RAPID FIRE: Robert Rath Talks The Infinite and the Divine

Welcome to this instalment of my Rapid Fire series of quick author interviews, in which I’m chatting to Robert Rath about his debut novel for Black Library, The Infinite and the Divine. This exciting new Warhammer 40,000 title is the first full novel to feature the ancient technological menace of the necrons as its protagonists, and promises to be something a little different to the usual Black Library fare. It’s available to pre-order as of Saturday the 3rd October.

Let’s get straight on with the interview – over to Robert!

ToW: What’s the elevator pitch summary for The Infinite and the Divine?

Robert Rath: Bitter rivals Trazyn the Infinite and Orikan the Diviner run across an artifact from the War in Heaven that may help free the necrons from the prison of their metal bodies. This kickstarts a cat-and-mouse pursuit through time and space – crashing civilizations and fouling timelines – as they try to decipher and unlock its secrets before time runs out and the object of their search is lost forever.

Of course, they’re immortal necrons, so ‘before time runs out’ means something very different to them.

I joke that it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Amadeus meets Withnail and I.

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?

RR: Trazyn is a planetary overlord who was previously the court archivist, and has decided to spend eternity amassing a curated museum of galactic history – often including the historical figures themselves, converted to hard light and displayed in enormous dioramas. He has an enormous scope of knowledge about history and culture, a deep compulsion to acquire new objects, and the morals of a wolf who hasn’t eaten in a few days.

Then there’s Orikan, who was previously the court astronomer and foresaw what a disaster transferring the necrons’ minds to metal would be. The fact that everyone ignored his warning has stuck with Orikan, making him spiteful and insular. He can calculate the future given time and focus, and ‘rewind’ events to a limited degree, but when the novel begins he’s also not quite the Orikan we know from the game – he has a lot of study and esoteric delving to do before he becomes the powerhouse we see on the tabletop.

In fact, that’s something he hates Trazyn for – Trazyn is naturally talented, not to mention a planetary overlord with near-endless resources. Orikan really had to work in order to get where he is.

ToW: Where and when is it set?

RR: This is a surprisingly complicated question, given that the book stars two immortals, one who can rewind time and another who can jump bodies!

In a timeline sense, the main action of the novel takes place roughly from the time of the Horus Heresy to the opening of The Great Rift. Though those events have minimal impact way out on the Eastern Fringe where the story is set.

It’s a precarious era for the necrons, since the only ones currently awake have mostly risen due to a random malfunction. So there are only a few thousand of them active in the galaxy rather than millions, and they desperately want to remain hidden.

As for actual locations, you will see more of Solemnace and Mandragora than we have previously.

ToW: How does this relate to your short story War in the Museum? Is it best to read that before the novel? Afterwards?

RR: Both tie up some loose ends from the other, but you don’t have to read the story to understand the novel and vice-versa. Personally I think it’s more fun to read War in the Museum beforehand but that may just be because I wrote it first.

ToW: What appeals to you about necrons as characters to write about?

RR: Necrons are an absolute blast. Partially, as a longtime 40k fan it’s just neat to see the galaxy from another perspective. It upends a lot of how we’ve come to think about the 40k universe.

For example, if a horde of daemonettes charge a Guardsman he’s going to feel existential horror, a mix of attraction and revulsion and fear for his soul.

If a bunch of daemonettes charge Trazyn, he’s going to assess their taxonomy and mentally compare them to the daemonettes already in his collection. He won’t be worried for his soul, his main concern is going to be: ‘is it worth keeping a few of these, or should I just kill them?’

And while that’s fun to write, there’s also a very tragic dimension to necrons. They’re immensely powerful, but also deeply dysfunctional on a personal and societal level.

As I see it, every necron is essentially a supercomputer, but a broken supercomputer. Worse, at their core they know they’re missing parts of themselves. In a literal sense they’ve lost their souls, but they’re also rootless. They’ve lost contact with the culture and home they once had, but by their nature are unable to adapt to new conditions. It’s a pretty melancholy place to be, and Trazyn and Orikan have different reactions to it.

On a practical level, I love writing fight scenes for them. Necrons are absurdly durable and can survive in any environment, so you can go really big and weird with the battles. Trazyn himself can be killed in any number of inventive ways. I think he dies something like five times just in War in the Museum.

But the point is, you can go really over the top. My maxim for writing action scenes was: I want to create a situation where Ibram Gaunt would be dead within two seconds.

ToW: Of all the possible necron stories you could have written, what made you go for this one?

RR: It just seemed like fate.

I knew that I wanted to write a Trazyn story, and that for the story to have any emotional weight, he had to be looking for something that related to the necron past, but once Orikan entered the picture everything came together.

They’re just such perfect opposites. Trazyn is externally focused and gregarious, while Orikan is internal and insular. Trazyn is all about the past, Orikan is focused on the future. I could go on and on. They’re even on facing pages of the Codex. It seemed mad to me that this wasn’t already a major storyline.

Rob’s also written a pair of Officio Assassinorum short stories, including the excellent Iron Sight

ToW: Where do you look for influences when writing about millennia-old sentient robots?

RR: My day job is writing an animated YouTube show called Extra History, so it’s probably not surprising that some of my influences and inspiration came from the past.

It’s relatively subtle – I don’t want people to look at it and see the historical influences clearly. But I do live in Hong Kong and have done a fair amount of traveling to historical sites and ruins in Southeast Asia, so that filtered into the book.

Another thing I drew upon was the history of the Pacific Islands – I’m from Hawai’i, and feel that Pacific history and aesthetics are an untapped vein in science fiction. I can’t go into specifics though, or I’ll start ruining surprises!

ToW: War in the Museum felt a little lighter and (dare I say) funnier than the default 40k grimdark – was that a conscious choice or something that happened naturally? Have you taken a similar approach with the novel?

RR: The short answer is yes, The Infinite and the Divine engages in a lot of the same black humor that you saw in War in the Museum.

Trazyn is an inherently humorous character, not only in his very conception as an immortal museum curator, but in that he actually has a sense of humor. Orikan is also funny in his own way, but it’s different. Orikan’s humor is really just verbal cruelty.

But it’s also a balancing act. It’s still Warhammer 40,000 after all, the galaxy is dark and quite awful. The way we’ve decided to navigate that tonal gap is that every Trazyn story is only funny from Trazyn’s perspective. If you told the short story War in the Museum through the eyes of one of the other characters, it suddenly becomes horror. Basically Trazyn is funny. His perspective is often funny. But the world around him is very, very not funny.

In fact, one of the things I’m most proud of in the book is how it can both have comedic moments and go to some dark places.

The Garden of Mortal Delights is Rob’s first BL short story

ToW: What do you hope 40k fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?

RR: Mostly I hope they have fun. I think all of us could use a little fun right now.

And if you’re a longtime fan, you’ll definitely enjoy how chock full of Easter eggs this book is. The great thing about Trazyn is that you can fill the Solemnace galleries with basically anything. When I started writing the book and War in the Museum, I sent Black Library a wish list of things that I wanted to use. And because I’m a 40k fan who started playing in Second Edition, some were really old and out there.

I expected them to maybe strike out half the items, but instead the list that came back was longer than the one I’d sent! Apparently at the studio they had a lot of fun passing the list around and throwing ideas on it, including some stuff I hadn’t thought to ask for.

And when I got that list back, my jaw was on the floor. Like, seriously? You’re going to let me use that one? Are you sure?

ToW: Do you have any other necron stories (with or without Trazyn and Orikan) planned?

RR: Not currently, but I love these characters and would be happy to return to them if offered the chance!

Right now I’m knee-deep in a book about a different faction with a totally different tone. And honestly, that’s what I love about the Black Library – the range of stories you can tell is just immense. I can’t think of many universes where the Ciaphas Cain books could sit comfortably next to the Night Lords trilogy, but the 40k universe is large and varied enough to accommodate a whole host of genres.

I mean, I’ve had five stories published by Black Library so far. The Garden of Mortal Delights was a dark fantasy escape tale, Assassinorum: Divine Sanction was a spy thriller, War in the Museum is a sci-fi disaster story with heavy humor elements…how great is that?

***

Thanks so much to Rob for taking the time to answer these questions, and give us such intriguing hints as to what to expect from this new 40k novel.

See also: all my reviews of Rob’s Black Library stories to date

Buy The Infinite and the Divine (also available as an audiobook)

Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews. If you have any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.