Welcome to part one of this in-depth interview, where I’m genuinely delighted to be talking to author Matthew Farrer and going into quite a lot of detail discussing his Urdesh duology from Black Library. After something of a long gestation, Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint was released in June 2021, followed a few months later by Urdesh: The Magister and the Martyr. Between them these two books – telling a single overarching story, really – explore a crucial part of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade from a brand new perspective, as the Iron Snakes and Saint Sabbat lead the armies of the Imperium in the war for Urdesh against the forces of the Anarch. With both books now available in paperback, it seemed the perfect moment to chat to Matthew about the unusual journey that this story has taken and the books that are available now as a result.
In an unintentional (honestly!) but deeply appropriate fashion, this interview ended up longer than I’d expected, so I’ve decided to split it into two. In this first part we’re going to cover the overall writing process, talking about everything from the original idea behind Urdesh to the dangers of switching word processors mid-project, Matthew’s goals for this project, and what it was like contributing novel-length stories to the Sabbat Worlds. In part two, we focus a little more on the craft side of things, from how to understand and write Space Marines to the unexpected influence of both Discworld and Captain America on Urdesh. There’s nothing really spoilerific here so you can read and enjoy these interviews even if you haven’t yet read either of the books, but if you have read them then I think this will have greater resonance, as you’ll recognise some of the moments or scenes that Matthew describes.
Anyway, without further ado let’s get straight into the first part of the interview.
Track of Words: I gather this story has had quite a journey across multiple years, changing series, being split into two books, and so on. Could you talk us through some of that journey, from when it was first commissioned to how it ended up?
Matthew Farrer: You’re right, the Urdesh duology has been a monster, easily the biggest and most convoluted project I’ve worked on. Let’s see if I can distil its history down a bit.
Back before I got involved, Dan had already had the idea of an Iron Snakes novel to sit alongside the next two Gaunt’s Ghosts novels he was planning, which were to be called The Warmaster and Anarch. Those books were shaping up to be intensely inward-directed, physically and thematically, focusing very much on what was going on within the Ghosts and in the politics of the Crusade command, with the action constrained inside a single city and eventually a single building. That meant that those books wouldn’t really look much at the actual war for control of Urdesh, which had been built up since The Guns of Tanith as something that was going to be a pretty big deal. So this Snakes book, which would be part of the Space Marine Battles line that was still running then, would provide that balance.
That was about where things were up to when my partner and I visited the UK in, I think it was late 2014? And it was when we were visiting the Abnetts in Maidstone that Dan described where all this was up to and then suggested that I be the one to write it.
My reaction was a bit muted, to be honest – no, that’s wrong, “daunted” is a better word. I have quite a pessimistic streak and the first place my mind went in this conversation was “oh god, I’ll mess it up and then what?”. But we kept talking about it out at dinner that night – at a Greek restaurant, just to keep it nicely in theme – and at some point during the evening I hit on that scene that opens the first book. I’d started thinking about ways to evoke that Grecian feel that Dan had given the Snakes, and about the way that the old Homeric stories open: “Sing, Goddess!” “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways…” and so on.
And suddenly that picture was in my mind, of the Iron Snake beginning his epic in exactly that manner, rehearsing the tale of his companions’ deeds, right up to the end with Milo remarking about the acoustics and stepping up to play. The whole thing clicked into my head fully-formed, pretty much exactly as it appears in the book, the only real change being that it was originally Priad rather than Xander. So I found myself telling the rest of the table that I thought I might have an opening scene, and talked through it, and that must have been a bit of a tipping point because from there I remember the vibe being that we were off and running. We had a visit to Black Library at Nottingham planned for later in the trip, so we set things up a bit by email beforehand and then talked through the rest of it with the BL staff once I got there.
My recollection is that I was writing the book by early the following year, having had some projects for another publisher to finish off in the meantime, and built up a good head of steam. I think I raced about two-thirds of the way through the manuscript in pretty good order (by my standards anyway, I’m slow compared to the rest of my BL stablemates). Dan was getting everything lined up for the big Warmaster/Anarch double, and we were kicking story and worldbuilding details back and forth pretty happily.
This was the point where things got difficult. I’m not going into detail, but for several years my life outside my writing went through an extremely tough and demanding stretch, and part of the personal toll that exacted was just about extinguishing my ability to write. There were good periods when I managed it in fits and starts, and I would send an optimistic message to my editors (and to the occasional fans who got in touch) about when I expected to have the thing finished, but those got further and further apart and I wasn’t even convincing myself with them. Eventually I bit the bullet and had to tell BL that I no longer knew when I would be completing the book, in honesty I was no longer sure if I could complete it, that if they chose to cancel the project and revoke the advance and the contract then I would respect that, and if they chose to have another writer finish the project I would provide all my notes and drafts and work with my replacement on handover in whatever way worked best for them.
Black Library’s response was a rather humbling show of support, which was to say that they wanted me to finish, they acknowledged my circumstances and just asked that I keep in contact with how I was doing and if and when I managed to advance the book. Gradually things changed and I was able to pick it back up and finish it. I remember the actual writing of the last quarter or so of the book rolling through pretty smoothly, which was a great relief (finishing Blind, as a counterexample, had been like yanking my own teeth out with pliers).
Blind – the third novel in Matthew’s excellent Enforcer trilogy
Writing the text, scene by scene, was quite easy; developing the structure and arc of the story was the tough part. I remember at least two major pieces of surgery, moving huge chunks of words around as I got a better idea of what exactly the Snakes were doing and what was at stake – I’ll probably speak to that a bit more in a later question – and that ate as much time as the writing, I did a lot of agonising about which scenes and events belonged where. I always end up with an ‘offcuts’ file with bits and pieces that didn’t quite make the book, you always end up writing way more than actually ends up in the finished work, but the Urdesh offcuts file is enormous. All that stuff I never got to use!
There was a huge long sequence that was meant to introduce Kalliopi Squad, where they’re storming this galvanic forge-tower in the middle of Ghereppan, that I rewrote something like five times, drew maps and diagrams and researched metallurgical processes and everything, and realised, almost at the same moment that I finally got it the way that I wanted, it that the whole thing had to go. I really liked the sequence but it was so obvious that the rest of the book worked so much better without it. Agh! Writers get very glib talking in the abstract about having to kill your darlings, but it doesn’t seem to get any easier in the concrete, when you’ve got all the text selected and your finger is hovering over the delete key.
(I exaggerate slightly, I never delete anything. I was faffing about reorganising my desktop just before I got into typing up these answers and found an offcuts folder called “Kal assault” sitting there so I still have it all.)
The other big milestone, of course, was the splitting of the book. You’ll notice that that whole story about how the thing got commissioned was the story of a book, singular, because that was what it was originally supposed to be, a single book called Urdesh that sat side-by-side in the timeline with The Warmaster and Anarch. What happened next was a salutary lesson in making sure you know your writing software. I started the book in a straight word processor, but partway through the writing I switched platforms to a Mac and ported the manuscript over to Scrivener. Which I have really taken a liking to as a writing tool – it works a lot like an old program called KeyNote (no relation to the Apple presentation app) which let you break a big document up into lots of smaller ones that you could arrange into trees and subtrees and cut and shuffle however you liked. I used KeyNote to write Junktion, Blind and a bunch of short stories.
Junktion – Matthew’s 2005 Necromunda novel
Anyway, Scrivener was particularly good for the way I was working with this book, writing in scenes not chapters, and then needing to do a lot of moving around and re-engineering. What I didn’t get the hang of until right at the end of the process was how to track a word count across all the various notes and sections – it’s not complicated but it’s not as intuitive as just looking down at a running tally at the bottom of a window in Pages or Word. And to be honest I was so exhausted and tunnel-visioned just pushing through to the end of the manuscript that getting the words down was all I had on my mind, rather than counting them. I do remember thinking at one point that it felt like I was going a little over the 100K I’d been asked for, and I might need to warn BL on that account and plan for a bit of editing and tightening.
Well, I finally got to the end of the actual drafting, managed to get my head around Scrivener’s slightly fiddly compilation process, and found that my manuscript stood at 199,924 words. I remember the exact number because I spent a few moments wondering if I should go and push an extra seventy-six words in somewhere so I could come in at exactly double what had been commissioned, but in the end I just stuffed the thing into an email, hit Send and sort of fell over for a while.
This is another point where I owe a debt of gratitude to Black Library. They would have been perfectly within their rights and the terms of the commission to just bounce the whole thing back with a note to shorten it to the contracted-for length, or to just take it and cut it down themselves, but Nick Kyme indicated from early on that his priority in cases like this is to stay as close as possible to the author’s story. In the end, they chose to wear the cost and work of setting, printing, warehousing and shipping a whole second volume they hadn’t planned for rather than lose any of the writing, which is a show of faith in the story that is absolutely not lost on me. I know that there were some unhappy readers out there who didn’t realise they’d started a duology until they got to the “to be continued” at the end of The Serpent and the Saint, but by and large people seem to have been OK with coming along for the ride.
ToW: Looking back now that both books are out, how do you feel about the finished story?
MF: …good? Surprisingly good?
I don’t do very well at rereading my own work. Generally all I see are the rough spots, anything from a word choice up to a major plot point that I wish I’d done differently, and that tends to blind me to how the piece turned out overall. It’s sort of montaged over with this ethereal, ideal version of the story that was dancing in my head before I started typing. I tend to need other people’s reactions to get a firm read on what I managed to make work and what I didn’t.
Thus, the “surprisingly”, because when I looked back over the full double manuscript for Urdesh it felt good and solid. The pieces fitted where I had intended them to go, the story’s path felt firm underfoot, the big showstopper scenes that had loomed large for me in the planning and writing still worked for me, and even some of the minor characters and scenes polished up better than I’d expected them to. Initially I was simply relieved to have dragged the beast over the finish line, but once I had a little time and perspective I was, false modesty aside, pretty satisfied with how I’d delivered on the brief.
Urdesh will never not be tied up with a very tough time of my life and the memories and feelings from that will always be woven into my feelings and memories about writing this book, but I’m happy with what I produced nevertheless. Looking back on it, maybe that was why I was so dogged about hammering away at the thing until I felt it was done. As I said to a couple of correspondents during the later stages of the writing, since I hadn’t been able to complete it on time, the least I could do was make good use of that extra time and make it worth the wait. I think I actually managed it.
ToW: I thought it was interesting that these books are very action-packed with a close focus on small squads of Space Marines, but at the same time they’re really about the bigger picture of what was happening elsewhere on Urdesh while the Tanith were fighting in Eltath. What did you want to achieve with this story? Did you have certain objectives in mind for what you wanted it to be?
MF: Just so. That was part of the brief when we were working out what the book would do, that it would cover at least some of the broader war for Urdesh while the events of The Warmaster and Anarch are turning the Ghosts’ focus away from that and inward onto themselves. I fretted a bit about that. The war for Urdesh is this monumental, pivotal point in the Crusade, and the planet itself is immensely valuable, industrialised, fertile and heavily populated. This isn’t some backwater colony where one fight for a single town-sized outpost will settle matters.
Although the Ghereppan-Oureppan axis is a vital heartland containing two of the major strategic centres on the planet, there would be half a dozen other warzones around the planet that could have claimed equal importance to them at the time the book starts, and countless smaller ones whose cumulative impact would have been enormous. Even if you love 40k for crazy, bombastic pageantry over hard-nosed military realism, which I do, it’s still a big ask to try and convince a reader that the war for that kind of world is going to be decided in a single set-piece battle, let alone a battle small enough that your cast can make a dramatically satisfying difference in it.
Trust me on this, because I tried! I had what I think was a pretty good go at laying out a strategic picture that brought huge concentrations of forces together, ripe for some suitably dramatic speartip action by Space Marines, but after taking that through a bit of development and a couple of iterations I still couldn’t convince myself. The thing that made the difference was adding the Saint, and then I guess actually thinking through the full implications of having a figure like that in the story. She’s not just another military asset with propaganda value and some handy battlefield abilities, she’s a Living Saint, a direct conduit to divinity. The simple fact of her is going to start warping the course of events around itself the way mass bends the shape of space. That brings out this tension between the science-fictional and the fantastical, in this case the tension between what makes sense for a hard-SF military narrative and what makes sense for a supernatural story about divine destiny. That’s exactly the tension that 40K does so well, and what gives it so much power as a setting.
Once it became obvious that the Saint, and whatever this war had in store for her, was the actual engine of the story, suddenly a lot of things fell into place. Telling the story on that larger-than-life mythic framing, which suited both the Snakes and the Saint so well, meant that it felt a lot more natural to hinge a profound moment of the war on a small cast and their climactic conflict. (Typing this now makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have realised this way earlier, given that the moment I decided to take the project on was literally the moment I saw it as a Homeric fable of personal heroism. Good old hindsight.)
All that was very nice to have cleared up, because I had my spinal narrative, so to speak, but I remember still being paranoid about falling too much into that storyline and losing track of the broader war, which as mentioned was an explicit part of the book’s purpose. So in both books I took conscious care to remind the reader that there was plenty else going on, both around the storyline battles in Ghereppan and Oureppan, and across the whole face of the planet. The characters themselves talk about it on several occasions, and when I glanced the story off one of the little tangents where you see events through the eyes of a walk-on character I tried to give a sense of where those people had come from, how long they had been fighting and where, and what their perception of the conflict was. (I shamelessly nicked this from John Birmingham’s Axis of Time books, where he used little one-off sideways perspective hops to great effect to sketch the outlines of a broader story, in this case an alternate-history WWII.) There was a scene early on in the first book that gave me the chance to do a big, sweeping ‘panning shot’ scene that took in the whole Ghereppan war, which I then had to cut, and I think I hyper-fixated on losing that and went to overcompensate in filling in the gaps later on.
There was one other reason I needed the big sweeping picture. The gambit we see unfold across the central stretch of the duology is the last great action that Anakwanar Sek will orchestrate. He doesn’t realise it’ll be his swansong of course, but he certainly intends it to be a masterpiece, given how he’s planned on it culminating and the enemy he expects it to deliver to him. So I couldn’t just tell the story of a great big battle, it had to be a great big battle that showed off all the audacious strategic brilliance that Sek is famous for, that so much of the writing about him up to now had built up for him. And that kind of ran me into what I think of as the Deaf Man Problem.
I adored Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct police procedurals when I was a teenager and I had the good fortune to hear him speak some years later on a book tour. He always gets asked about the Deaf Man, the alias used by a brilliant master criminal who pops up in several books to plague his detectives and is hugely popular with the readers. He explained that there weren’t more books with him as the antagonist because the Deaf Man was a genius while he, Ed McBain, was not, so it took a lot of work to come up with a crime plot that showed off his criminal prowess without using narrative cheats that would just make for an unsatisfying story.
So, the Anarch, Anakwanar Sek, He Whose Voice Drowns Out All Others, is a military genius; I, Matthew Farrer, am not. So it took a lot of fretting and scribbling and teleconferences with an extremely patient Dan Abnett for me to craft something that would stand up to at least a little scrutiny as clever, audacious, brilliant, etc., etc. And then that had to emerge from the broader narrative that the Snakes are taking part in as well. So if you look for the picture that all the story fragments make up, you can see the outline of a plan to betray and destroy his hated rivals in the Blood Pact, lure Imperial forces into a two-stage trap at each end of the Causeway and put the Beati herself straight into his noose. Except that, of course, just like the Deaf Man, he ends up a little too clever for his own good. His ambition has written a cheque that his intellect can’t cash, and the powers that he serves are not the only ones in the heavens. For all the teeth-gnashing that went into lining up the dominoes for Sek’s plan, I have to say it was supremely satisfying watching the way they all fell in a heap on him as they were always fated to do.
ToW: You’ve contributed short fiction to the Sabbat Worlds series before, but this is your first longer project (and, alongside Nick Kyme’s Volpone Glory, one of the only non-Dan Abnett novels in the range) – and you’re not only working in that sandbox but writing much-loved characters like Priad and Damocles Squad. What has that been like?
MF: Well, I did use the word “daunting” before! The odd thing about this book was that while I’m very used to writing in a pre-existing setting, nearly all of it was with characters and places within that setting that I’d created (or at least developed) myself. Writing characters that had been built up in such detail in existing stories was a whole new step, particularly since they were so heavily tied in to a single author.
That author, in this case, was a huge help. Dan made it clear from the start that he had no intention of standing over my shoulder while I was writing: I had complete licence to tell whatever story about the Iron Snakes I wished to, up to and including killing any or all of them. Well, killing characters wasn’t the part that worried me, what worried me was just getting them wrong, giving loyal fans a jolt when they try to get into this story full of unrecognisable characters with their favourite heroes’ names. That, again, led to a certain amount of fretting, because it took a while for me to stop second-guessing my instincts about the characters’ voices and behaviour.
There’s a beautiful instant some way into most pieces of writing where the clockwork clicks into place and the characters start moving and talking by themselves, or that’s how it feels, and suddenly instead of dragging them along like reluctant dogs on a lead you’re running to keep up with them. This time I had to keep stopping and checking myself – was the voice that was taking shape the right one? It messed with my momentum a bit, but eventually I’d been back to my various reference scenes, mostly from Brothers of the Snake, Sabbat Martyr, Titanicus and Salvation’s Reach, often enough that I felt I was in sync with them and things smoothed out from there.
Some interesting things grew out of that, actually. For example Holofurnace in Salvation’s Reach had a character voice very different to Snakes like Priad and Khiron, and bringing that with him into Urdesh where it contrasted directly with those characters fed into the idea of the Snake squads actually having quite divergent little cultures and mindsets between them, something that the original stories had hinted at. That passed on into the book in various ways and suggested some extra depths to the Phratry in a way I was quite pleased with.
The other thing that helped was that my two books were a large leap away, time-wise, from all of the ‘feeder’ stories that lead into it. Milo has been part of the Saint’s retinue for well over a decade, and isn’t a boy any more (I initially wrote him as one out of habit and had to go back and correct it). The gap in both time and experience is much bigger for the Legio Invicta and the Iron Snakes, and when you factor in Dan’s short piece Kill Hill Priad was away from his brothers for at least ten years on a solo ork hunt.
I found that reassuring, because you don’t expect people to be exact copies of who they were a dozen or more years ago, particularly not years filled with the sort of experiences these characters are having. As long as anything I was doing differently with them reflected a change like that, giving them some growth and new layers, then they would make sense. Framing it like that helped me to feel a bit more confident about it. I think the shortest gap would probably be for Nautakah, as I suspect Arnogaur only takes place a year or two before Urdesh, but Aaron gave him such a distinctive voice and sharply-sketched personality that he was an easy one to pick up and run with.
The other thing you have to do with these stories, of course, is give thought to what shape the toys are in when you put them back in the communal box, to use Dan’s metaphor. Which doesn’t mean putting them back in exactly the shape that you took them out in. That’s an easy assumption to fall into, but I think that leads into the sort of ‘reset button’ treatment that makes for less satisfying stories over the longer term. So what you want is for each character you put back in the toybox to have something cool and new about them, whether it’s as obvious as a physical change like an injury, or as subtle as a new experience that might be the seed for a whole different character arc, or an epiphany which has them seeing themselves or their lives in a new way. There’s a balance to hit in enriching the character in a way that works for you as an author, while staying true to what you see as core about them up until now, providing those hooks and connection points to give future authors some interesting options, but at the same time not forcing the next writer to follow a particular take on a character they may not want to use.
As I’ve said, I don’t have a lot of practice with that because I tend to work in my own mini-milieux with my own characters, but by the time of Urdesh I’d done a bit of work in Wyrd Games’ Malifaux setting where there’s a big cast of named characters whose stories advance a bit with each new book or edition. I have a feeling that helped refine my technique with this for Urdesh because by handoff time that process felt very smooth and free of any snags or false notes. I suppose that means I either got it down pat, or failed at it so hideously that I’m blind to the extent of the screw-up. Once again, I’m too close in to know. It’s in the hands of the readers, and the other authors, now.
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So that’s part one of the interview done! I’ve got to say a huge thank you to Matthew for putting so much time and thought into these brilliant answers – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I did! If you’re still thirsty for more, you can check out part two of the interview right now.
See also: all the other Matthew Farrer-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
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Matthew Farrer lives in Canberra, Australia and is a member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. His early short stories appeared in Inferno! magazine in the 90s and he went on to write the Shira Calpurnia trilogy and many standalone stories in the Warhammer 40,000 and Necromunda settings. He Tweets as @FullyNocturnal.
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Both Urdesh books are out now in paperback, ebook and audiobook editions – check out the links below to order your copies*:
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