Taking place (largely) well away from the usual characters and locations of Warhammer 40,000, James Swallow’s audio drama Corsair: The Face of the Void is a bold adventure story featuring Rogue Trader Santiago and her crew of misfits taking on pirates, aliens and even Imperial authority. Closing in on a pirate ship carrying a valuable bounty, when her prey is strangely becalmed Captain Santiago leads a boarding action to retrieve and claim the prize only to find unexpected dangers lurking in its depths. It soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary bounty they’ve been sent to claim.
It’s a straight-up, no-frills story which introduces a cast of characters, throws them into peril, and begins to peel back the layers of who they are and how they interact with each other. Plot-wise it’s the sort of cool, enjoyably familiar story that’s easy to get absorbed in, while providing plenty of scope to start getting to know the characters. Beth Chalmers’ Santiago is brilliantly forceful, leading mostly through force of personality backed up with unsubtle threats, while enigmatic Aeldari ranger Ophidis (played to supercilious perfection by Barnaby Edwards), dour enginseer Kyteal (another excellent Mechanicus performance from Cliff Chapman) and Navigator Icaylian (a fey, third person-referring Deeivya Meir) provide the experienced core of her crew. Meanwhile Steve Conlin does excellent double duty as permanently-horrified pilot Konnor and big-bad Dhokar.
Coming in at a little over an hour, it’s the first Black Library audio drama of this length to be entirely narration free; arguably it might be better described as a radio play. Like Titans’ Bane, the SFX and music take a back seat to the acting, contributing to an immersive experience without hogging the spotlight, and leaving the listener free to concentrate on what’s happening. The seven-strong cast do sterling work with Swallow’s sharp dialogue, bringing the characters to bickering, entertaining life, while the absence of narration only emphasises the importance and effectiveness of the dialogue. Only once or twice is there the odd bit of obviously expositional dialogue as characters literally tell us what’s happening – the majority of the time it’s easy to follow what’s going on and get caught up in the crew’s developing relationships.
This isn’t aiming to be a standalone, powerfully emotional story, but rather a (relatively) light and entertaining tale that ticks all the boxes for fun and excitement while setting things up for more to come from these characters. There’s a clear sense of 40k tone and style, despite the less-than-typical characters and setting, but it does feel good to take a look at a story that stretches the boundaries for 40k a little bit. Space Marines are all well and good, but there’s something deeply cool about Rogue Traders, and it feels like there’s a lot of scope here for future stories. If this is the only Corsair story we get then it’s worth having as both a great character piece and a beautifully put-together work of audio…but on the basis of this let’s hope it turns into an ongoing series that really starts to explore the fringes of 40k.
See also: my interview with James Swallow talking about Corsair: The Face of the Void.
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