Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with Black Library authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.
In this instalment I spoke to Chris Dows about his latest 40k audio drama Martyrs of Elysia, the third and final instalment of his Elysian Drop Troops audio drama series. It’s available to order as of tomorrow, so get ready to pick it up very soon!
As usual, let’s get straight to the questions and Chris’ answers.
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for Martyrs of Elysia?
Chris Dows: In the dramatic finale of the trilogy, Commissar Mastroval’s relentless pursuit for the murderer of Captain Bandrac concludes with the interrogation of his prime suspect. The resulting battle of wits between himself and Sergeant Zachariah matches any military campaign the two have experienced, with surprises and shocks coming at every turn – for both of them.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
CD: While Zachariah’s comrade Adullam and rookie Uldek both feature in this final part of the story, the emphasis is very much on Zachariah himself. Zachariah and Adullam are battle-hardened veterans of the Elysian One Fifty-Eighth, while Uldek is one of thousands newly recruited to face the Chaos/Elyisan Pirate menace on their doorstep. And then there’s Commissar Mastroval, supreme interrogator, wily tactician and arbiter of life and death for anyone who stands before him.
ToW: Where and when is it set?
CD: The interrogation is set in a blockhouse on the outskirts of Elysian Training Camp D-64; flashback action takes place in and around the Elysian Pirate stronghold of Veyland Sinestre. It is set just before the fall of Cadia.
ToW: Is there anything that you’d recommend someone check out before listening to this?
CD: As this is the final part of a series, it’ll make far more sense if you check out Scions of Elysia and Renegades of Elysia, the previous two installments, although it is possible to pick up what’s previously happened from the way it’s written. This isn’t a cheap marketing ploy by the way – the plan was to have enough space (if you’ll excuse the pun) to really explore the characters and storyline, and to properly world-build Elysia which a lot of gamers/fans of BL really like but all know there’s very little detail of the actual place.
As characters, Zachariah and Adullum have appeared in two previous short stories – The Mouth of Chaos and Monolith. In fact there’s subtle hints to how Martyrs… concludes in both of these short stories!
ToW: How does the series feel now that it’s all written, produced and released – has it changed much from when you first conceived the idea for it?
CD: That’s a really good question.The idea for this story goes back over five years, to my initial discussions with Laurie Goulding about developing the Elysian Drop Troops for a potential expansion of the figure line. When BL decided they wanted to do a major relaunch of audio dramas, Nick Kyme approached me to see if I was interested – which I most certainly was, being a huge fan of audio narrative and conversant with writing in the script format (I was a comic book writer for 15 years and there’s a surprising similarity between telling stories in sequential art and sound).
The first draft of Scions was written in October 2016 (!) working with Nick Kyme and Laurie Goulding as development editors. By the time I got on to Renegades of Elysia (January 2017) I was working exclusively with Laurie. There was quite a bit of tweaking as we went along but we always knew what the general direction of the story would be. However, by the time I got to drafting Martyrs in August 2017, Laurie had gone to pastures new so I was assigned Kate Hamer to work with. You’ll appreciate working with three editors for over a year throws up all kinds of issues; every editor brings something new with them, but everyone respected the initial synopsis and sticking to that (more or less) has given the story a backbone which has been hugely important.
Kate had some great ideas right off the bat, and while we both wanted to maintain consistency with the two previous stories we also wanted to incorporate her take on the narrative and character development. I think all three stand up well; the consistency provided by Matt [Renshaw – audio producer] and the excellent cast also helps enormously. It has changed to how I originally conceived it, but to be honest for the better. Played back to back it’s a towering three hours of nerve-shredding tension – and an inordinate amount of explosions.
ToW: How did you find working on a story set across three audios – did that provide any interesting challenges or opportunities?
CD: The greatest challenge was one of continuity, particularly with the characters. I had to be careful Mastroval didn’t suddenly become too soft or harsh depending on who he was interrogating, nor that a part of the Elysian world I’d detailed didn’t suddenly contradict itself. I’m really pleased with the (very Frank Herbert-inspired) hierarchy on Elysia; it actually turns out to be integral to the story as revealed in Martyrs.
I also wanted to look for different soundscapes for each part of the trilogy – so there’s the initial attack on the Elysian Pirate stronghold in Scions (with lots of great detail surrounding the actual drops the Elysians undertake), the whole military training aspect of Renegades… set around training camp D-64 and, for Martyrs, you get to hear anti-gravity platforms for the first time (I think). One of my greatest pleasures writing audio dramas is thinking up sound forms that haven’t been used before; I think Martyrs has the best yet, again thanks to Matt seeing (hearing?) exactly what I’m trying to achieve.
ToW: You’ve now written quite a few Black Library audio dramas; have you found that writing these has affected how you write prose stories, or do you deliberately adopt different approaches?
CD: I’m lucky in that I can turn off the prose side of my writing brain and switch to the script side without really thinking about it. Funnily enough, with the recent drive towards dropping the ‘omniscient narrator’ often found in audio dramas, this switch is made all the more easier. When you’ve got a narrator that isn’t part of the story, it’s very easy to write them as paragraphs from a short story to stitch the events together. This can lead to repetition and, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s much easier to write an audio drama with an all-seeing, all-knowing narrator than it is to do it through dialogue and sound effects alone.
Again, I call on my experience as a comic book writer to solve problems in the storytelling. Going back to your question, I haven’t actually written a prose story since I started on the audio dramas – it’ll be interesting to see if I do eventually have issues, but I don’t think I will. Right now I’m more than happy writing audio dramas – they keep me busy enough!
ToW: Do you have plans to continue any aspects of this story, or is this the last we’ll see of Zachariah and Adullam?
CD: I really like the Elysians and would love to return to them some time. I had a chap come up for a signing of Renegades at Warhammer Fest in Coventry a couple of weeks back and he told me what he thought would happen in Martyrs. I’ve got the world’s worst poker face and tried to be non-committal but I had to tell him he was delightfully way off! Will I write for Zachariah and Adullam again? That depends on if they survive Mastroval’s interrogation. You’ll have to listen to Martyrs to find out!
***
Thanks once again to Chris for taking the time to answer these questions. Keep an eye out for a review of Martyrs of Elysia coming very soon. If you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews, just click here.
If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, on Facebook or Twitter, or by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com.