Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m welcoming Mike Brooks back to the site to chat about his epic fantasy trilogy The God-King Chronicles, which is now complete with the recent release of book three, The Godbreaker. It seemed like the perfect time to look back on the trilogy as a whole, what readers can get out of it, what inspired these stories and the world in which they’re set, and how Mike feels now that it’s all done. But that’s not all! It’s been a busy year for Mike in terms of book releases, so once we finished chatting about The God-King Chronicles we moved onto discussing several of Mike’s Black Library novels that have been published this year, featuring Chaos Space Marines, Orks and…more Chaos Space Marines.
So whether you’re a fan of award-nominated epic fantasy, war dragons, non-Western perspectives, interesting uses of language, plotting trilogies, Space Marines, Chaos or competing Orks, I think we’ve got you covered in this interview! Without further ado then, over to Mike.
Track of Words: For anyone not familiar, how would you describe The God-King Chronicles and what do prospective readers need to know about it?
Mike Brooks: The God-King Chronicles is a low-magic epic fantasy trilogy with war dragons and multiple queer characters and cultures. It has the usual fantasy fare of characters trying to save the things and people they love in the face of threats, but it’s also about finding common ground with people or cultures different to your own, and looks at the origins and practice of power structures: to my mind, what’s objectively true is not as important or as interesting as what people believe to be true, because that’s what determines their actions.
ToW: Looking back at the finished trilogy – how do you feel now that the books are all out there in the wild?
MB: Incredibly proud! This is a series that’s been knocking around in my head since the mid-90s, in one form or another, so it’s been an amazing privilege to finally get it down and out there, even though it’s changed a great deal since I first came up with a few of the characters. I’m very happy with the reception it’s had, as well: it might not have reached as many people as I’d have hoped – which I guess is what happens when the first book comes out in the middle of a pandemic when all the physical bookshops are shut – but most of those who have read it seem to have enjoyed it. It’s been great to hear from people who’ve fallen in love with the world, the characters, or the cultures, and especially those who have appreciated the queer content. It was also incredibly gratifying and humbling for The Black Coast [book one in the trilogy – ToW] to be shortlisted for Best Novel in the 2022 British Fantasy Awards.
ToW: Can you talk a bit about what you set out to achieve with this trilogy, in terms of your approach to epic fantasy and what you wanted readers to get out of these books?
MB: First and foremost, I wanted the trilogy to be a hopeful one. That’s not to say that bad things don’t happen – they do, and with some frequency – but I wanted the overall tone to be one of people looking for ways to make things better. The arrival of grimdark in mainstream fantasy was a game-changer in many ways, but I feel it became too pervasive. Characters die in The God-King Chronicles, and it’s not all sweetness and light by any means, but although a better world might be something you have to fight for, I didn’t want it to feel out of reach. I make no secret of the fact that I started writing the first book, The Black Coast, as an angry response to the xenophobia in Britain that led to the Brexit vote.
Secondly, I wanted to challenge some of the perspectives that so often crop up in epic fantasy, and which some readers cling to. Very often, those stories take place in a world that is broadly identifiable as medieval Western Europe, with the social structures, weapons, architecture and climate that would imply. If there are other cultures, they are usually foreign to the main characters, presented as exotic and strange. Although I am very much Western European myself, I wanted to do things a bit differently and make it clear that the world should not be divided into “European = normal” and “other = strange”.
ToW: Could you tell us about the world that this series is set in, and what the thought process was behind some of the key cultures that you developed over the course of the books?
MB: The world itself doesn’t have a name as such. The country in which the majority of the series is set is the kingdom of Narida, a huge place stretching from the tiny town of Black Keep (home of some of the main characters) in the cold south, right up to the tropics and deserts in the north. The other main location that’s featured is the City of Islands, an island chain strung out between the two main known continents, and which is decidedly tropical. There are also some scenes on the remote, far-southern islands of Tjakorsha. Each of these places have their own cultures, which I tried to make distinct.
Narida is a heavily patriarchal society, but is laid-back about sexuality. The Tjakorshi, by contrast, have a society that is far more equal in terms of gender roles, but are generally quite homophobic. The City of Islands has five genders (plus the informal neutral gender used when you don’t know the gender of the person you’re talking to, or don’t want them to know yours if you’re referring to yourself), and everyone adopts the one they identify with most out of high masculine / low masculine / agender / low feminine / high feminine, and can switch between them as they feel appropriate. I wanted to show that the prejudices often transplanted unthinkingly into fantasy fiction – homophobia, sexism etc – are not ‘defaults’ that every society goes through at a certain point in their development, but individual aberrations that should always be challenged.
I also tried to make the cultures different in terms of their language use. The Tjakorshi speak like us, since I wanted at least one culture which wouldn’t be difficult to write! The Naridans don’t use personal pronouns like “I” or “me”, to reflect the fact that their society is so structured that there is no concept of them existing independently of it. Instead, you refer to yourself either by your rank or role, or by your relationship to the person you’re speaking to. So the same person might be “this lord” if he’s addressing a group of his servants, but “your husband” to his wife, and “your servant” to the god-king, and so forth. Due to the patriarchy, “this woman” is automatically lower status than “this man”, which makes things interesting when Saana Sattistutar, leader of the Tjakorshi who appear from over the sea at the start of The Black Coast to settle in Black Keep, insists on referring to herself as “this man” because she’s damned if she’s going to have anything to do with that.
In the City of Islands, gender is denoted through language. English is somewhat limited in that regard, particularly in written form, so I went with using diacritics to reflect a tonal language. As a result, someone might say “me” if they’re using the formal neutral tone, with the other genders being covered by “mé / mê / më / mè / mē”, and then similar for “Í”, or “yôu”, and what have you. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than my initial plan of creating five new versions of “I”, “me”, “you”, etc!
Luckily, people who’ve read the novels tell me that they’ve quickly got their heads around the different speech modes after a brief adjustment period, and they add flavour without getting in the way of understanding dialogue or the story. Indeed, in some cases I feel that someone’s choice of language to use with regard to themselves or another character adds an emphasis that wouldn’t be there if they were speaking standard English.
ToW: Did you do anything differently with this series compared to other books/series you’ve written, in terms of maybe how you plot or structure, or how you approached certain characters or themes?
MB: I needed to plot in slightly more detail, perhaps, but a lot of it still came together as I write, which is fairly usual for me. I usually have the broad points mapped out, but specifics tend to crystallise as I go. For example, Nalon the smith is a secondary character who was originally just there to fulfil a story role, with no real idea in place for who he was as a person. As soon as I started writing him I realised that he was a contradictory arsehole, which made him massively more fun. I find that if I try to change how I naturally write too much then things become more difficult for me overall.
ToW: I’ve always been interested in how authors plan trilogies, working towards a single cohesive story told across three books. Could you talk us through some of your process for this?
MB: The God-King Chronicles is an… interesting example for this, mainly because it wasn’t originally supposed to be a trilogy. Or at least, not one that looked like this.
My initial plan for the series was something a bit like how Joe Abercrombie has done the world of The First Law: an initial trilogy, then some standalones, then another trilogy to finish it off. So the first three books would have been a tighter focus on events in Black Keep, with other characters appearing in the standalones, and then everything coming together as the storyline got larger and more chaotic with the final trilogy. It was a nice idea, and one my then-agent initially thought would work, but then he told me that the market had changed and it wasn’t likely that we would be able to sell even a first trilogy that was as comparatively low-stakes as the Black Keep trilogy. Epic fantasy had to be epic, he said, so we needed the big stakes in right from the start.
As a result, I started planning again. I worked out a way to get pretty much everything into six books, which for sake of ease could be split down into two trilogies. I wrote The Black Coast, we sent it out on submission, and Orbit UK (and then Solaris, for the US market), picked it up. However, I realised there was a problem: they were only buying the first ‘trilogy’, the first three books of a planned six, and I wasn’t sure that there was enough in there to make it feel like a completed trilogy in and of itself. More importantly, some of the stuff I really wanted to get on the page wouldn’t make it unless the next three books were also bought. Having had the problem of an incomplete series with the Keiko books, I wanted to avoid that at all costs.
As a result, with the first book having already been bought, I took a hatchet to the plan and found a way (with some rewriting of the first novel) to get the most important stuff into only three books. One of the reasons the series is made up of such doorstoppers (The Godbreaker is 200,000 words, give or take) is because each one is essentially having to do the work of two!
ToW: Are you still planning further stories in this setting, or is this now done and dusted?
MB: While critical reception to the books has been very good, the overall number of sales hasn’t exactly been mind-blowing, and that’s what publishers are looking at. It doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be going back to this setting, at least not in a novel format.
ToW: As well as The Godbreaker, you’ve also had Huron Blackheart: Master of the Maelstrom, Warboss, and Harrowmaster all come out in 2022. Did you have a particularly prolific writing year at some point, or is this just a happy coincidence that so many books have been published in 2022?
MB: I do tend to be fairly prolific with my writing – with Harrowmaster, I’ve had thirteen novels (plus two novellas) published in seven years. However, Huron was written just after the start of the pandemic in 2020, but for some reason wasn’t published until this year (perhaps for some sort of synchronicity with the new Chaos Space Marine Codex?), so that one was waiting on the back burner, as it were.
ToW: Black Library fans have got lots to enjoy in your new releases this year. Could you tell us a bit about each of those three 40k novels, and what readers can expect from each of them?
MB: Certainly! Huron Blackheart: Master of the Maelstrom is a Warhammer 40,000 character novel about the lord of the Red Corsairs. Rather than have him in overt opposition to the Imperium I decided to show my take on the workings of a Chaos warband, and how even a warlord as famous and ruthless as Huron has to work to hold onto his power in the face of challenges from within. As with anything involving a character for whom there is a model, you know he’s not actually going to die, but hopefully there’s still a compelling narrative in there.
Warboss is a straight-up Ork novel: it’s not a sequel to Brutal Kunnin, but there are small points of overlap. Essentially, a warboss dies (crushed by a falling mega-gargant head), leading to a literal race to replace him when his top weirdboy says that Gork and Mork want the Waaagh! to find a certain thing (that just happens to be under a human hive city). There are three obvious contenders – a Goff, an Evil Sun, and a Blood Axe – but there’s also a grot called Snaggi Littletoof who believes the gods have spoken to him and decreed that he should be the first-ever Grotboss. As with anything to do with orks, it’s silly and violent in equal measures, and was a lot of fun to write.
Harrowmaster is about the Alpha Legion in the 41st millennium; specifically Solomon Akurra, the leader of the Serpent’s Teeth warband, and the sorceress Tulava Dyne. In some ways it’s a follow-up to the short story The Brightest & Best, although in actuality the novel was written first! It’s a look at who the Alpha Legion are these days, what their goals are, and what drives them. Solomon is of the opinion that they have been fragmented for long enough, and that they need to regain their cohesiveness not only in order to survive, but in order to achieve what he wants them to achieve. Solomon and Tulava are a pairing that I very much enjoyed writing: he is a pragmatic tactical mastermind, a renegade rather than a full-blown Chaos worshipper; she is a sarcastic and irreverent former Imperial battle psyker-turned-sorceress; they both hate the Imperium, but trust each other.
ToW: Epic fantasy, a Space Marine power struggle, an Orky power struggle, Chaos Space Marines adapting to the new reality of 40k – there’s a lot of variety there in tone, characters, themes etc. Do you actively seek out that variety in order to help you to be prolific and stay engaged with what you’re writing?
MB: Oh, certainly. I like the swing between writing my own fiction and writing for Black Library, in that it’s very nice to alternate between having complete creative freedom, and being able to sit down in a setting where all the world-building has already been done for me. I think I’d be more likely to get burned out if I was always doing one or the other, but this works very nicely for me. Similarly, dealing with new or different characters and factions within my Black Library writing is a great way to keep things fresh. Fun and easy though I find writing orks, I wouldn’t want to just do orks all the time. The last thing I want to happen – especially as a full-time writer, which I am now – is to be sitting down in front of my laptop and thinking “Oh gods, not more shootas”.
ToW: Now that The God-King Chronicles is finished, is there anything you can tell us about what you’re working on now or next?
MB: I’m currently working on the next piece of “my” fiction (which is lucky, since I couldn’t tell you any details of what I was working on if it was for Black Library!). It’s a very different feel to The God-King Chronicles, with overt magic and a far more fantastical world. I’m hoping for it to be a bit lighter-hearted, as well: although The God-King Chronicles is essentially a hopeful series, it did end up with quite a few decapitations and brutal battle scenes. This new project is intended to still have stakes and emotion and loss, and won’t be free of fighting, but without me needing to use the word “entrails” or “sever” quite so much…
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Mike Brooks is the author of The God-King Chronicles epic fantasy series, beginning with The Black Coast; the Keiko series of grimy space-opera novels, Dark Run, Dark Sky and Dark Deeds; and various works for Games Workshop’s Black Library imprint, including Brutal Kunnin and Alpharius: Head of the Hydra. He was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, and moved to Nottingham to go to university when he was eighteen, where he still lives with his wife, cats, and snakes. He worked in the homelessness sector for fifteen years before going full-time as an author, plays guitar and sings in a punk band, and DJs wherever anyone will tolerate him. He is queer, and partially deaf (no, that occurred naturally, and a long time before the punk band).
Check out Mike’s website for more information.
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Big thanks as always to Mike for taking the time to put this interview together, and congratulations on both the completion of the God-King Chronicles and the publication of no fewer than four books this year!
Have you read The God-King Chronicles or any of Mike’s new Black Library novels that came out this year? Are you planning on picking any of them up? Let me know in the comments below!
Check out Mike’s author page on Amazon to pick up any or all of the books mentioned in this interview! Or, have a look at the links below for the three novels in The God-King Chronicles (the images below show the US covers – if you’re in the UK, the links will take you to Amazon’s UK site and the UK covers!):
*If you buy anything using these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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