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 slightly longer than usual instalment I spoke (in places at length) to James Swallow about his classic 40k Sisters of Battle audio drama Red & Black, which has just been reissued several years after its original release, and is once more available to order in CD and MP3 formats.
Without further ado, let’s get straight to the questions and James’ answers.
Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for Red & Black?
James Swallow: It’s a prequel to my first Sisters of Battle novel Faith and Fire, and a story about Imperial faith. One of the things we see a lot in the Warhammer 40,000 universe is the idea that humans are the ascendant species – if you’re not human, you’re seen as a lower life form and not worthy of the Emperor’s light. I wanted to explore that idea – what if we came across something that wasn’t human but that did believe in the Imperial Truth? What would that be like?
Originally the idea was that it was going to be a robot civilisation, a leftover from the Men of Iron in the deep 40k lore. In the end we decided not to go in that direction so what we have instead is a stratified society made up of humans and genetically engineered replicants, who are following the Imperial religion. From their point of view they see that as completely fine but from the point of view of the Adepta Sororitas and the Ecclesiarchy they’re seen as an aberration.
Against all the friction and conflict between these two cultures as they come together, there’s a group on the planet who are agitating against the Imperial Church, so everything’s being pulled in three directions.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
JS: There are three main characters in the story. The first one is Sister Miriya, who is one of the two main characters in my Sisters of Battle novels. She’s a battle-hardened Battle Sister, a take-no-nonsense type who’s seen it all and done it all, but also someone who’s constantly being challenged and is willing to buck the rules a little bit if she has to, to do what needs to be done. She’s also deeply spiritual, and is constantly challenging that spirituality and trying to find her truth in what is a conflicting and changing universe, where there aren’t any easy answers and sometimes the things she’s told to believe don’t marry up with what she’s experienced. She’s very much a conflicted character – she’s strong on the outside but she has a lot of inner conflict which I think makes her an interesting character.
Alongside Miriya is her second in command, a character called Lethe who [SPOILER ALERT…] gets killed off in Faith and Fire. When I wrote the character I liked her so much that I thought it was a shame I’d killed her off, as she was good fun, so I thought the prequel was an opportunity to give that character something to do. Lethe is who I tend to think of as the ‘regimental sergeant’ character – the salt of the earth, tough as nails, working-class soldier type. She has a chalk and cheese kind of relationship with Miriya, but they also have a really strong friendship.
The third character is called Rho, who’s one of the genetically engineered beings, and she’s turned up in Imperial space as a messenger. She thinks they’re going to reunite with the Imperium, but doesn’t expect to be treated as something strange and unusual. Rho is a very different character. She’s numinous and a bit ethereal, a waif-like character like a sort of novitiate nun who’s completely into her religious beliefs and totally consumed by it all.
In this audio drama it’s basically Lisa Bowerman and Beth Chalmers doing pretty much all of the voices, and they both do a fantastic job! Beth plays Miriya, and does an amazing job with some of the speeches that she comes out with, and all of these empowering conversations. Lethe and Rho are played by Lisa Bowerman, who’s also the director of the audio drama. When we were first putting it together we were talking about Lethe and Lisa asked me ‘who is this character, what’s she like?’ I talked her through the whole thing – tough, working class and so on – and Lisa said ‘ok, so a female Sean Bean’. Exactly, she’s from space Sheffield! That’s dead on, and Lisa really nailed it.
ToW: Where and when is it set?
JS: I’ve never nailed that down. Everything in the 40k universe is set sort of ‘ten minutes to midnight’, but with the Sisters books I wanted to set things maybe ten or twenty years before that…but it’s nebulous. It fits where it fits, really.
ToW: Is there anything that you’d recommend fans check out before listening to this?
JS: Not really – because this is the prequel story it’s designed to be an introductory plotline. Including this audio there are four stories in my Sisters of Battle arc. Red and Black is the opening prequel, and then Faith and Fire is the first novel. That’s followed by Hammer and Anvil, and then in the big bind-up omnibus edition there’s a short story called Heart and Soul which takes the characters a bit further on. That’s the chronology of the narrative.
ToW: Why this story? What made you want to write this in particular?
JS: I like doing audio! I’ve always loved writing audio dramas, and I was one of the people who were flying the flag early on at Black Library saying we should do audio stories. I think this was the second or third audio I’d done, and we hadn’t yet done anything with an all-female cast. It occurred to me that this was an opportunity for us to do something that deals with a section of lore which hadn’t been covered much – Sisters didn’t get a lot of love back then.
Also, we had these great female directors and voice actors, so I thought ‘let’s give them an opportunity to showcase their skills’. You immediately get a different sound, because it’s not Space Marines yelling and shouting at each other – it’s Adepta Sororitas yelling and shouting at each other! It has a very different tone to it, and I think that really shows in the strength of the performances.
ToW: What influences do you draw from when writing about Sisters of Battle?
JS: I go back to the source! When I first started Faith and Fire I went back to the original Sisters of Battle Codex, just to try and get my head in the same space as the original creators of that faction were looking at. What was the intention for those characters? What did the lore say, and what narrative doors were being opened? It was just to try and steep myself in all of that.
Also I try to draw from the greater mythological sense of female heroines. The thing about the Warhammer universes is that they have this epic, mythological scope, and I’ve often said that what we’re doing is telling pulp, sci-fi stories while also reaching back to the original hero myths. Characters like Achilles, Hercules and Athena, and stories about massively larger than life characters who live in these heightened, mythological realms.
So there was definitely a sense of that, of reaching back to classical mythology to tackle the themes which occur again and again throughout human history. 40k feels like the kind of place where you can tell that type of story and have it feel like it fits correctly.
ToW: We’ve seen a few more Sisters-focused stories published recently, from Alec Worley and Danie Ware. What would you be looking for in a story about these characters?
JS: It’s fantastic, and I’m really pleased because they’re one of my favourite factions in the game and it’s great to see them getting some new love. Plus, plastic Sisters coming out! It’s going to be super awesome. I’m hoping what this means is that we won’t just see an occasional story about the Sisters, but that you’re going to be able to regularly read about them with a new novel or novella every year.
It’s great that GW are supporting the faction, and that we’ve got other writers working on them. Especially really talented people like Danie and Alec coming in and doing more stories – long may they reign! I love the stuff that Danie’s been doing. Danie’s a great writer and I knew her before she started working on Warhammer 40,000. I can remember when she told me she was doing a Sisters of Battle story and I was really excited because I knew she would absolutely nail it. With the Bloody Rose stuff that she’s doing it’s very cool.
If you want to boil it down to what’s interesting about Sisters, when you look at stories about Space Marines you have these genetically enhanced transhuman demigod super soldiers out there with these incredible physical abilities just stomping around the galaxy carrying the banner of the Imperium. That stuff is really interesting, but if you look at the Sisters of Battle they’re doing exactly the same thing but with hardly any of those bonuses. They’re just ordinary humans. Granted they’ve got cool power armour and neat guns, and big tanks and what have you, but they don’t have any genetically superior abilities. They haven’t got years of implants to make them beyond human. What carries them beyond being ordinary humans is the unshakeable faith they have in their religion. That to me, as a writer, is really fascinating. The idea of where that can take you – can it make you do terrible things? Can it make you do incredible things?
It can drive a human being to go beyond their limits in ways you’d never expect. When you think of the dangers and the challenges of the 40k universe, the terrors and horrors that are out there, the unshakeable strength you’d need to have just to look that kind of thing straight in the eye! To me, writing about characters – and reading about characters – like that is fascinating. Are they strong enough to fight it or do they break? That’s great character drama right there, and I love that.
Of course on a superficial level – nuns with guns, what’s not to like? That’s the great thing – you can enjoy it on a surface level, all the blood and thunder of it, as there’s a dark glamour to that sort of thing that’s exciting on one level. But underneath it we’ve got these deeper questions of what it is to be human in a world like this, and what the nature of faith is in a world like this. These are just fascinating ideas!
I’ve always thought that the Sisters are an interesting faction, but I remember when I was first trying to sell the idea of Faith and Fire to Black Library there was a bit of resistance as they weren’t sure if people would be interested. There was a perception that the fanbase was almost exclusively male, and they wouldn’t be interested in a book that was led by and peopled by female characters. To which I said ‘I don’t think that’s true, I think our readership responds to strong characters no matter what they are. A good story is a good story’.
Faith & Fire is also available as an audiobook
That was definitely proven right, because after Faith and Fire came out I got a lot of specific fan mail about the Sisters books which would say ‘thank you for doing this, we’re really pleased that someone is doing this faction’. I would get two specific types of fan mail – people who would say ‘my girlfriend thinks this is all blokes shouting at each other so I bought your novel to prove to her that we do have cool female characters’, or female fans who would say ‘thank you for writing strong female characters that we can empathise with because as fun as Space Marines yelling at each other is, it’s nice to see some female characters as well’.
So I’m glad that I helped to keep the door open with that a little bit, and it’s terrific now that people have realised that there’s something which this faction has that the other elements of the 40k universe don’t have. I think it’s important to keep that alive. We’ve got such a fantastic spread of lore and backstory in the 40k universe, and there are so many cool factions and stories and things you can do, and I think the Sisters of Battle are right there at the top with some of the coolest ideas Games Workshop have ever created. There’s so much depth to them, they’re so much more than just nuns with guns.
It’s nearly 8 years since this was first published – how do you feel, looking back at it now? Anything you’d do differently?
JS: Wow! I honestly didn’t think it was that long. Looking back I felt like we packed a lot into that one CD – I think it’s about 70 minutes in the end, and there’s not a lot of fat on that. I remember thinking at the time that I had a whole lot of story to tell and I crammed it all in there. If I could go back and do it again I think I’d like to have said ‘let’s make it a two-CD story instead’, but at that point I don’t think we were doing double-CD stories.
I think that’s the only thing I would have changed – I would have liked to have made it a little bit longer. It would have been fun to spend some more time with the idea of clashing cultures, but at the end of the day I’m very happy with it. I think Beth and Lisa absolutely knocked it out of the park and did some really great work there!
How does this story compare to the rest of your work? Is it a familiar style, or a departure?
JS: If you like the kind of stuff I do about Space Marines shooting at each other, you’re going to like the stuff I do about Sisters of Battle shooting other people! It’s very much in that same kind of wheelhouse, and has the same sort of touchstones – the things that personally interest me about the 40k universe.
Any plans to go back to these characters, or the Adepta Sororitas in general?
JS: Yeah, maybe one day. I had for a while planned to write a third novel, but the other Horus Heresy-shaped stuff was getting in the way. In the end, when BL wanted to do the omnibus edition I wanted to do something new as I didn’t want us to just put the book out with the text version of Red and Black and say ‘here you go’. I feel if people are going to buy an omnibus edition then I want to try and give them something a little bit new.
So I said ‘if I can’t do the novel, at least let me do this story’. So Heart and Soul is basically the last third of what the novel would have been, squeezed down into a short story. It’s a narrative I really wanted to write, and in a way I’ve signed off with those characters. If this is the last Sisters of Battle story I do, that would be ok, because I’ve put those characters in a place which I think is kind of cool. That said, I would absolutely love to go back and explore those characters some more. Maybe, again, in another audio drama.
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Huge thanks to James for taking the time to answer these questions! It’s great to see this title coming back onto the Black Library shelves (physically and digitally), and if you’re anything like me you’re probably about to run off and pick up a copy to listen to right away!
Click here to order Red & Black.
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