Hello and welcome to the second part of my in-depth interview with author Matthew Farrer, where we’re taking quite a detailed (but still mostly spoiler-free) look at his Urdesh duology for Black Library. In the first part (which you can read here) Matthew talked about the journey that these books went on (they weren’t originally commissioned as a duology!), and what it was like contributing novel-length stories to the Sabbat Worlds series. In this second part we’re going to look in a bit more detail at some of Matthew’s writing process for these books, from structure and pace (by way of the Discworld) and perspective-hopping to how to really portray the speed and power of Space Marines in motion (by way of Captain America), and what it was like collaborating with both the BL editors and fellow author Dan Abnett.
If you haven’t already read part one, definitely check that out first. Assuming you have, let’s crack straight on with part two!
Track of Words: You talked in part one about working with Dan and the Black Library editors – how closely did you collaborate with them while planning and writing this story?
Matthew Farrer: I leaned on Dan quite a bit for this book, to be honest, and I owe him a debt not only for bringing me in on it all in the first place but for how he supported me during the writing. He was always there as a sounding board for anything I was uncertain about trying, a second pair of eyes when I wanted to be sure a plot thread or a particular passage would make sense to someone other than myself, and a tireless and generous source of goodwill and encouragement.
There was actually one point where we directly overlapped, with Urdesh and The Warmaster/Anarch being underway at the same time, and I remember we communicated quite a lot during that period because that was where we were working out exactly how the stories would dovetail. We wanted to have some direct links between them to reward readers who were reading them in succession or side by side, from characters in one story mentioning events in the other up to the way that one story hands off characters directly into the other – that took a bit of back-and-forthing of manuscript sections so that we could make sure those joins were seamless.
(Something I’d been keen to try was a literal crossover scene, one that would appear in both books from the perspective of the different casts. That was the original concept behind the holoconference scene between the Beati and Warmaster Macaroth, although the crossover didn’t pan out in the end.)
The planning and writing stages of the story were all done with Dan; working on the manuscript with Black Library themselves came once I’d turned it in and Nick Kyme had given it the first read through. It was Nick who made the call to split the manuscript rather than cut it down, but after that I did the detailed edits with Kate Hamer, whom I hadn’t met before but who was never less than a delight to work with.
You have Kate to thank for the fact that the word “moment” doesn’t make you physically flinch now you’ve read the books. Sometimes an author gets a brain stone about a particular word or phrase that starts creeping into the prose way, way more than it should, invisible to the writer themselves but clanging like a bell for the reader. For the most recent piece my partner finished it was “then”; for me in Urdesh it was “moment”.
“For a moment he looked around, then a moment later a shot rang out and he spent a moment diving for cover until in the next moment…” (I think it’s worse when you do a lot of revising as you go, as I do. Because I’d start each writing session with some cleanup and rewrites I think I put quite a few “moments” in with insufficient attention to how many a sentence might already have.) Then, because it simply wasn’t possible to just search/replace, I had to rework and tighten up the surrounding prose to get rid of all the moments, which made the work so much better in the final draft. So, yes, if you like the pace of the action scenes, take the time to raise a glass to Kate and her tactful suggestion that I might want to do a Find command on “moment” and see if I could see an issue.
ToW: I thought you took an interesting approach to structuring both Urdesh books, with short sections that quickly rotated through various POV characters and with no traditional chapters. Could you talk a bit about what the idea was behind taking that approach?
MF: I’m really fascinated by the mechanics of structure and pace in fiction, and I paid close attention to how well the Discworld books flowed and fitted together using only section breaks, not chapter ones. I’d been wanting to have a go at that approach for myself, had been doing some thinking about how it might change the way that a story was built and told. This was the first long-form fiction I’d had the chance to do after all my pondering on the subject, and it seemed like a pretty good fit. I thought that a Space Marine Battles book [which this was originally commissioned as – more on this topic later – ToW] should be as swift and kinetic as possible, planting the accelerator on the floor and yanking the reader off their feet, and so the lighter and less intrusive the breaks in the narrative the better.
“Life doesn’t happen in chapters…” So said Sir Terry Pratchett, and who are we to argue?
It seemed to me to change the way that certain story beats or point of view shifts worked, and made me think about the story as one huge cohesive piece with all the plot threads in constant motion around each other rather than the more start-stop rhythm of chapters. (Or the start-stop rhythm I give them, anyway. I always fall into the practice of trying to give each chapter of a work its own arc and beats as if it were a self-contained story which makes for a different feel to the work overall. Not everyone does that.)
One tweak to that format that came right at the end was adding the little character/location headers to each section. BL were thinking ahead to the audio release when they asked me to add those, on the premise that the scene shifts would leave audio listeners lost. I do think they create a slightly different rhythm to the story than it would have had without them, but having listened to the audiobook with my partner I can see the utility of them. (Quick side note since I’m mentioning audio: if you do like audiobooks, definitely consider getting Urdesh in that form. Harry Myers gives a sensational performance.)
I also think going chapterless made the perspective-hopping a lot easier, especially in the case of the one-scene cameo characters whose stories we briefly pass through when we’re getting glimpses of the broader war. I’ve used those sorts of perspective hops before, I think most often in Legacy, but when you’re using a chapter structure then you have to pay attention to how much a cameo character is going to push into a chapter. Are they going to get a chapter to themselves? Share one with the main cast? Go into an interlude piece of some kind? None of those approaches are right or wrong; Thomas Perry does brilliant things with quick sidestep perspectives inside chapters, sometimes even for just a paragraph, and George R R Martin does PoV shifts in chapter-length increments equally effectively. But it does mean an extra bit of architecture you have to keep considering when you want to use them, whereas here with no chapter structure to worry about it seemed to me that I could take the story through those swerves and back into the main cast much more fluidly and organically.
ToW: Given that Urdesh was originally commissioned as a Space Marine Battles novel, do you think there’s anything you would have done differently if you had originally planned the book as part of what now feels like a growing ‘Sabbat Worlds‘ series?
MF: That’s an interesting question. My recollection is that the Space Marine Battles label fell away fairly early in the process, but that term certainly shaped how I initially approached the story. I’m aware that I’m thought of as BL’s “weird niche high-concept world-building” guy, which is a space I’m quite happy to inhabit, but one of the reasons I came around to wanting to do this was precisely because I don’t normally think of that whole two-fisted, guns-blazing, pedal-down action stuff as being my thing, and that in turn made me want to see how well I could do it if I had the chance. What better chance was there going to be than a Space Marine Battles book, where the entire brand, the thing the reader picked the book up for because it was right there on the cover, was Space Marines, battling? So even once that particular branding was no longer relevant to this book, the groove was well and truly laid down.
If I’d been asked at the start “can you do us a novel set in the Sabbat Worlds about the battle for Urdesh heating up” then you’re right, I think it would have come out quite differently. My usual instinct is to flip the obvious narrative choice on its head and look for a perspective that’s off on a tangent to the big action (you can see glimpses of that in the story I did write, with things like the displacee-camp scenes). Throughout this project, I was consciously turning away from my usual style and leaning into the, well, into the bolter porn.
And so then the game I played with myself was to see how far I could push it. How much time could I spend in the thick of combat before the story just had to pause and take a breath out of it? Could I create so many, and such varied, kinds of battle scenes that I could make a satisfyingly complete narrative chequerboard out of just them alone? How many character or worldbuilding moments could I convey through the fights somehow instead of the more usual exposition or quieter development I might use otherwise? There are a lot of authors who write a lot more action than I do who are probably rolling their eyes at this, but because I’d written relatively slower and quieter stories before this a lot of these questions were brand new to me.
The really extreme example, of course, is the final showdown between Priad and Nautakah. My other books try to make the final test of the protagonist something interestingly human-scaled, that needs them to bring qualities other than ‘can shoot faster/punch harder than someone else’. Here again, Urdesh was a conscious reversal of that, it clearly was going to need a crowning battle scene that was as intense as I could make it, and great big glorious crowning battle scenes were something I was totally unused to writing. I had that thought hanging over me throughout the entire book – as soon as I realised who the two combatants in that final duel were going to be I could feel that scene crouching at the end of the story, pulling each of their story threads in like a black hole bending light into itself. And because trying to do justice to a fight like that was kind of daunting, I sort of bravado’d myself into it by doubling down every time I thought about it. Every time I thought “that’s going to be hard to write, it’ll need a lot of work and space and—” I’d interrupt myself and say “fine, make it BIGGER!”.
I ended up thinking of that battle as my ‘Mozart scene’, and how’s that for an insolent comparison? But you remember that bit in Amadeus where Mozart is talking about an opera scene he’s writing, where another singer enters and their song layers in with the existing ones, and then another, and then another, and he’s asking Salieri how many singers do you think I can get away with adding in like that? Five? Six? The answer is some crazy number, and he’s bouncing up and down with delight at how far he’s managed to push it and still make it all work. I thought about that scene repeatedly when I was working out the final duel at Pinnacle Spire. I kept asking myself “how long can this go? How many beats, movements, reversals, how many pages can this go on for, how far can I get down into the blow-by-blow, move-by-move of it, before the energy breaks down, and I lose the reader and it all falls over? Five pages? Six? How many different ways will I be able to imagine them attacking one another? How many times can I reverse the point of view? How many times can I set up a certain win that turns out not to be? How far can I push this?” I remember being determined, in the leadup to that scene, that if I were going to make a mistake with this fight then the mistake would not be doing it by halves.
What you read is actually still shorter than what I initially wrote. When I went over it with the editors there were a couple of beats’ worth of it taken out. I held out to keep the cuts to a minimum, though. I wanted that fight to dominate the end of the story in the way that it did, and the reader reaction was everything I’d hoped and more. I’d honestly been bracing for complaints and dismissal for my self-indulgence asking people to sit through all that slugfest but, at least in the responses that have come my way, readers loved the outsized intensity of it. It’s probably just as well I don’t have another battles book planned, who knows how I’d set about topping it?
ToW: Speaking of Space Marine Battles, something that really stood out for me in these books is the way you’ve depicted the Iron Snakes in action, with their sheer power and speed coming through like I’ve never come across before. How do you go about writing these sorts of characters in action, and finding a good balance between pace and detail in these scenes?
MF: It did take a fair bit of conscious consideration before I did any of the in-scene writing. I’d done a couple of pieces about Astartes in short stories but this was my first full-length tilt at them and I wanted to get it right. I couldn’t just write them as slightly burlier special forces with fancily-painted armour. The Adeptus Astartes are post-human, and one of their major themes is the paradox of humanity’s iconic defenders being so divorced from humanity themselves. So whether you’re seeing things from their point of view or that of people around them, they should never feel like regular soldiers or regular people. That sense of inhumanity should saturate and define everything.
I actually remember having real doubts early in my BL writing about how possible it would be to write interesting Space Marines at all. It seemed to me for a long while that portraying them with proper fidelity to the background in the Codexes would make for characters as flat as a skating rink. An Astartes was a psychologically engineered and hypno-conditioned living weapon; a story about one wouldn’t read too differently from a story centred on the bolter he would draw, shoot, reload and put away. Obviously the conception of Astartes has evolved away from that (and my take was probably overly reductive to begin with, given we already had different approaches like Ian Watson and Bill King’s, for example), so there are now many more variations on how they look at the path back to their humanity, whether they consciously keep that connection, or kick over the traces and try to be whole unto themselves, or forget why the connection was important in the first place.
I like that variety, how the cultures of different Chapters lead them to all kinds of understandings about this. The Iron Snakes have been placed fairly firmly on the ‘humane’ end of the spectrum, still pretty in touch with their original natures compared to many Chapters, and that’s the vision for them that I continued with. (But even here there’s a range – Priad and Khiron are still conscious of their human natures, some of their brothers like Holofurnace and Symeon less so, in their different ways.)
And I’ve got slightly off the subject, because your question was about the physicality of the Astartes, but focusing on their inhumanity was the entry point to that. I sort of built that from the ground up, with small details that I used to feel out the larger ones. An important touch point was particular scenes from Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s writing, where he’d talk about the weight of a Marine’s footsteps, or the ever-present background sounds of the reactor pack, or the chorus of little mechanical noises from their joints and motors when they moved. You never forgot who – what – you were in the scene with. I took that into my opening with Xander and Milo, and you can see that encounter starting to feel out those small details: Xander’s imposing size contrasting with the ease with which he moves, his metabolism, the keenness of his senses and perceptions and how he uses them.
Then the next few scenes with Priad were a good way to ease into the action side, since there’s only one Space Marine to choreograph and I could give a lot of attention to how he moved, thought and fought. In keeping with that idea of constant reminders of inhumanness, I went out of my way to give him things to do that you just wouldn’t give a human soldier. He reaches the battle by just stepping off a cliff edge and then a multi-storey rooftop, runs at vehicular speeds down streets, deals with a truck by tearing his way in through the front of the cab and with a tank turret by ripping the cannon bodily out of its mounting, and so on.
Those two scenes fell into place pretty easily. I think their published versions are almost exactly my drafted ones, so after that I got a lot more confident that I had a handle on what I wanted to do with writing Marines and could start to build up more layers: whole squad action, jump packs and vehicles, psykers, and most importantly coming up with as wide a variety of settings and enemies as I could, to make sure every fight scene had as much individual personality as possible.
For the dynamic stuff, the battle scenes, I remember my jumping-off point wasn’t a 40k story but that quick-but-glorious sequence early in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Steve is racing through a building shoving doors off their hinges because he doesn’t have time to slow down for them, taking corners by running half up the wall because of the speed he’s moving or smashing cavities into them when he doesn’t time it right and so on. Lazier filmmaking might have thrown in a single big moment to conspicuously trash one bit of set so that the audience can go “ooh, such power” then just run a standard two-men-on-foot sequence, but instead they make sure the whole scene is informed by his nature and abilities. I clearly remember having a lightbulb moment about that sitting there in the cinema.
So, the lessons when it came to writing Space Marines for myself was to start from the ground up, build their abilities from the smallest actions and interactions, never let their inhuman nature slip into the background, and through that you’ll get to know them the same way you do any character you write. Your picture of what they can do will grow naturally out of that as you push them to their limits, and then the fun really starts because you start thinking about how you can push those limits further and further and further still.
I suppose you can see some of that in how the battle scenes evolve through the book, actually. The early ones are very deliberately one-sided, with the Snakes just flattening skilled and fierce enemies while barely moving into second gear. So you see how devastating they are when, as far as they’re concerned, they’re pretty much going through the motions. I wanted the point when they run into something that can really stop them and hurt them to feel like a shock to the reader, a real “wait, how can that happen?” moment.
Your question about balancing pace and detail is a really insightful one, because that was another thing that I fretted over a bit and needed careful and conscious attention right through the writing. Action scenes have a fine balance to keep, between fast description that ends up with too much unsatisfying flash, or bogging down in detail that maps out the fight in depth but loses all any kind of tension or adrenaline. On top of that, a fight scene is no different to any other scene in a story: it needs to advance story, reinforce mood and reveal character. There are ways you can do that without needing to stop and state explicit details, to do with word choice, changes in narrative voice, how you use or deliberately break sentence and paragraph rhythm and so on.
I’ve spent a bit of time rereading authors who do that well, and I’ve also had the great good fortune to have had some panel time at conventions with Kyle Rowling, a stage combat trainer and choreographer who’s worked on many major film projects. Hearing him talk about designing combat scenes to develop a whole story just through movement gave me some really good insights into how I could make that work in prose, making the fighting an active storytelling tool that let me be more sparing with description or authorial observations that might take away from the pace.
In the end, something very neat fell into place with the fight scenes in Urdesh. There needed to be extra detail to show the reader what the Astartes were doing that a normal human couldn’t do: what they could perceive with their senses, what their combat-engineered brains could process, specific demonstrations of how their speed, mobility, durability give them a totally different relationship to the battlefield. And once I had that fine-tuned, I found that the shift in style it brought – slightly less frantic and impressionistic, slightly more clinical and observational – created exactly the feel I’d been looking for. That sense of people totally at ease in their element, utterly familiar with every possible contingency and almost impossible to surprise, not overwhelmed by a tide of adrenaline and avalanche of sensation but coolly in command of surroundings that might as well be moving in slow motion.
ToW: Finally, is there anything you can talk about in terms of what you’re working on or planning to work on next/in future?
MF: As much as I hate to end the interview on a disappointing note, there kind of isn’t. I’ve discussed some things in super-general terms with BL but at time of writing I don’t have anything in the pipeline with them. What I do have is a personal pipeline that’s absolutely clogged…
Er, let me rephrase. I suck at multitasking at the best of times and for the whole time I was working on Urdesh I was desperately pushing away any and every other story idea that popped up and wanted attention. I needed to keep my focus. Disregard new things! Finish book! I have an old-fashioned pinboard on my office wall, divided up into sections into which are pinned filing cards for ideas and projects, and for several years there was only one filing card labelled “URDESH” that was circling around the “drafting”, “revising”, “beta-reading” and “submitted” sections while the “concept” and “planning” sections were so thick with cards that I’m not sure I can get an actual pin through them into the corkboard any more.
I have a ton of things to get to work on. There’s the urban-fantasy comic script, the space-opera mech-pilot story, the post-climate-change-cyberpunk-urban-shaman novel, the other cyberpunk novel with the crooked lawyer and the gang war, the sassy world-hopping fantasy heist novel, the epic world-shattering cosmic-war fantasy novel (which wants to be a duology at least, I can tell), the global-collapse-first-contact comic script, the breezy fantasy YA seaside romance, the not-so-breezy fantasy espionage-platonic-companion novella, the psychedelic body-hopping transhuman galactic-exploration novel, the straight non-SF contemporary crime novel, and I haven’t even started on the collaborations and the short stories. (Which are almost all horror, weirdly enough. My brain likes to be quite upbeat if I’m doing anything novella-length or over but anything under ten thousand words and I swerve hard into horror territory. I have no idea why.) What an amazing, super-productive time I’m entering!
Hah, of course I’m not, this is me we’re talking about, I’ve been sinking an awful lot of time into staring at that backlog paralysed with indecision and unable to start anything. But that’s passing. I’m slowly picking up the tools and stepping back to the workspace again. I’m just not quite ready yet to start talking about what’s taking shape there.
***
So there you have it. I could have happily carried on asking Matthew more questions, but every interview has to end somewhere! Once again, thank you SO MUCH to Matthew for agreeing to this interview, and for taking the time to answer so many questions and write such fascinating, thought-provoking answers. I had an absolute blast working on this interview, and I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading both parts as much as I did putting them together.
If you’d like to go back and check out part one again, here’s the link.
See also: all the other Matthew Farrer-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
***
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.
***
Both Urdesh books are out now in paperback, ebook and audiobook editions – check out the links below to order your copies*:
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
