A brief chat with BL’s very own Cruel Overlord Marc Gascoigne, as suffered by Dave Allen.
OK, we’re celebrating ten years of BL and as part of the celebrations we’re here to talk to Marc Gascoigne about how it all began, and the plans for the future of the company.
Hello!
So, back in 1997, how was the division first set up?
It had long been a pipe dream of some members of GW to create a GW annual, almost like a Blue Peter Annual – which for those of you outside the UK is a national institution here, a children’s TV programme introducing kids to a variety of educational and entertaining topics, and its annuals, books put out every Christmas, became legendary for their mix of stories and show reports and practical things to do. The idea of doing something similar for Warhammer, with a mix of game rules and painting tips and shots of the latest models and, indeed, stories and comic strips, had long been harboured in the breast of folks like Rick Priestley, who are certainly old enough to remember such things.
And that idea came to fruition back in 1997. I got involved with Andy Jones and Rick P at GW, helping out with some special projects and started to talk to them about my time in children and teen book publishing. With my publishing experience and their Warhammer knowledge, and the enthusiasm to put together a Warhammer annual… well, it led to us putting together a magazine which changed along the way… it was originally called Carnage and later Inferno!, which people will be more familiar with. To make that we set up a little team which we called the Black Library. It had been pottering away in the background for some months but it was officially established on the 4th of April 1997. Seems an awful long time ago.
Why did you choose the Black Library as a name?
Simply because of what it means in 40K terms. It’s a place where all the knowledge of the universe is held – not that we’re setting ourselves up to deliver all that that promises, but it’s a resonant phrase in 40K terms. It’s served us well actually, it’s a name that means something in 40K and it’s a bit dark, bit nasty, a bit cruel, just like 40K, and so it’s proved to be.
Now you were telling me the other day that Inferno! was the first stage and that the second stage was the comic.
Yeah, well Inferno! fulfilled, to some extent, this dream to do a GW annual, but it also did a lot of other things very quickly. The most important thing was that it taught us how to deal with freelance writers. People who were very good at spinning words, but also showed us the techniques we could use to harness their writing talents in creating fabulous stuff for Warhammer and 40K. Obviously in the GW Design Studio we have tremendous game writers, editors and artists, but they’re not necessarily skilled in the tropes of fiction. For BL we were able to come from the other direction, and Inferno! very quickly became a mechanism to recruit writers, and very soon artists and comic strip writers too. It became obvious very quickly that the occasional comic strip in Inferno! along with the short stories was OK, but very soon what we needed to do was a proper comic, so about a year after Inferno! kicked in, Warhammer Monthly made its debut.
Inferno!, you were also telling me, sparked off the Forge World pod.
It wasn’t so much Inferno! but the Black Library department. Once we had a couple of products out, we became seen as the experimental wing of GW. We were connected to them but we were able, because we weren’t tied down to just doing game product, to start flirting with different formats, to try things on for size, to see if some things would work that we had tried either not at all, or not for some time.
And one of products we brought under our wing was the Citadel Journal, the fanzine of the Warhammer hobby, run by the guys in Games Workshop Mail Order. Andy took that under the BL wing and gave it a bit more of a rigorous schedule, and in one of the first issues we put out there were some resin tank conversion kits available only through mail order, designed by a chap called Tony Cottrell. These amazing conversions, they flew out of the mail order team’s shelves, so we did another one and very quickly it became obvious that there was another business there. So we pretty much spawned the Fanatic (later Specialist Games) team and then Forge World span out of that, very successfully as another experimental division of Games Workshop.
OK, so moving to what the Black Library is mostly known for…
Novels! Well, of course once you do short stories everyone says “Well this is all very well, 7,000 words, ten, twenty pages in your magazine, but when are you going to put these into big books?” and it has to be said from the very off, that very first issue of Inferno, we had stories that were immediately thought of, at least internally by us, as pilots, tasters for a novel range. And indeed if you look at the early issues of Inferno! you’ve got a Gotrek and Felix, you’ve got a Gaunt’s Ghosts, you’ve got a Gilead. You’ve also got talented writers like Barry Bailey and indeed a bunch of short stories that could easily be collected in anthologies and when it came to the end of 1999, two and a half years into our existence, they indeed formed the basis of our first novel range: First and Only starting the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett, Trollslayer by Bill King with Gotrek and Felix, the short story collection, Eye of Terror. All of them very much setting out the stall for how BL would be and indeed continues pretty much, with some exceptions to be the sort of shape now. Now when we started we didn’t know how many people were going to buy these things, you know, you can dream about matching your Bernard Cornwells or your Terry Pratchetts for sales, but we also knew that as well as being best-selling books and books that would play well for regular SF readers they really had to fulfil all the imaginative dreams and desires of Warhammer and 40K players. I think that’s probably been the biggest challenge over the years, mixing that combination of good fiction but also fiction that’s right for Warhammer players. Sometimes we interpret things in a way that some players don’t like, but for the most part I think we get it pretty close these days.
So the next stage was the decision to do roleplaying games and tie-in novels with film adaptations.
Well yeah, two separate things but, yeah. Forge World became its own division and Specialist Games ditto, but we never stop creating things, trying things on for size, and
Black Industries, particularly, span out of that need to exploit that freelance approach, taking good writers and our own Warhammer and 40K knowledge. It became obvious that we knew some of the best roleplaying game designers, and indeed folks like myself used to work on some of the rpgs we made back in the mid-80s, such as the Judge Dredd rpg and the first edition of WFRP and so on. It became another area to exploit and to explore and to mine to create good stuff that wasn’t tabletop wargaming but was inexorably linked through the background worlds.
Black Flame came about the same way really but slightly out of left field. GW had a successful relationship with New Line Cinema through the Lord of the Rings games. It was New Line who suggested that because we had this very strong and thriving fiction imprint doing, effectively, books licensed from GW featuring Warhammer… so why didn’t we licence some properties from New Line and feature of their characters. Black Flame has been a tremendous stepping stone in learning about the wider world of science fiction and fantasy and indeed, in Black Flame’s case, horror fiction, all of which helped launch Solaris, our all-new original fiction imprint, which debuted this year.
What would you say the main differences between BL now and BL of ten years ago are?
Where do we start? BL was founded by Andy Jones, notable in GW for starting new projects, a man of boundless enthusiasm, a very bright and skilled chap all round. So there was him, there was myself as the bloke who knew how to do the editing and had a fair fist at typesetting and our magnificent admin person Judy, who we loved but we only found out later that the rest of the entire company was absolutely terrified of her. Perhaps that really helped in the early days to get things done. That was it – three of us. Nowadays, you look around the BL office now, there’s 30 of us plus the sales team in North America, and links with the guys at Sabertooth Games who distribute our game products in the States. Our reach is global, we have more than 200 titles out there and the sort of sales we making now are far in excess of where we imagined we’d be. Those early chats we had in the first days: “We’d like to do a comic one day, we’d like to do novels, and hey, we might even do some novels about the Horus Heresy, and then possibly some original fiction”. They’ve all come good. It’s been a bit of a long game but that’s the way publishing often works, you plan for things, you develop it, you create the talent, you write it, you edit it, you get it ready to be launched – that process by itself it up to two or three years long. Before you know it ten years have flown by. And actually, I have to say there are another two or three dozen projects now on the long loooong game that will only play out five, ten years from now and beyond.
Are you going to tell us anything about them?
Course not.
Right. What’s your personal favourite product that BL have made?
Oh blimey. Oh I wish you hadn’t asked me that. I wish I’d actually read the list of proposed questions you sent me before we started talking. I have to say that it’s always the next book. I’m in a very privileged position, and I know I abuse it by sticking things on the forums saying “Ooh look, I’ve just read the book that no one else has because I’ve got the manuscript on my desk”. You know, Only in Death came in just this morning and after Lindsey, his editor, I’ll be the second person to read it after Dan himself, and more pertinently I’ll be the first person to be all smug on the forum about having done so. So to some extent it’s a cheesy answer but it’s always the next book, the next project. However, of the things we’ve done, holding those first copies of First and Only and Trollslayer in my hand was pretty damn special.
Would you say that’s the proudest moment of BL’s history?
Ah, God, I think the proudest moment happens every time a book comes in, and I wouldn’t pick out a particular high point, though it has to be said lasting ten years and when we open some bubbly later this week to celebrate the birthday, that’s going to be a very proud moment.
How will you be celebrating?
Well obviously as the Cruel Overlord of the Black Library we might just give the slaves twenty minutes off, on no pay of course. More seriously we’ve got a bit of a do and I’ve arranged for some little pressies that I think are cheap enough that they’ll break within 20 minutes but impressive enough that people will initially be excited enough to have had them, and hey, there’s always cake and champagne. And then we’re certainly going to be celebrating 10 years of BL in all the stores and on the website pretty much throughout the summer.
OK, what non-Black Library author would you like to see write a Black Library book?
It’s a tough one because I think that the guys that we work with – and I’m thinking of all our writers, though obviously world-class likes of Dan Abnett, Graeme McNeill, Nathan Long, Ben Counter, Alex Stewart, so many more – they’re already writing great Warhammer and 40K stuffs. I have to say, you could get some of my favourite fantasy and SF authors, particularly of my formative years, the likes of Micheal Moorcock who was a tremendous inspiration to all that we do, or Fritz Leiber and his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books, and so many more, I could be very tedious about them. But actually, getting those guys to write Space Marines? It might be disastrous. No, let them do what they do and we’ll do what we all do and there’ll be plenty to go around.
What are your own favourite elements of the GW IP?
I have to say I just love that decayed medieval technology, not just the Chaos forces but the whole society of 40K, I think it is such an original creation. You come across various game worlds, worlds from movies or books, and you can see the strings. From 40K it’s been refined and added to so much over more than twenty years now that it really is extraordinary. The whole rich mix worked on by hundreds and hundreds of people, tens of millions of words over twenty years. That in itself I think is amazing.
And is that why you think the IP for the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000
worlds have proved such fertile inspirations?
They are unusual, 40K particularly. Some authors don’t like tem, they don’t like a world where humanity is holding out against inevitable darkness, but I think that there’s something in it that appeals to the doomed adolescent, certainly I identify with that, even at my age.
Right we chose some questions from the Warhammer and Warhammer 40K quizbooks…
Great. [Gritted teeth.]
Which companion of Gotrek and Felix has a series of nails driven into his skull?
That’ll be Snorri, of course.
In Riders of the Dead, what country do Gerlach and his demilancers ride to reinforce?
Kislev.
In Death’s Messenger and Death’s City, Hanna possesses a small understanding of which type of magic?
I have no idea. Sorry, Sandy.
How does Anjelika Fleisher, heroine of Honour of the Grave, make her living?
She robs from battlefields.
What is Filthy Harald’s weapon of choice?
Hmm, I don’t know, is it a nightstick of some sort?
Erm no, Magnin Throwing Daggers.
Ahhh, pity, because I did proofread that one.
Right, which member of the Gilead’s Swords mistakenly believes himself the son of an elf?
Hmm, he’s the narrator of the book but I couldn’t tell you his name.
We’ll give you half a point (I can't believe I wimped out on that, "The Narrator" indeed! - Dave). Who leads the Tanith First and Only regiment?
Goodness me, well wait until you read the next book and then I’ll give you the correct answer to that one. Currently… Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt.
Right, the epic battle for which planet saw the final conflict of the Horus Heresy?
Terra.
Which…
Of course we haven’t got to that one yet, that’s not about a BL book!
Oh right well it’s general sort of question, I’m sure it’s mentioned in some of the other 40K novels we’ve done…
Yeah, indeed, in those lovely big Horus Heresy artbooks we did.
Which Black Library author writes about the Iron Snakes Space Marine chapter?
Goodness me, could that be Mr Daniel Abnett?
What is the name of the magical sword that Ursula wields throughout The Heart of Chaos?
I don’t know that one.
OK, great stuff. You scored 6 and a half out of 10, so not so much Cruel Overlord as Cruel Arbitrator Captain I think. Thanks very much, Marc.
Thank you. Mine’s a pint.
