Author Spotlight: Steven B. Fischer

Hello and welcome to this Author Spotlight interview where today I’m chatting to Steven B. Fischer, who may be familiar to Track of Words readers from his Warhammer 40,000 short stories in Inferno!, and his upcoming Black Library novel Witchbringer. With his novel still a little way off, I thought it was a good time to get to know Steve as an author – what he likes to write, how writing for Black Library compares to working on his own IPs, and what it is that appeals about grimdark fiction in particular. We also chat a bit about Witchbringer, just to give you a sense of what you can expect when it arrives later in the year!

Without further ado then, over to Steve…

Track of Words: To start off with, tell us a little about yourself as an author – who you are, where you’re from, how you ended up being a writer, etc.

Steven B. Fischer: I grew up in the frosty North of the United States, almost up on the border with Canada. As a kid, I spent my summers exploring the woods and creeks around our house with my brother and neighbors and my winters huddled indoors reading between expeditions outside to build snow forts, ski, snowshoe, and ice fish. Honestly, it was pretty idyllic.

I always wanted to write. I remember sitting in church when I was just old enough to feel guilty for not paying better attention, dreaming up stories I would force my mom and dad to transcribe on our plunky old computer when we got home. As I got older, dreams of becoming an author took a back seat to more practical career goals, but they never disappeared completely. I found some fellow writers online in the mid 2010s and started scratching out some mediocre short stories. Here we are.

ToW: Can you remember a defining moment when you were growing up, or a particular book or author, that steered you towards science fiction and/or fantasy?

SBF: Some of my earliest memories are of my dad reading The Chronicles of Narnia and Brian Jacques’ Redwall series to my brother and me before bed. Those were awesome, formative stories, but I think the hook really sunk when I picked up The Golden Compass sometime in middle school (titled Northern Lights in the UK, I believe?). I tore through Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and I couldn’t wait to find another one that blended fantasy, science, religion, and mythology so effortlessly. I think I’m still looking, although 40k definitely scores some major points.

ToW: Looking at the bibliography on your website you’ve had quite a lot of short stories published over the last few years, in different places. What would you say readers can expect from your work in general?

SBF: I hope they can expect a couple things. First off, I’m a firm believer that fiction, while untrue, should always be honest. My worldview has changed a lot since I started telling stories, but I’ve always done my best to craft characters that felt like honest representations of humanity to me at the time, with all of its glaring flaws and brilliant nobility. Second, I think they can expect personal stakes and solid emotional payoff. Every good story is a character story, and I’m going to work my ass off to make you care about my characters – and the things they care about – so that it matters to you when they succeed (or don’t) in the end. Most of my work is free to read, and almost every story I’ve published will take less than ten minutes of your time, so take a look at the Library page on my website and see for yourself. My personal favorites: And All Our Bones Were Dust, The Man Who Has to Die, and When I Left You Did Not Ask Me to Stay.

ToW: Outside of writing you work as a physician – how much would you say your medical background makes its way into your work?

SBF: My medical background is my work. No one wants to read about physicians in space (trust me, I’ve tried that storyline more than once), but I picked writing back up as an adult because I needed an outlet to deal with a job that can be incredibly rewarding but also wildly stressful and emotionally taxing. I wrote my first short story when I was a medical student after sitting at a patient’s bedside while they died. Writing helped me process that heavy experience, and I’ve had a lot of heavy days since. Those encounters with human fragility, mortality, and occasional joy are the fuel for most of what I put on the page.

ToW: Witchbringer is out later in the year from Black Library – we’ll hopefully talk about it in more detail closer to the release date, but what can you tell us to give a general, spoiler-free overview of the story?

SBF: Wait. Your readers aren’t here for my children’s book recommendations?

Witchbringer, at its heart, is a story about metamorphosis and all the nasty, painful bits that accompany it. On its surface, it’s an in-the-trenches look at war through the eyes of an Imperial primaris psyker.

I got to meet Glavia Aerand in a Black Library short (The Weight of Silver) a few years back [you can read my review of that here – ToW]. At the time, she was a young officer of the Cadian 900th regiment struggling with the burdens of her first command. Since then, Aerand’s peculiar good luck and uncanny instincts have blossomed into a full-on psychic awakening, landing her at the Scholastica Psykana – the treacherous, bloody institution where untrained psykers are taken to be pressed into the mold of the Imperium or die.

Witchbringer catches up with Aerand near the end of her time at the Scholastica Psykana, where either fate or fortune send her straight back to her former regiment and into the middle of a brutal, isolated warzone. Both Aerand and her former comrades have changed dramatically, and the reunion is more painful than pleasant. But if Aerand and the Cadian 900th want to survive, they’ll have to come to terms with who – and what – they’ve become. For better or for worse.

There are lasguns. There are flamers. There are running psyker battles and an environment that’s often an enemy itself. And yes, there are characters that I love – and I hope you will too – and a lot of emotional payoff at the end. If you want to see a messy, ugly conflict through the eyes of your average psyker, then this is the story for you, and Glavia Aerand is the one to tell it.

ToW: Is this your first novel? How do you feel about it now that it’s been announced and you have a physical release to look forward to?

SBF: This is my first novel that anyone other than my friends and family will read, and I’ve got to tell you, I’m even more excited than I thought I would be. The Witchbringer that you’ll read is so different from the one I first imagined, but my editor Will Moss and the rest of the team at Black Library did an amazing job shaping it into a much stronger story than the one I first pitched.

I’m really proud of what we were able to do. I make some big asks of my readers – we drop into the middle of Aerand’s story arc with precious little explanation, and we spend some time at the start of Witchbringer laying groundwork for developments down the road and a lot of time inside Aerand’s head as she struggles with the day-to-day aspects of existing between the physical world and the warp – but I really think that the payoff is there. I’ve re-read the last few chapters of Witchbringer at least a dozen times by now, and it’s still a page-turner for me every time. I hope it’s every bit as captivating for you.

ToW: How would you say writing tie-in fiction for Black Library compares to writing your original fiction?

SBF: Working with Black Library is the best writing experience I’ve ever had, hands down. Most fiction gets created in a vacuum, with authors spending countless hours pouring their sweat into a story with no guarantee it will ever be accepted by a publisher and no interaction with an editor other than an impersonal rejection (or the occasional, thrilling acceptance) at the end.

That process is flipped at Black Library. I pitch a story straight to an editor who works with me to refine and adapt it from the outline stage onward until it’s something that the studio is willing to green light. The result is a better story from the very beginning and a far less stressful process for the author. Add to that an existing universe rich with settings, lore, and detail which takes a lot of the world-building weight off my shoulders and really lets me focus on character, plot, and whatever makes a particular story unique. The only downside is that the process takes a bit longer since there are more people and more pieces involved, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

ToW: What appeals to you about writing in the Warhammer 40,000 universe? Is the ‘grimdark’ nature of 40k something that particularly interests you?

SBF: My path to writing 40k was a little atypical, because it actually found me. I had heard of Warhammer and knew enough to laugh at the occasional “for the Emperor” meme that popped up on Reddit, but I didn’t learn much about the universe until an acquisitions editor at Black Library read one of my original short stories and reached out to me. I’d been writing grimdark since before I knew what grimdark was, and once I found 40k I felt right at home. I love the genre (mostly), because I think it gets a lot right about the universe we live in and the way we interact with it. But I think grimdark also asks a lot of both its authors and its readers, and requires courage and honesty to avoid falling into its more damaging tropes.

Steve’s first Black Library short story – The Emperor’s Wrath – is available in Inferno! Volume 1

Heroes don’t exist. I think this is the most important lesson of grimdark, and just good fiction in general. So much of western literary tradition has focused on knights in shining armor and noble protagonists that don’t make moral mistakes or make only minor ones that they rapidly correct. That’s bullshit, and it’s dangerous, because the result is a brutally fractured real world where we deify our chosen leaders, celebrities, family members, etc. and dehumanize those we oppose. The reality is that we’re all capable of brilliant acts of virtue but also unspeakable selfishness. If we want to improve as individuals and a species we need to move beyond the binary classification of “good” and “evil” and learn to acknowledge the flaws in ourselves and the virtues in our enemies. That doesn’t mean we can’t stand for something – there’s a danger of grimdark slipping into moral relativism on this front – but the appropriate response is one of moral empathy, not apathy. I’ve done my best to show that in Witchbringer, and I hope that as Aerand struggles against her own demons and grapples with the disquiet of recognizing her similarities to her enemies, that you’ll do the same.

You don’t matter to the universe. I think that it sometimes takes a sci-fi epic like 40k to properly illustrate something that humans have recognized for millenia. The universe is an enormous place, teeming with forces beyond our control or imagination. Too many stories focus on characters driven – and shielded – by destiny, whose most minute actions impact the course of history. Well-written grimdark throws that trope to the side and acknowledges what most of us know when we’re honest with ourselves: even the most impactful humans are absolutely insignificant in the grand scope of the universe. This galaxy was here before our species ever drew breath, and it will last long after we’re gone. We have no special destiny as individuals or a species, and the rest of this universe could care less that we ever existed at all. That can sound depressing, and that honesty can stray into nihilism, but it isn’t, and it shouldn’t. Nihilism is just honesty without courage, and a better response than apathy to the scope of our universe is one of humility and awe. Life doesn’t hand us a purpose, but we can, and must, create purpose for ourselves. None of us matter to the universe, but we sure as hell matter to the people next to us, and that’s more than enough. I hope you see that in the soldiers of the Cadian 900th.

There are no happy endings. The only way authors get away with pretending there are is because we get to stop the story whenever we choose. But real life is a rolling series of victories and failures, and the world has a way of flipping us from one to the other with an indifference that feels almost intentional. There’s this almost-universal human delusion that if we can just buy that next thing, or get that next promotion, or achieve whatever goal we’ve set for ourselves that we’ll finally be “happy”. The reality is that long-term happiness is an evolutionarily undesirable trait, and the false belief that permanent, transcendent happiness is a state we can actually achieve is a huge part of the reason why we often feel so unhappy. But we can learn to be content with the journey itself and to derive real, lasting satisfaction from the pursuit of those goals rather than their actual completion. You’re going to see throughout Witchbringer. Pyrrhic victories and outright losses, and characters that plod on – some with despair and others with joy – through it all, because that’s the only option time gives us.

At the end of the day, that’s humanity’s lot. We’re just intelligent enough to recognize how small we are in the face of an uncaring universe, but not powerful enough to do anything about it. But there’s beauty in that, too. To stare, unflinching, into the indifferent maw of eternity and infinity and to step forward into that darkness with courage and joy. Well, I can’t think of anything more badass, or more grimdark, than that.

You can find The Weight of Silver – the prequel story to Witchbringer – in Inferno! Volume 3

ToW: What else can you tell us about what you’re working on (for BL or otherwise), or what you’ve got coming out over the coming months?

SBF: Right now, I’m mostly working on surviving without sleep and figuring out how the hell you’re supposed to brush a six-month-old’s teeth. My wife and I were lucky enough to have our first kid earlier this year, so most of my free time is getting eaten by baths, taking the little dude to our neighborhood pool, and getting covered with half-chewed blueberries and avocado as he tries to figure out how those damn hand things are supposed to go all the way from his plate to his mouth without stopping anywhere else in between.

From a writing standpoint? Will and I are taking a look at some other factions in the Warhammer universe. The Guard will always have my loyalty, but there are some awesome character and story opportunities with every faction on the table. Otherwise, Witchbringer should be out in early December along with another prequel short story featuring Aerand around the same time. We’ll have to see how the novel sells, but there’s definitely more to Aerand’s story in my head, and I hope I get the chance to tell it someday!

ToW: Finally…when you’re not writing, what might we find you getting up to?

SBF: Oh Throne, way too much. I love hiking, backpacking, paddleboarding, kayaking – really anything that gets me outdoors. My wife and I love to DIY together, and we always have a few projects running around the house. She’s currently refurbishing some old furniture that we’ve had for years, and it’s turning out great, so I’m just doing my best not to get in her way. I love to play board games, although it gets harder and harder to assemble enough adults in one place for several hours at a time, especially now that most of our friends are popping out kids of their own. I actually haven’t ventured into the tabletop world, yet…but I think that with writing for Black Library, it’s only a matter of time. My wife and I are both avid readers, and I usually try to keep both a novel and a non-fiction book on the nightstand at the same time. I just finished Dan Abnett’s excellent Ravenor trilogy, and I’m thinking of re-reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen. For non-fiction, I’ve been working through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and I’ve been reading Epictetus’ Enchiridion to my six-month-old. I’m a little disappointed with his lack of engagement – he seems more interested in eating the pages than appreciating the nuances of classical stoicism.

Thanks so much for having me, Michael. It’s been a blast, and I look forward to talking to you more about the gritty details of Witchbringer once we get closer to the release!

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Steve is a physician in the Southeastern US. His short stories have appeared in places like F&SF, Grimdark Magazine, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. His first novel, Witchbringer, set in the Warhammer 40k universe is set to be published by Black Library later this year.

If you’re looking to get in touch with Steve, the best way to reach him is by howling thrice towards the moon on a cold night (alternatively, you can email him at steven.b.fischer@gmail.com or tweet @stevenfischersf).

Check out Steve’s website for more information too.

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Thanks so much to Steve for taking the time to chat with me, and for giving us the lowdown on his writing. Make sure you check out his website and have a read of some of his stories! All being well we’ll be back with a more in-depth interview discussing Witchbringer a little closer to its release date.

You can check out my reviews of some of Steve’s earlier Black Library stories here.

Witchbringer is due out sometime around December time, but you can pre-order your copy now:

*If you buy anything using these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.

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