The Primarchs Audio Dramas with Robbie MacNiven, Laurie Goulding and Ian St. Martin

If you’ve been following the 2017 Black Library Advent Calendar throughout December then you’ll probably already know that three of the twenty-four stories were audio dramas in the Horus Heresy Primarchs series. These three stories are the first audio dramas we’ve seen so far in the Primarchs series, and two of them offer the first contributions to the Heresy in any form by the authors in question.

In an interview that spanned three different time zones, made possible by the wonders of modern technology, I sat down with Robbie MacNiven, Laurie Goulding and Ian St. Martin, the authors of these three audios, to talk about their stories, the audio medium, and what’s involved in writing such important characters. Unlike lots of my interviews, I’ve decided to run this in a single post…which means it’s quite long. I really hope you enjoy this, though – it was certainly great fun to listen to three brilliant authors talk about such an interesting subject!

Spoiler warning: while we didn’t go into huge amounts of detail on all of the stories, I should point out that there are a few spoilers for each of them within this interview. If you would prefer to avoid spoilers, please make sure you listen to these stories before you read this interview! I’ve added in spoiler tags where I think there are particular sections that you might not want to read if you’re not familiar with the stories, but still…here be spoilers. You have been warned.

Enough of that, though – over to Robbie, Laurie and Ian!

Track of Words: all three audios are available to buy now, but can you quickly run through the elevator pitches for your stories, and what you hope people are going to be able to take from them?

Robbie MacNiven: Stone and Iron is about Perturabo teaching his sons some hard truths. The setup is a classic one – pre-Heresy Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists squaring off in a siege-rivalry against ork invaders – but Perturabo’s objectives aren’t what we might expect. He’s not there to just school a new Grand Battalion in the art of siegecraft or rag on the Fists, he’s there to weed out the weak and the incompetent from his own officer cadre and show them that it’s just as unwise to underestimate an ally as it is an enemy.

That was the concept behind the story, really. Perturabo’s growing disillusionment at this stage in the Crusade bleeds into everything, including his legion’s sometimes clumsy attempts to emulate him. He’s not a primarch that suffers fools lightly, especially when said fools make the Imperial Fists look more competent than the IV.

Laurie Goulding: My Advent story was Malcador: First Lord of the Imperium, and basically it’s the Sigillite being called to the bedside of his longest-serving astropath, Sibel Niasta, who’s part of his Chosen. She’s very old, but she isn’t immortal in the way a lot of these other characters are, and she’s dying of old age. She’s taking a lot of secrets to the grave, a little bit uncertain about how much of an impact her life and her contribution has made to the grander scheme of things.

I wanted to write a story that showed that side of the war – it’s not always about warriors fighting these grand, galaxy-spanning conflicts, there’s also a human cost to this. I’m not talking about humans fighting on the battlefield, but ordinary people simply trying to do their best for the Imperium. That can take its toll on them, and it takes its toll on Malcador as well.

In fact, I was as surprised as anyone that this turned out as a Primarchs story, even though that’s awesome and a great honour in itself, but because it’s not actually focusing on any primarch in particular. However, Malcador has a lot of insight and a lot of behind-the-scenes knowledge about what the primarchs are, why they exist and who they were intended to be. I really wanted to see if we could dig a little bit deeper into that, to see what kind of insight he can give as to what the destiny of the primarchs could have been… should have been… but probably won’t be.

Ian St. Martin: In Curze: A Lesson in Darkness we start with an iterator who’s basically committing the history of the compliance of this world called Piamen into record, to be submitted for documentation by the War Council of Terra. Her narration then trails off and leads into the events unfolding in real time, and we see what is essentially the first compliance in the Great Crusade by the Night Lords legion after they’re reunited with Konrad Curze. Essentially it’s about how Curze teaches his legion first-hand what things are going to be like going forward under his tutelage, and under his direction. How they’re going to be prosecuting the Great Crusade under him.

I wanted to go pretty dark and crazy with this one. It’s that thing where when you’re pitching and writing first drafts you always want to go over as opposed to under, and let the editor reel you in, in terms of ‘we can’t get away with that’ or ‘this is too much’ and so on. So I told the story the way I wanted to tell it, with parts that were maybe past what I thought the editors would take, and they took a lot more than I was expecting!

RM: I’m glad the [spoiler title=”SPOILER”]massed skinning and throwing out of an atmospheric spaceship[/spoiler] didn’t get the chop!

ISM: Well it was definitely something that needed to be handled the right way. I think what won over in the end was that you don’t see the act itself, which I think is actually more powerful. It’s brutal not so much because you see the action but because you see the reaction of the people around it. [spoiler title=”SPOILER”]You go from ‘gather everyone up’ to ‘it’s raining bodies’, and so you get that shock of it where you fill in the gaps, which is much better than just a scene of gratuitous violence. I think that’s why we were able to work it in without it being overly graphic.[/spoiler]

ToW: it feels like the Primarchs stories often provide the opportunity to show different sides to these characters to what we’ve seen before. How did you go about handling that, showing enough to be interesting without revealing everything, or covering what other authors have done?

RM: Well the first thing you think about is making sure not to do anything that’s already been done, but then at the same time you want to cover the most exciting stuff. And what’s the most exciting stuff with the Iron Warriors? It’s when they get paired off with the Imperial Fists, so I just ran with it!

In terms of approaching Perturabo, you can’t be afraid to give it a bit of your own spin, I suppose. At the end of the day it’s a twenty-minute audio drama and not a full novel, but really the number one priority was riffing off the previous ideas and trying to distil that down into something that not only works for the audio format but can be done in a tight timeframe. These are shorter even than most audio dramas, so you don’t have a great deal to work with.

But when you’re dealing with literally the biggest characters in the setting it’s important to pare back what you want to achieve, which is why I went with a fairly contained storyline. It wasn’t a vast engagement during the Great Crusade, but essentially a backwater siege. The purpose there was to try and show an aspect of Perturabo that wasn’t necessarily totally devoid of all the previous archetypes. There’s the idea of his bitterness, the fact that he feels as though his legion is being used as a meat grinder, all of that but distilled down to what became a lesson for the company commanders he has around him.

LG: That’s really awesome. To me, Perturabo is one of the most interesting primarchs that we have in the Heresy, not because of what he does or doesn’t do, but because of the different ways that he’s been portrayed and the different ways people have seen him. Readers or listeners build up in their mind what these characters are like, but then somebody else tells a story with a slightly different interpretation of that same character.

RM: Yeah, I think it would have been too easy, if I wanted to write a story about the Iron Warriors and the Imperial Fists, to have Perturabo weighing in and saying how terrible the Fists were and that the Iron Warriors were so much better. That would have been bland and boring, so instead I used it as a vehicle for Perturabo to address the growing discontent, and the idea that there’s this degree of bitterness that runs through his legion. [spoiler title=”SPOILER”]So we have him using the Imperial Fists to teach his company commanders that they should learn from both their enemies and their allies, and respect their abilities, not take them for granted.

 

The classic Iron Warriors stance being that they’re better at siting works and building fortifications than the Imperial Fists isn’t necessarily always true. In this case the Imperial Fists have actually done better than the Iron Warriors company commanders might have done if they had been in the reverse situation, and Perturabo turns the tables on his subordinates to say ‘this is not acceptable, if you want to be members of my legion you’ll have to buck up your ideas and be a bit more like the Imperial Fists’. That’s hopefully where the twist comes from in that story.

At the same time Perturabo then chews out the Fists and admits that he’s used them as an example and as a lesson for his subordinates, which has led to unnecessary casualties among the Imperial Fists. It’s got that dose of the cold and calculating Perturabo, who knows what he’s doing at all times and isn’t afraid to let other people know that he doesn’t really care for them, whether that’s his subordinates or his allies.[/spoiler]

LG: That’s what I like best about Perturabo, for sure. One of the things that keeps drawing me back to Malcador as a character is that he has a lot of secrets, on and off the table. He keeps secrets from his followers – I mean, everybody keeps secrets from the Imperium at large – but it’s not just about making sure the enemy doesn’t find these things out. It’s also about what kind of information you want the people fighting on your side to have.

I think this starts to broach the question of how much of what we know about the Imperium in M31 is actually true? Which then begs the extension of that question, by the time we get to 40k and the Dark Imperium, after ten thousand or more years of dogma and this agreed-upon ‘truth’, is any of it still real for the common citizen? Did any of it actually happen? That was basically how the Horus Heresy started, in the background, years ago.

I felt like I needed to put in just enough uncertainty to show that. There’s clearly a lot that hasn’t made it into the history books, even at this point in the Horus Heresy, before we get to the wholesale revision of what happened and who the primarchs were, after Horus’ defeat. Like him being the arch-traitor, the snake that the Emperor is depicted wrestling on the great gates of the Imperial Palace, these huge fundamental cornerstones of the Imperium and how they understand their own past. A lot of it is just lies or embellishments, but at this stage, in this story, Malcador’s basically having a deathbed chat with Niasta and she knows a lot of the actual truth.

She’s had to communicate these truths back and forth, and these secrets – she’s the telephone, the means by which the information is transmitted or received across the Imperium. There’s no point in him lying to her about what she already knows and the messages she’s been forced to relay… but there’s still a lot that she doesn’t know, because it’s not been relevant to her duties. Malcador in this story has taken the opportunity to put some of her fears to rest, and to try and persuade her that [spoiler title=”SLIGHT SPOILER”]whatever all of them are asked to sacrifice, it’s not in vain, it’s not been contrary to the original plans for the primarchs and for the Imperium.[/spoiler]

At the same time, there’s another question – is he just lying to her? Which bits are true and which are lies? There’s even the implication that Malcador might have told lies to many people in order to get them to accept the bits of truth that are necessary to get things done. I have my own ideas about what’s true and what’s not, but I think it’s more interesting to let people listen to it and decide for themselves.

For some reason, there’s this notion that certain authors enjoy ‘trolling’ fans, and I know some of the usual suspects on various forums have assumed that’s what’s happening here, with me maybe putting in lots of revelations just for the sake of it. But I’m a fan first and foremost, I think sometimes they forget that! I have my own questions about the Horus Heresy, about the lore I spent nearly ten years curating and collaborating on. There are plenty of things, like this story, that I’d like to see highlighted, even if I’m not one to come out and give the black-and-white, cut and dried Codex-style answers for those fans who need that sort of certainty. I’d much rather give people something to talk about, something to discuss and disagree with each other on.

That was always what I loved about this when I was ‘just’ a frustrated Heresy fan like everyone else, the conversations on forums where we gave our own theories about the published stories and tried to figure out the nuance and the possible future direction of the overall series. In fact, I saw on Reddit there were something like 250 posts in the twelve hours after the audio was released – what I put in the story almost paled in comparison to the amazing feeling of seeing Warhammer fans across the internet engaging with each other, getting excited, asking questions and interpreting it in their own way, however it suited their angle on the hobby. I’d happily see someone say they hated it, as long as they had a respectful discussion with their online buddies about why!

But a lot of people did ask me why I chose to write a story about Malcador at all – why here, why now? I think it’s because the primarchs don’t even necessarily understand what they are or what they were intended to be at the beginning, and some of them die without knowing. Malcador knows at least what the plan was, although whether he ever truly tells that to anybody is another matter altogether.

ISM: For me it was tricky, as I had a very short window to pitch this story. Nick wanted me to pitch a Primarchs audio, preferably about a character that hadn’t had a book in the series so far, and he needed the pitch turned around back in a pretty short period of time. So I had to work out which stories were jumping out at me, and it wasn’t immediately Curze at first. From a cynical sales perspective I figured Sanguinius would always sell well, but a Sanguinius story didn’t jump out and grab me.I was at the gym and the idea of [spoiler title=”SPOILER”] Curze drowning a city in bodies [/spoiler]jumped out at me while I was working out, and I knew that’s what it would be.

I pitched that to Nick and insanely he allowed that to happen, which I wasn’t expecting! I expected him to say ‘there’s no way we would allow that to be published’. So coming to the conclusion that it was going to be Curze, immediately you know you’re going to be in Aaron’s shadow, like if you were writing something about Abaddon or about Angron. They’re so defined by his work that you have to find a way to divorce yourself from that and say that amazing as Aaron’s work is, you’re telling your story of Curze.

You can look at it for inspiration and the broad strokes of the character, but you don’t want to find yourself writing something that feels like fan fiction. That would do a disservice to the readers, because if they wanted that they would buy something that Aaron wrote. They’re buying something that you wrote, so write your own story!

I think what I was looking to do with it, at the broad stroke, was that I wanted to look at something after Curze’s reclamation on Nostramo, when he meets the Emperor and gets given his legion. What does his first compliance action look like? How does he go about doing it, not only as a way to tell his legion who he is and how things are going to be done, but basically to tell the galaxy how he’s going to go about doing things. If you read the Forge World books for the Night Lords they essentially had a similar tactical acumen, using fear as a weapon and things like that, before they were reunited with Curze. But I really wanted to hit home that gradual beginning of the shift from fear being a means to an end, to fear being the end in and of itself.

One of the most enjoyable things about the Heresy is showing these children who are so desperate to be approved, embraced and loved by their fathers that they’ll do anything to achieve that. What makes it really interesting is when the fathers, who they’ll do anything to impress, are monsters. We see what lengths the World Eaters will go to for Angron’s approval, mutilating themselves by hammering the nails into their brains – they quite literally become monsters, because that’s their father and that’s the destiny that they see for themselves. Every son looks at their father and says ‘that’s my future’.

This was a fun opportunity to get inside Curze’s head a little bit and see how he starts to show his legion the way that they’re going to be doing things, and get a little bit of how he views people based on his nature and his nurture. So that’s the excuse I’m using for raining dead bodies on a city!

RM: It’s interesting to see the way legionaries try and emulate their primarch without ever really having any hope of being able to fill those boots. In Stone and Iron you have these Iron Warriors who see Perturabo as this siege master, who’s well known to have the attitude of embitterment and superiority towards certain people, so they try and emulate that. But in doing that they miss the point – they make mistakes and get carried away trying to live up to this ideology that he created in the legion, in the same way that Curze created the ideology around fear with the Night Lords. I think that’s an interesting dynamic to be able to explore.

ISM: Yeah! I have a Captain character named Nivalus who converses with Curze, and I introduce him through [spoiler title=”SPOILER”] a vision that Curze sees where he kind of looks at the moment when Nivalus and his brothers learn that their primarch has been discovered. They’re almost like giddy children – ‘who’s our Dad going to be? What’s he going to be like, is he going to be like Dorn? Like Magnus? Like Sanguinius? What’s he going to be like?’ Then they’re met with the reality![/spoiler]

I’m sure that based on things like their tactics they will have had an idea of what he’d be like, but then they’re confronted with the reality of the father that they had envisioned versus the father that’s in front of them. What does that feel like, when your father is…kind of brutally insane? I really wanted to highlight the madness inside of Curze. I didn’t want to make him just angry, I wanted him to be disturbed, and unbalanced. It’s like his attention is split between what he’s seeing in his mind and what’s in front of him. It’s like you meet your father for the first time and he’s kind of a raving lunatic – and then what that’s like, realising that you kinda like it.

LG: Curze is remembered as a monster, as one of the most horrendous, terrifying characters of the legions… but was he always going to end up like that? Is that just the way he was made? I think it’s going to be really interesting to see, if Black Library continues to do shorter stories around the Primarchs series, as well as the main novels. I’d love to see more of these different interpretations of the characters explored through audio. I think it’s a great opportunity to really paint them in different colours.

ToW: How do you go about choosing a story to tell specifically in audio, as opposed to prose?

LG: When Nick Kyme and I were first talking about this, he asked me if I had any ideas for a Primarchs audio. I told him I had an idea for a story that focused on the primarchs without actually featuring a primarch, but I wasn’t sure how much of an audio story it could be. He said ‘If you could make it specifically an audio story, that would be great…’

At Games Workshop, I was working a hell of a lot on the audio drama production side and trying to figure out how we could advance the storytelling style and help everybody to tell audio stories. One of the things was to always remember that these stories should be intended for audio, first and foremost.

I mean, my Advent story, it starts off with a narrator and then that just drops away so that it’s a conversation between two people, which I guess is the simplest and most fundamental audio drama concept. You can totally play with the audience’s perception by making a conversation seem more intimate and very much just between the characters, and not actually having the artifice of having a narrator. But then you do have to make decisions about how much action to depict, how much of the scene needs to be described to allow people to understand it.

At the same time, it’s a case of thinking about what tricks to pull and how much more emotion to get into the performances, which is one of the most exciting things about audio to me. It’s more than when existing stories are converted into audio dramas, but when they are created from scratch.

ISM: To add into that, with my story in terms of the big punch scene I’m sure we could potentially adapt it outside of audio into prose if that is what they wanted, but it would definitely need adjustments and rewrites. Since audio was the medium for this story that is how I crafted it, and prose obviously has its own aspects to consider. In this particular scene, [spoiler title=”SPOILER”] Konrad Curze essentially butchers close to two hundred thousand people within the flagship of the planet they’re invading, then takes the flagship and rains skinned, living people over the capital city.[/spoiler] It’s a really visceral thing, which was the kernel of the idea I had in my head – it was something I thought would be dynamite for audio, which might not be as affecting in prose.

It would obviously still be affecting as it’s a gruesome, shocking thing, but I think it’s the abruptness of how it can be introduced from an audio point of view, rather than just a literary one. The way it just shatters how the scene was developing up until that point, is really something which you can do really powerfully in the medium of audio but you can’t necessarily do as well in prose. I think you definitely want to have certain stories specifically written for audio and not just as an adaptation of a short story.

One of the lessons I had to learn writing audios for Black Library was not to write a prose story at first and adapt it as a script, but to write it as a script to begin with. To consciously ask why I’m describing the person doing this instead of it being a sound effect, or whether I should have the narrator say something when it could be done through atmosphere or through dialogue. Those conscious creative decisions where you realise that you’re dealing with a different medium, even though reading is auditory and your brain kind of processes it similarly.

It’s the idea that this is a unique medium and it should be treated in that way, just like a comic book would or a film. It’s very different and it lends itself to different types of stories that can be told in uniquely compelling ways.

LG: I remember, Ian, when you first told me about the idea for that story, I was just blown away by how grim that could be! To then actually hear it fully produced, it’s every bit as shocking as you’d imagine. When you hear that idea and imagine what that would sound like to you…Then to hear it produced and presented in the audio format is something so startling and alarming, even compared to a story like Know No Fear. That novel is one of the most visceral descriptions of these things, but reading it is not the same as hearing it for yourself.

RM: It’s interesting, as well, how liberating it can be realising that you have all of these little tricks to play with, like direction and sound effects, which free you up from having to worry as much about the prose and getting the pacing right. It all gets pared back to something more visceral, especially when you’re telling these sorts of stories.

Speaking to some of the Black Library editors, as well, it seems as though the sort of end-game they’re heading for is to cut back on the narrator more and more. I gather the push is to have as much dialogue as possible, with the ultimate aim being to potentially have only dialogue and no narration. It wouldn’t be easy to do, but it would be an interesting experiment!

ISM: If I can piggyback something off that…I just finished an audio drama script – I don’t think I can say what it is or what it’s about – but in immersing myself in that I asked for the script and audio for The Tranzia Rebellion that Black Library did a couple of years ago. That’s got no narration, it’s just like an old radio play so it’s all dialogue and sound effects to convey the story.While I don’t necessarily think that there’s no room for narration, I feel that if it can be used in a way that helps the story then it’s still meaningful. For me it was really helpful just looking at and listening to that script as I was working on other scripts, for things like best practices and formatting, and how to go about that sort of storytelling.

LG: The Tranzia Rebellion was actually something that Christian Dunn really spearheaded at the time and really pushed for. It goes fully into the realms of a radio play, beyond audio drama. In Britain we’re far more used to hearing this sort of thing because it gets broadcast daily on the BBC, and even the long-running soap opera The Archers, which has been going on for over sixty years. That’s all radio play, there’s never any narration. I don’t know if it’s just a cultural thing, and we Brits are just more prepared to accept that as a storytelling medium?

Since I’ve come to the USA, I’ve seen that there’s a lot more difficulty selling the idea, throughout the industry, of telling stories in audio. The response is always just, why not make a movie, or write a book? It’s because this is the cinema of the mind! You can imagine anything on the screen in your head, your personal special effects budget is infinite!

Working with people like James Swallow, or people who I’ve been listening to for years like Dirk Maggs, who’s most recently done the X-Files and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, these things are written specifically for that medium. Very rarely do the newer, big-name audios rely on narration. However, it’s a whole other kind of story if you add a narrator, if you take the decision deliberately to have narration. It needs to fulfil a specific role in the storytelling.

I think it’s great how much audio is being perceived everywhere as more of an exciting and valid storytelling medium. Not that it will ever replace books or movies or TV, but it’s being taken seriously in a way that it probably hasn’t been since radio was the dominant medium for telling stories. Sixty or seventy years ago, when people just didn’t have televisions and hardly ever went to the movie theatres…

ISM: Yeah, and I think that the rise of podcasts has had a huge role to play in that, in the wider-spread acceptance of the audio format, especially in the States. It’s hard for me to speak from the point of view of the UK as I don’t live there, but I think podcasts have definitely helped with expanding it and making it more accessible.

ToW: Ian and Robbie, these were your first experiences of writing for the Heresy – was it a daunting experience, or just exciting?

RM: I’d say exciting!

ISM: I was more dumbfounded. It was something that I’d never thought I’d be able to do. I didn’t think I had made it in time, I thought that maybe I’d get in for whatever comes after the Heresy. So when I was asked to write a Primarchs story I said that I would TOTALLY write a Primarchs story…’put me in, coach!’

RM: Yeah, exactly the same. Maybe because it was on a smaller scale…if I’d been asked to write a Primarchs novel then that would be scary, but writing an Advent story was like going in at the shallow end, if you will. It sounds terribly geeky, but it’s just a massive honour really, to write about one of the biggest characters in the galaxy. I wouldn’t say he was my favourite character I’ve ever written, I’m still going to give that to Ragnar Blackmane, but Perturabo for me is still the second biggest-standing character out there.

ISM: For me with Curze I don’t think it’s sunk in, and it might not until the story releases. I got into writing because of Aaron’s Night Lords series – I was working at a bookstore hand-selling copies of Soul Hunter to anyone that would listen, and decided to give it a whirl. So it’s kind of bizarre in that way, because it was very much the series, and the group of characters, who got me into this career. To be able to contribute to that in any way, no matter how big or small, is pretty bizarre and kind of surreal.

ToW: What are the challenges in writing Primarchs stories, as opposed to 40k or Heresy? Is there a different tone to aim for with these sorts of stories?

RM: I think the main one for me was that because Stone and Iron was a Great Crusade-era story rather than the Heresy itself I needed to slightly steer away from it being so obvious that there was a rivalry between the two legions. It’s very easy to retrospectively say ‘oh, well they hate each other…they’re arch enemies’, and they definitely are the biggest rivals at this stage, but to these character the Heresy hasn’t yet happened. So I was retrospectively looking at that, and making sure it didn’t colour anything too much, which is the reason I have Perturabo showing a small degree of respect to the Imperial Fists and really coming down hard on his own legion.

As far as these characters are concerned they’re still allies, they just don’t really like each other. So in that sense there was a little bit of a sea change. I got the same sense a little bit from your one Ian, with how Curze reacts to the Captain figure. I like that you didn’t paint him as the sort of 40k-era villain, because that’s not what the Night Lords are…yet…at that point.

LG: One of the earliest principles that Nick and I talked about with the Primarchs series was that it could be from anywhere in the timeline, as long as it made sense for the story and the characters. First Lord of the Imperium is set ‘now’ in the Heresy, but they’re talking a lot about the past, even the ancient past. It’s an interesting mix, and when Nick confirmed it would be Primarchs I tried to lean into that, and play up the narrative styles of both series as appropriate.

Now that I think about it, Christian Dunn and Lindsey Priestley had an amazing saying when I first came to Black Library, that a lot of good Warhammer shorts can be boiled down to “two fights and a conversation”, but fans often respond much more positively to Horus Heresy stories that are “two conversations and a fight”. I think my story is just three conversations, and it seems to have blown quite a few people’s minds… so who knows? Maybe there’s a scientific formula to this idea! Imagine that.

ISM: With A Lesson in Darkness it was easier to avoid making it feel like a 40k story because it was very much a character study, and I wanted to work in the feeling of the Great Crusade. The feeling that there is hope in things, but also not…and the sense that things are almost curdling with the vision for this grand empire. I think it’s a slightly different kind of thing with Curze because he knows what’s going to happen already, so I almost wanted to have him wandering around just waiting for it to happen. He knows how this story ends. He’s looking at his son and thinking ‘no…you’re not going to make it, you’re not going to end up being like me…’

One of the biggest things for me, which has led to some good editorial conversations, is that I am mostly of the opinion that there really are not ‘good guys’ in 40k. I feel like there are more just degrees of bad, so if you look at the most heroic defenders of the Imperium they’re still defending the most horrendous, atrocious totalitarian regime in the history of the human race. Different authors are going to have different opinions on that, and they very much should, but in my mind it’s always degrees of how bad these characters are. Even if they’re trying to build the Imperium they’re building it on the bodies of trillions of people.

ToW: Not that dissimilar to the Carcharadons, then…?

RM: Yeah, definitely. The line I take if I have to describe the Carcharadon mindset as simply as possible is that they serve the Imperium, not humanity. They serve the institution which they have been bound to by their oaths, they don’t care for individual humans or even human society. People can read into that, in terms of which legion it suggests they stem from, but that in itself is just a symptom of their wider lack of humanity, like Ian talked about. That’s across all of the chapters or legions, even the nominally more positive ones like the Salamanders. They’re still badly removed from human concerns and the humanity that they’re supposed to be protecting, and that is naturally going to breed a distance which reaches its ultimate expression with the Carcharadons I suppose.

ISM: One of the things that Malcador mentions in Laurie’s story is the idea that the Imperium is built for humans, not for post-humans. One of the sublime tragedies in 40k and how things have turned out is that it really did get that backwards and the Imperium really was elevated above the people. It’s impossible to say what the Emperor’s true vision was, and even after The Master of Mankind that’s still up for a lot of debate, but I think at his core he wanted to elevate humanity over the institution and the construct of the Imperium. I think that 40k is very much the opposite of that.

ToW: Laurie, you did a lot of work on audio while you were at Black Library, have you got any thoughts about the casting of voice actors, and how that’s changed over time?

LG: Oh man, I always loved working on the audio stuff! I worked for a long time with Matthew Renshaw, who’s the audio producer at Black Library and I believe directs most of the recording sessions now. He organises the sound design, and getting all of the talent together to create these amazing productions from the bare scripts, or from story adaptations.

Looking back at the evolution of storytelling at Black Library, and what the editors are looking at now, when this originally started with the first audio drama productions like The Dark King & the Lightning Tower, Slayer of the Storm God and Heart of Rage, they were pretty much single-voice audios that were just short stories repurposed into audio dramas. They even had the “…he said” at the end of characters’ dialogue! It’s fascinating to see how they started experimenting with all this, what… ten years ago now, to see where we came from and where it’s evolving.With having multi-cast audio dramas, a lot of the considerations are about who you get to play which characters. Sure, there’s precedent established for some characters, like Kharn most often being portrayed by Chris Fairbank, or Toby Longworth almost always playing Garro or Malcador, and those are definitely considerations, but they’re not set in stone. Sometimes Matt has made some amazing leaps with characters by either casting new actors to play them at a different time in their lives or careers, or actually just recasting them and never making a big deal about it.

But at the same time when you bring in an actor, we would try and give them as many roles to record in one session as was possible, to get the most out of them as a performer, and to get the best possible performance that made the most sense for each of the stories. I always found that really interesting, to see somebody like Gareth Armstrong or Jonathan Keeble who can just switch between these different roles, seemingly effortlessly. You’d just hear them putting on different voices, slightly different accents, or just putting themselves into the mind of a different character entirely. Even their body language changes in the recording booth. You can see them go from playing a suspicious human agent to being an upstanding hero Space Marine, and they’ll actually stand taller when they play those roles!

I actually did some background voice work, you know – as an ork in Josh Reynolds’ The Art of Provocation, some other stuff too. Most of those orks were actually people from Games Workshop, who were just tempted into the booth for ten minutes of shouting out all these orky phrases, and doing the background roars. So much fun! So much cringe! But then in the production it’s treated and processed in such a way that it feels far more immersive than just seven awkward-looking guys, with bald heads and glasses looking at each other in a small room around a microphone.

ToW: Are there any stories that you’re particularly hoping to tell in future, in an audio format?

ISM: Well I just handed in a script a few weeks ago, that if you watch my Facebook page you might know what it’s about.

RM: Hang on, I watch your Facebook page and I don’t know what it’s about!

ISM: Okay, I’ll say this. The name of it was said at the Black Library Weekender. Which I was not aware that they were going to do, so that was cool! It’s a character that I have written before, and I’m really excited about it. I’d love to talk more about it and what its inspiration is, but I can’t because they’ll sick the dogs on me…

So that’s a story that I’ve wanted to tell, and I’ve got more stories with them that I’d like to tell. I’d like to do more Lucius stuff. I would very much like to take the John French route, and between novels to pepper the interim with short stories about the supporting cast. I’d love to write an audio about how Clarion came to be on the Diadem, or about Cesare and his apothecary misadventures, about the early days of the Rypax…whether those are in short story format or in audio format, they would be fun to do.

RM: For me, kind of riffing off Chris Dows’ next audio drama [Titans’ Bane] which is set inside a Shadowsword, and the whole thing is narrated through the tank commander, I’ve wanted for a year now to do an audio drama about a void-fairing Imperial fighter pilot squadron. We’ve had novels and stories about the Imperial Navy, the big ships, and we’ve had Double Eagle about the Imperial Navy’s air force in aerial combat on a planet…but we’ve not seen the fighters in space. Which do exist, they attack the big capital ships and defend their own from other enemy fighters and bombers.

I think that would be cool, you could get all sorts of great TIE fighter-esque sound effects and laser beams which you can hear even though you shouldn’t because it’s space… all of that sort of thing. I think that would be a lot of fun to do. Apart from that…

Actually, I feel like I have to do another one about Ferrix, the Iron Warriors character in Stone and Iron. He also featured two years ago in an Advent short story [Blood and Iron], in his 40k incarnation where he’s a Warpsmith. He’s kind of becoming my little Iron Warriors side character staple which I do every year, so hopefully next year he can get something more. We’ll see.

LG: I actually can’t talk about the stuff I’m working on right now! Ha! Sorry to spoil the fun.

I am working on audio projects beyond Black Library though, too. As I said before, there is an increasing global interest in the medium, and I’m really excited to see that happening.

ToW: Let’s finish off with this. If you could voice yourself one primarch in audio, who would you pick?

ISM: So it would be me doing the voice? It might be because I just wrote him, but I think it would be Curze. What I really wanted for how he talked in the story is almost a breathless whisper the entire time. If you’ve ever seen the movie Donnie Darko there’s a scene where Jake Gyllenhaal and Frank the bunny rabbit are sitting in a movie theatre, and Frank pulls off his rabbit mask and he talks to Jake Gyllenhaal… that’s how I wanted him to sound.

I wanted to give the idea that Curze has never really had to talk to someone that wasn’t inches away from his face, and that most of the time he’s talking it’s just him talking to himself. So what does that sound like? It’s very hushed, almost a whisper, and the fact that he’s constantly distracted by visions of the future and of his own death, he kinds of trails off…

So I’d probably pick that…but I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the right kind of voice for that sort of stuff, so I’m not sure how great of a voice actor I’d be.

RM: I was going to say the same thing! I don’t know, I think we just have spiritual links to the primarchs we’ve written about now. In my defence, Perturabo was my favourite Traitor Legion primarch beforehand, so I feel like I’d want to do him. I feel we can all emphasise with him a bit, just because he’s so long-suffering and just tired of everything by the time we start dealing with his character. And yet he has this childlike anger and bitterness deep down inside where he feels like he’s not been appreciated. I feel like I could work with that, but that’s probably just me!

To be fair, I was told that if I was ever down in Nottingham at the same time as a recording session I could go and do ork and tyranid sound effects! So yeah, I’d be up for that.

ISM: I just want Sean Barrett or Jonathan Keeble to narrate my life…

LG: I’d love to tell you that I am currently in talks with Toby Longworth to narrate my life… but that would be a lie.

It’s weird, as a long-time, old-school fan of the Heresy, I kind of feel like I have already heard most of the definitive primarchs’ voice depictions. I can’t imagine myself replacing those actors, even in my head for a hypothetical question like this! Anyone who saw me and Graeme Lyon acting out THAT scene from The Reflection Crack’d on stage at the Weekender a few years back – you’ll know no one ever needs to see or hear that again.

If you’re asking which primarch I most identify with, or who I take the most pleasure in reading out loud… that’s Angron. Without a second of doubt.

***

As always, I’d like to say a massive thanks to Robbie, Laurie and Ian for taking the time to do this interview. It turned out much easier than I’d expected to get all of us ready and available to talk at the same time, in four different places, so thanks to the guys for being supremely accommodating. I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed listening to the guys talk about their stories, and the audio medium as a whole!

If you’d like to read more about the three audio dramas in question, you can find my reviews here:

• Stone and Iron by Robbie MacNiven
• First Lord of the Imperium by LJ Goulding
• A Lesson in Darkness by Ian St. Martin

If you’ve got any thoughts, feedback or questions off the back of this interview, please do feel free to let me know – you can get in touch via the comments on here, by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com or via either Facebook or Twitter.