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POSITIONS:On writing WH40K -- 2007 Worldcon interview (2006 interview -- on accuracy in 40K)

On Writing 'Tie-In' and 40K

Washington based freelancer Rose Harding caught up with CS Goto at Worldcon 2007, in Yokohama, Japan, on 1 September. She is in the process of writing a book, ‘Tied-in or Tied-down: On Franchise Fiction, Fans, and Science Fiction’, which should appear in 2009. We are grateful that she allowed us to publish this transcript ahead of her book.

RH: Welcome Cassern, and thank you very much for taking some time out from the convention to talk with me. As you know, I’m preparing a series of interviews from Worldcon about ‘tie-in sci-fi’ for a planned book on fan cultures, and I’m delighted that you’re willing to talk to me.

CG: No problem, Rose – your project sounds really interesting to me. But why me?

RH: It started when I asked some local students about their WH40K (Warhammer 40,000) games. They told me that they’d set up a tournament for the following week in which two teams would play against each other, one side representing the ‘Goto-verse’ and the other side representing ‘Reality.’ Apparently their group was divided over your novels, and they wanted to battle it out in the form of a game!

CG: Of course. Was this because the eldar armies on my side kept fighting amongst themselves? Or perhaps it was because my Space Marines suddenly became full of existential angst and walked off to sulk in the corner? Or may be my army was an uncomfortable mix of eldar and Marines who didn't trust each other and just watched as the whole planet exploded?

RH: They did say something about introducing a special ‘succumbing to decadence’ saving-role for the eldar armies!

RH: … anyway, it seemed to me that you’d be a good person to talk to as part of my research on the way in which fan-groups respond to fiction that is tied-in to their hobbies. I’d also hoped to talk to some other BL authors, but I think you’re the only one at the convention this year. My first question was going to be whether this story about the students surprises you.

CG: Actually, I’m rather shocked, but it’s a good story. Of course, I’m aware that my work for BL (Black Library) has been a little controversial, and I have seen my share of gamers criticising me in occasionally rather passionate ways. On the other hand, I have also seen some readers defending me with quite astonishing energy. In a couple of cases, I have even seen avatars online pretending to be me defending myself against various charges. No doubt their intentions were good, but the results can sometimes degenerate into mud-slinging. So I suppose a table-top confrontation in this way is not too surprising, and it’s actually quite poetic. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not surprised!

CG: I really don’t know, but I doubt it. The vast majority of BL readers are not involved in the online forums where these debates play out, so many of them are probably only vaguely aware of (and possibly not bothered about) what’s going on. Many of them, of course, are simply uninterested – they just want to enjoy a few novels from time to time – which is absolutely fair enough. When you consider how many copies of BL books are sold, and then look at the number of people active on their forums (and other related forums), the proportion is very small. Having said that, it is the voice of these active groups that is most audible, so even the most cursory look around the internet would make anyone aware of the issues, if they were interested. I don’t mind this at all, and, in fact, I talk about some of these things on my own website, as you may know. In general, I find these kinds of debates interesting and often constructive, albeit sometimes in rather provocative terms!
I did receive an email a few weeks ago from someone who said that my books were a kind of guilty pleasure: even though he enjoyed reading them and had apparently bought them all, he had to hide them from his friends because they don’t like my version of 40K at all! That made me laugh.

RH: One thing that interests me is the question of whether tie-in writers who write in science fiction settings like WH40K identify themselves as ‘science fiction writers’?

CG: That’s actually a really interesting question. I think I’m on record somewhere as saying that it feels much more like writing historical fiction, since there is such an emphasis on fidelity to established lore. I stand by that, I think, despite what is ostensibly a futuristic setting.
Given that we’re here at Worldcon, however, I suspect that your question is as much about what I think ‘science fiction’ might be? In which case I think that there is an important tension between science fiction and tie-in writing. As you are fully aware, there is a large body of theoretical writing about the meaning of science fiction, and I subscribe to the view that it is essentially a literature of estrangement. That is, I think that true science fiction is defined by the ways in which it challenges our views of conventionality; it is supposed to be radical and provocative, demanding that we reconsider the world in the light of new technological, social or philosophical innovations. In this sense, simply having a futuristic setting is not enough.
In this framework, tie-in fiction’s affinities with ‘historical fiction’ (ie. its emphasis on fidelity to existing conventions and details) is actually antithetical to science fiction. In many ways, tie-in fiction is essentially and necessarily a conservative form. It is precisely concerned with NOT challenging the existing conventions.
Having said that, I do try in my own work to write in the spirit of science fiction, since I am not conservative by disposition. Hence, I try to play with the conventions (within certain parameters) in order to explore and reveal the implications of the established lore. I find the imperative to challenge accepted authorities politically important, although I accept that there are necessary restrictions within the medium of tie-in!

CG: Let’s see … I suppose that my depiction of the eldar in Eldar Prophecy falls within this category – science fictional eldar – or even my so-called ‘human Space Marines.’

CG: Well, the conventional view of the eldar appears to be that they are emotionally disciplined, incredibly enigmatic, and that they live in harmony without enacting any violence towards each other, because of a deep-seated racial anxiety about the survival of their species. Indeed, a number of readers have asked me why the eldar in my books do not always fit this model. My answer is that this is the eldar IDEAL. It is the behavioural pattern that eldar society aspires towards. Like all ideals, however, many eldar will fall short of them, otherwise we’re not talking about ideals anymore but merely about cookie-cutting all members of a particular category. That is: individual eldar are individuals, just like individual humans are individuals, and hence they will exhibit variation in their behaviour, just as all humans behave differently. This does not invalidate the ideal, but rather it underlines the fact that it is an ideal.
In 40K, humans (and Space Marines) participate in the ideal of loyalty and service to the Emperor – some of them are better at this than others. If all humans actually were perfectly loyal, then the Horus Heresy would not have happened, there would be no war between groups of humans, no cultists and no criminals. In other words, if all the human characters behaved according to the prototypes of their species, there would simply be no 40K universe. Likewise, with the eldar.
One of the differences is that readers only have a limited number of books that treat the eldar at all, which means that some readers want these books to show eldar in very prototypical ways, and I can understand that. If there were hundreds of novels about eldar (as is the case with Space Marines), then this would be incredibly boring; I’m just not sure that we should wait until there are hundreds before considering this. Perhaps, one day, there will be many more novels about the eldar, in which case presenting them in these ‘science fictional’ ways might become less problematic.
Eldar Prophecy is set in the distant past, and it’s supposed to explore some of the features of the eldar psyche that gave rise to the need for a disciplined ‘Path of the Eldar’ in later times. In other words, it shows that a cultural ideal of emotional discipline might have arisen in eldar society because of a history (or even a nature) of emotional over-indulgence causing catastrophic problems. I suggest that it is because the eldar are endangered by their own natures that they have developed the ideals of discipline and harmony that we see in the conventions of 40K. From time to time, in exceptional and difficult circumstances, this means that even the eldar might slip from their path …

RH: That sounds exciting to me, and I must say that I enjoyed Eldar Prophecy. It had a kind of ‘mythic’ quality, and your explanation of its purpose seems to fit this. You seem to suggest that you think there will be more books about the eldar in the future. Is that correct, and do you think other BL writers will tackle them?

CG: I really hope that there will be more, and I can imagine that the readership will want more about the eldar. In the past, BL has really discouraged authors from trying to write from an alien point of view – in fact, such stories were banned from the Inferno! magazine, until my own eldar short ‘Menshad Korum’ appeared in there [This story also appears in the BL anthology, Bringers of Death, 2005]. The eldar have long been a favourite species, and BL have been very careful about how they portray them. It seems that Games Workshop have been conscious that their fan-base tend to perceive the eldar as Tolkien-esque elves in space (as basically super-elegant and superior humans) and this doesn’t appear to be their vision. Hence, stories along those lines have been rejected, and rather they encourage authors (including myself) to emphasise that the eldar are not ‘good’ or ‘perfect’ or even ‘honorable’ in any human sense, but rather self-serving, arrogant, devious and alien. I suspect that this is part of the reason for some of the controversies about my depiction of them.
Whilst many of the authors include aliens in their work for BL, of course, I do hope that other authors will take up the challenge of writing from alien points of view. Quite a few years ago, the excellent Si Spurrier took a crack at the Tau in Firewarrior. Although these alien POV books are always controversial, I think that the readership enjoys it, and I also think that readers deserve to see a range of approaches to the material. Perhaps the ice has been broken now, and more such books will appear.

RH: It sounds to me as though there are still things about the eldar you’d like to explore yourself?

CG: Yes, I confess that I haven’t yet written the eldar book that I have always wanted to write. To be honest, when I first started writing for BL I did so because I had an idea for an eldar novel that I wanted to write. Of course, I wasn’t able to do it with my first book because authors were simply not allowed to do it at that time, although the eldar content in Dawn of War gave me some scope. Since then, I have been gradually trying to include more and more eldar material and earning the trust of BL about my depiction of them. The end result was Eldar Prophecy, BL’s first (and so far only) entirely alien focussed book. This was a big step, but it’s still not quite what I wanted. My real goal is to write something about the eldar that is not concerned with war at all, more like a character study of eldar following different paths in their alien society. There are elements of this in Eldar Prophecy, but BL is essentially interested in war and action, of course, so this type of book may be a step too far! Nonetheless, there has been a lot of progress towards this ideal over the last few years. Perhaps someone else will write the perfect eldar novel soon?

RH: It’s interesting to hear how the parameters of the imprint act to determine the kinds of plots and subjects writers can tackle. It does sound like there would be a market for such a ‘non-war’ book, although perhaps it is not the core market of BL. You mentioned politics earlier, and something that people often ask about tie-in fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy tie-ins, is whether the genre is inherently conservative. There are normally three central questions: race, gender and violence. On these questions, I’ve heard very positive things about your work, at least within the parameters of a universe that is concerned explicitly with war against daemons and alien species! Do you have a more critical attitude because of your approach to the radical mission of science fiction?

CG: (Laughs) I certainly don’t think that there is anything politically radical in my BL books! Really, there’s no room for radical politics, because (as you suggest) the setting itself places some serious constraints on what is possible. Tie-in writers are literally ‘tied-in’ to certain contours of the universe and, as I said, even small divergences can cause some serious ripples amongst the readership. So yes, I broadly agree that this is a conservative genre: female characters tend to be relatively rare and when they appear they tend to be beautiful and elegant and surrounded by protective men, even when they are toting serious weaponry; alien species have specific characteristics that all of them are supposed to exhibit; violence is endemic because 40K is a grim future of perpetual war. Of course, not all BL novels subscribe to all of these things in equal measures – Matt Farrer, for instance, has some strong female characters and markedly less violence than others. He’s a really good writer, in my opinion.

RH: You’ve just explained how you try to deviate from the species/racial stereotypes in the case of the eldar, but can you also say something about gender? You seem to have a lot of strong female leads in your books.

CG: Yes, I am committed to the idea that a grim futuristic universe like 40K would make little or no differentiations of gender when it came to roles. Women should be just as dynamic and powerful and men. They should be just as involved in the action and in the intrigues, rather than being aesthetic props.

CG: In general very well, and I’ve received some nice mail from female readers who were pleased to see powerful women (they especially seem to like female eldar) in the stories. Although WH40K is a largely male-domain, there are large numbers of female gamers out there, many of whom have been waiting for novels to feature women more centrally or more evenly. And, of course, a number of the male readers appear happy to see powerful women with guns. Which probably reflects a completely different agenda, even if coincidental!
Having said that, I was really surprised to receive an email recently from someone (a male, actually) who thought that I was being misogynistic because I involved women in my novels so much. I was genuinely shocked, since my intention was precisely to show some equality. Thinking about it, however, I can see where this view comes from, and it’s one of the other quirks of tie-in fiction: whilst I can tweak some of the conventions of 40K by introducing more, strong female characters into the stories, I cannot alter the fundamentals of the 40K-verse, in which all characters will fight, battle, suffer (and probably die) in an age of war. At the end of the day, this is war fiction after all, and that is absolutely non-negotiable.
The result, of course, is that when I deploy more female characters in more central and more dynamic roles, more female characters are seen engaged in (and victim of) violence. They are certainly not involved in any violence just because they are women, but I can see how even their presence in this setting could be perceived as a problem, although I’m not sure what the solution is, since missing them out or using them peripherally would also be problems. It’s possible that the conservatism of the system cannot be overcome from within here, and that 40K is simply not the forum to engage in gender politics. I wonder whether ‘tie-in’ is also a political bind in some ways, but I haven’t really had chance to think that through properly.
Intriguingly, there is a similar issue that is sometimes raised by eldar fans, who are often both pleased that the eldar feature so prominently in my novels and distressed that so many of them get injured or die in this time of perpetual war. Unfortunately, if there is going to be BL fiction that is centrally about the eldar (or anyone/thing else) then the eldar are going to be depicted in battle, as wounded, as prisoners of war, or even as dead. This is just what happens in 40K! It is an intractable problem, since I can understand the romance of the eldar or the romance of the ‘feminine,’ and hence the emotional need to preserve them from all suffering. The attempt to preserve them, however, necessarily relegates them to the peripheries, and you end up with a token eldar being mysterious and enigmatic on the margins of stories about other things.

RH: Actually, reading through your books and those of various other BL authors, I’m struck by the relative lack of violence in your novels. Is this a conscious decision? You mentioned earlier that your dream eldar book would have no violence at all!

CG: I’m not somebody who is excited by violence, so it is rarely included in these novels for its own sake, unless there are characters who are themselves particularly evil or masochistic. The dark eldar, for instance, have a particular predilection for violence for its own sake. But, on the other hand, violence is just a fact of life in 40K. Some readers have asked me why I often ‘cut away’ from scenes at the point when violence is about to occur, leaving it to occur in the imagination of the reader. There are readers who want to see these scenes, and there are a couple here and there, but in general it seems that my most enthusiastic readers are not those looking for gore. I tend to use violence as a way of demonstrating the brutality of the 40K-verse and the mercilessness of an age of perpetual, intergalactic war. One or two of my characters are really very unpleasant people, and so they do some very unpleasant things – if they didn’t, they would be less hateful as villains. The 40K-verse would really be a horrible, horrible, horrible place to live, and violence is part of the reason for that. As long as people understand that violence is being used to repel readers from the reality of 40K rather than out of any sense of the glory of violence, then I’m happy.

RH: It sounds like the writing process of tie-in fiction is fraught with landmines. Is that how you think everyone thinks about it?

CG: I can’t speak for everyone, but I can imagine that not everyone thinks in this way, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that this is necessarily the right way to think about it. Keep in mind that some tie-in writers are writing within universes that they have participated in creating: for them the issues of radicalism and conservatism must be experienced very differently, since they have a stake in conservation as part of the creative process. In the case of BL, for example, there are a number of very popular writers who also work full-time for Games Workshop itself; these guys have a really special relationship with (and an incredible knowledge of) the universe of 40K! Other writers can come through from fan-fiction or be professional tie-in writers working on a number of franchises simultaneously. Different types of writer cater for different audience groups, and a smart publisher will try to cater for everyone. At the end of the day, as far as BL and the readers are concerned, it’s just important that writers respect the setting, create good stories and characters … and meet deadlines!

RH: Given all of these dilemmas, why would authors want to write tie-in fiction?

CG: Well (laughs), that’s an easy question for me to answer, at least in my own case: it’s because I love 40K, and especially the eldar! It’s a fantastic setting, with immense potential, and with a fan-base who show genuine curiosity and creativity. It’s a community of people who really care about the 40K-verse, and that makes writing for it such a privilege. I’m really grateful to BL for not only allowing me to write about 40K, but also for paying me to do it! Of course, this sense of privilege also makes writing for it absolutely terrifying, because literally 100% of the readers already have a sense of what they want to see. I suppose that if/when the terror starts to outweigh the passion, then I wouldn’t be able to go on.

CG: (long pause) I have to be honest with you, Rose – it can be difficult. When I was first asked to write the Dawn of War novel, a number of friends (who are themselves writers) advised me very strongly not to do it. Stories about abuse and even death-threats that are sometimes received by tie-in writers are not uncommon in the industry, and authors share these with each other more often than they share them with anyone else. To be frank, I haven’t spoken with any tie-in writers who haven’t experienced some issues like this, even the incredibly popular ones. I don’t want to mention names. In anycase, my friends and colleagues were pretty wary of the whole thing.

CG: I’m not sure. But it’s one of the idiosyncratic things about the genre that in addition to the casual readers, there’s a section of the fan-base who will read everything published by BL, whether they like it or not, just because it’s BL. In some ways they’re policing their investment in the universe that they love so much – they’re hungry for any and all information about that universe – which is understandable, of course, given the amount of time, energy, and money that they spend on it. This means that some of the readers are very vocal about what they like or dislike in particular books, and some take it very personally. In the case of ‘regular fiction’ (ie. non-tie-in), this doesn’t tend to happen so much: people just don’t read your work if they don’t like it … and they buy your next book if they enjoyed the last one. In other words, for most ‘non tie-in’ writers, readership is usually positively selected as their productivity increases – people read you because they like your writing, rather than because they want to see what you have done to something that is not yours and over which they already feel a measure of ownership. Conversely, tie-in writers face an unusually volatile and yet loyal readership: there are great highs and lows hardwired into the genre.

RH: Speaking with some other tie-in writers for this project, one hypothesis that has been floated is that a significant portion of the readership are at least passively involved in creating the game-settings for themselves. They meet regularly with friends either in person or online to discuss the background or to play the games, and in this way they build a communal sense of the ‘correct interpretation’ of the setting. Hence, the readership is actually composed of myriad clusters of sophisticated and interesting interpretations of the universe, each of which is valid in its own terms, and each of which is self-reinforcing about the universal validity of its interpretation. When people from these groups read tie-in novels, they will either see close resonances with their own interpretations (and hence be further reassured about their own ‘correctness’) or they will see aspects that conflict with their own views and hence interpret the novel as wrong or sometimes offensive. Furthermore, because most of these readers are part of small(ish), self-reinforcing communities that tend to agree with each other in their interpretations of the universe, these readers often perceive such novels as wrong in some absolute sense: the novels appears to disagree with ‘everyone.’
Does that sound feasible to you? Do you recognise the patterns?

CG: It doesn’t sound impossible, although I’d much rather think of the 40K community as a single group of enthusiasts with common interests instead of lots of divergent ones. That said, one thing that I have noticed in the emails that I get from readers is that a significant number of them write on behalf of their game groups; they ask questions about the background or want to test their own theories against mine, often talking about how their group collectively adopts a certain position on, say, whether eldar are likely to turn against each other in certain circumstances or whether they would never turn a blade on another eldar. Some gaming groups, for instance, appear to have a house rule that they will not permit eldar armies to fight against each other. For these readers, Eldar Prophecy (which shows a kind of civil war on an eldar craftworld) must be a kind of anathema.

RH: That’s very interesting and useful, thank you. I wonder whether these groups realise that their own interpretations, even if shared by the other people in their communities, would probably not be shared by everyone else? I don’t know any games-clubs, for instance, that ban eldar v eldar battles. There’s obviously a big difference between developing a consensus of 10 people in a local club, or even 100 people on an internet forum, and developing a position that will be read and challenged by 30,000 others.

CG: I think it’s true that nobody, not even the guys at Games Workshop itself, can please everyone, particularly in an open and flexible system like WH40K in which there are various generations of gamers subscribing to different editions of the rules and to different stages in the development of the background. Very famously (at least in these communities), the squats (basically a race of space dwarves) were quietly removed from the universe by GW. Whilst most people seem to have dealt with this (and the squats themselves have subsequently become something of a joke for many), there remain strong voices of support for them and there are occasionally calls for them to be reintroduced. More interestingly, there are voices that simply ignore the fact that the squats do not officially exist (and officially have never existed!) and accuse GW of inaccuracy in their current presentation of the 40K-verse because they don’t mention them anymore. I find this fascinating.

RH: Yes, I’ve heard of the squats. But we’re losing track of the question: given all these complicated issues, why do authors write tie-in?

CG: Well, as I said, I do it because I love the setting. Nothing else would make this possible, I think. And I think that most of the aspiring 40K writers (and there are lots of fan-fic writers out there) are also doing it because they love it. If it were all about the money, for instance, it really wouldn’t be worthwhile. Yes, tie-in writers get paid, but not nearly as much as people think – it’s certainly not enough to make the emotional roller-coaster worthwhile. Unless you’re writing for lots of different franchises at the same time, which I’m not, you have to look at the money as a bonus rather than as the purpose.
The other great thing, aside from the chance to make a contribution to the setting that you love, is the way that some readers really grab hold of your contributions and run with them. For instance, I know various gamers who have built Deathwatch killteams after reading Warrior Brood and Warrior Coven, others who have written fan-fic based on some of my characters, and some who use my characters as their avatars online. This is really satisfying.
In other words, whilst tie-in writers sometimes find themselves the target of abuse from some readers, they also have a responsibility and an obligation to the readers who support them. This can be a juggling act, of course: forces pushing and pulling at you.

RH: Thanks so much, Cassern. This is really useful information for my own book. As you know, I’ve organised a little roundtable for a group of media tie-in authors on the last day of Worldcon this year, so I look forward to continuing this conversation with you and the others then.

Many thanks to Cassern for taking the time to answer these questions during the busy convention. We hope to catch him again at next year’s Worldcon (in Denver), so perhaps we’ll be able to update this Positions page again then. In the mean time, if you have thoughts or comments, please visit Have your say.