when people call my work 'Abnett-verse' rather than seeing it as actually Codex approved? That my stuff may be all well and good, but to the REAL 40K player-fan, it's just an interpretation and not actual 40K, and that that's a cross/criticism we will all (us authors) have to take on the chin?
Exactly. Like... are we canonical? Are we deviants? How d'you feel when people say you're not only not canon, but also seeing it your own whacked out way? Any and all of the above.
... sorry, I was still lost there for a minute, thinking how it WOULD be awesome for the Sisters of Mercy to play Notre Dame. Because, you know... the Fighting Irish had a 35-27 record and two Bowl Championship Series bowl games under Weis, even though he was sacked last year after they lost to Stanford.
The... what? Under... who? Don’t the Irish always fight? I’m marrying one of them, and they’re pretty mean when they want to be. But you know this already. Our respective female owners have been talking about wedding dates, so if Nik and Katie have their way, it sounds like you’re going to be over here for the big day.
... Nik and Katie are getting married?
Stay with me, Dan. Focus.
Right, okay... Yeah, you described 40K as Brave New World written by Peake. Absolutely it’s that. Or Charles Dickens’s The Rise And Fall of the Roman Empire. Or Terry Gilliam’s Spartacus.
Actually, I always think there’s something very Dickensian about 40K’s gas-lit bureaucracy, and inky cuffs, and consumptive coughs, and corrective appliances. And melta-guns.
Actually, I haven’t thought about the ‘Abnett-verse’ thing much (I think the preferred term is ‘Daniverse’). I think the simple answer is that we will always be un-canonical to somebody. Doesn’t matter if you’re writing 40K or Star Trek, and it doesn’t matter how officially approved you are, there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like the way you do it. I’ve been told as much on several occasions (Jim and the editors are correct, A - grow a pair and buy a helmet, coz it’s a great big scary world of fandom out there, and here’s where you start payin’... in sweat). Yes, people have told me this on several occasions. Once or twice, they’ve even been polite about it.
This is inevitable when our ‘brand root’ is a hobby rather than a movie or a TV show. The very nature of the hobby encourages everyone to collect, paint and personalize their own collection and develop its mythos with the help of other players doing the same thing. The spread of variables is huge. And I’m not talking about something as obvious as a player unilaterally deciding that the primarch of his White Scars is going to be called Fiona (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’m talking about the subtle, ever-flowing, Chinese whisper mutations that occur with living continuity.
Actually, the God-Emperor once told me that the best way to look at it was this: 40K fiction is not an interpretation of the game universe, the game universe being the ‘true’ or ‘definitive’ one; 40K fiction and the game are BOTH interpretations of a definitive universe unavailable to us. It took a long LONG time get 40K fiction properly rolling. Once every one agreed on the working model explained above, everything started to... oh, that’s an analogy I don’t want to finish writing.
So I’m saying brace yourself AND relax. Throw yourself into the creative process in the knowledge that an awful lot of people next Games Day are going to tell you how much they love your stuff (they will. I’ve read your stuff). Yet bear in mind that somebody in your autograph line will want to strike you repeatedly about the face and neck and throw you roughly to the floor for the crimes you’ve committed against the Holy Codex. I remember a very early Games Day where a very agitated guy who’d queued for a long time came up to me and asked me a question (actually not a canonical one, in point of fact, but never mind. He asked, 'Is Bragg really dead?'... ah, those innocent days of novelty questions). I answered, and I SWEAR he was going to swing for me. He refrained, I think, because in a moment of clarity he realised I could take him, and if I couldn’t, the McNeill at my side looked like he was pretty handy. And also, I think, because Nik, sitting on the other side of me, target-locked him and extended her claws.
Wow. In hindsight, it could have turned into a saloon brawl like a scene from Destry Rides Again.
By way of contrast, I did a signing at a GW store. It was very busy, and there were a lot of very young kids, who went to the autograph queue once with their Codexes, once with their army boxes, and once again with Anything Else They Had That Could Be Signed (bus tickets, shoes, foreheads). At the end of the signing, I made a point of thanking and shaking hands with all the staff, because they’d worked hard. Seeing this, the kids lined up to get their hands shaken too, and I had to go down a line of them like Her Majesty The Queen during state visit walkabout.
Which was lovely.
See, you’re good at that stuff. But me, I’m not a people person. I hear them all talking, y’know. I see the looks they give me. I hear the 'bad boy of Black Library' whispers, and I scope out the way our editors go pale when I show up hungover for signings.
But enough about my good points. And kudos for not finishing the bowels analogy. I admire your restraint.
You’ve broken out from the pack, and let’s not dance around each other by denying it, because I can’t stand false modesty, and I’m just not a dancer. I even heard this legend that you don’t have to do synopses for novels anymore. You just lazily drop an email saying 'I’m going to do this, and if you try to stop me, I’ll kill you. I will physically kill you. Sincerely, Dan Abnett.'
Give me a few years, and I’ll get there. That’s the goal. Being mean to people over email is a speciality of mine. But the thing is, here’s where you’re at right now:
You get the best reviews. You’ve had the first Horus Heresy series novel and I’m dead certain you’ll have the last. You’ve got the Ghosts saga unfolding across 800 bestselling books. You’ve got people making armies based on your own Iron Snakes Chapter which, incidentally, were the least Codex Chapter ever, and if the Ultramarines ever came calling ‘round for tea, you know there’d be tears and some deeply unfriendly purging. Most important of all, Nikki/Xhalax from the conventions likes you best.
Maybe this is because I came into the Black Library really late, so it’s something I have to roll with and you just don’t. But from my point of view, one of the savage aspects of tie-in fiction is that you’ve got a hundred other guys doing it, too. You need to share the sandpit... and they might already have the cool toys. Or worse (and tying into all of us seeing things different ways) you might share the sandpit with them, but you may secretly think their sandcastles suck. The architecture’s all wrong. Their moat is lame. Those battlements wouldn’t repel a sustained siege, damn it.
If we’re being entirely honest here, sometimes it can feel a little claustrophobic. It’s the part of the 40K / general tie–in experience that... well, sucks. I’d sell my cat (who’s called Loken, by the way, you’ll meet him at the wedding reception) for the chance to do a Flesh Tearers trilogy, but they’re dangerously close in theme and function to the Blood Angels, who’re already done by Jim. That’s the kind of thing I’d not even try to get past Marketing.
Graham has the Ultramarines. You have the Imperial Guard saga to eclipse all others. Most of the other Chapters, regiments, factions and Legions are tied up, one way or the other. I don’t say this as a complaint, because I have absolutely nothing to complain about, but I think it’s a part of the process behind the curtain that deserves a mention. Have you ever encountered that? Have you ever thudded into the editorial wall of 'Someone’s already doing that, so settle down, new boy'?
Now, my main ambition - Horus Heresy aside - is to do something focusing on Abaddon, from his days in turning the defeated Sons of Horus into the unified Black Legion, and his crusades against the Imperium of Man. He’s always been my favourite lore character, and if I had to put it down to one story I wanted to tell, it would be that one. The guy is crying out for some depth. For the sake of argument, a two-book series: The Talon of Horus, and The Black Legion.
Mmmm. Elegant.
So don’t be coy. Yeah, you’ve got Gaunt’s Ghosts. Yeah, you’ve got Eisenhorn and Ravenor. But is there something huge and potentially fearsome lurking on your hindbrain? Some story you’re dying to tell, but never got around to doing yet?
Also, I had to Google 'Destry Rides Again'. It’s cute that they used to make films in black and white, before awesomeness was invented.
Aaron Fact #216: I used to think that people saw in black and white, until I was born, at which point life became visible in colour. True story.