Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m very happy to welcome back Steven B. Fischer to talk about his brilliant new Warhammer 40,000 novel Witchbringer. Steve and I chatted recently for an Author Spotlight interview and it was super interesting (you can check that out here), and the little glimpse we got into Witchbringer was more than enough for me to want to chat about the novel in more detail. With that in mind, in this interview Steve gives a great overview of what to expect from Witchbringer, including what it was like exploring the Scholastica Psykana and the nature of being a psyker in the Imperial Guard, keeping character conflict at the heart of the novel, looking for light in the middle of a grimdark universe, and loads more. Oh, and the relative merits of psychic powers in the real world!
Without further ado then, let’s get on with the interview.
ToW: To start things off, how would you describe Witchbringer, and what can readers expect from it?
Steven B. Fischer: From a narrative standpoint, Witchbringer is a glimpse at a Primaris Psyker’s final days at the Scholastica Psykana and the down-and-dirty tale of her brutal first campaign fighting alongside the Astra Militarum regiment in which she used to hold command. As a character arc, Witchbringer is the story of Glavia Aerand – a former Cadian soldier turned sanctioned psyker – struggling to find a new way to serve now that she – and the regiment she’s serving – have changed dramatically.
The story opens with a glimpse into the Scholastica Psykana, the mystery-shrouded institution where raw, untempered witches are taken to be trained, tamed, and hopefully rendered useful to the Imperium. You’ll get a firsthand picture of the power and darkness there through the eyes of an acolyte unsure if she will survive her training. Before long, however, Aerand will find herself back in the company of the Cadian 900th, the Astra Militarum regiment in which she used to be an officer, plunged into a nasty, costly campaign on a planet every bit as dark and mysterious as the Scholastica itself.
Readers can expect a character-driven story, and a tight look through the eyes of a sanctioned psyker. Plus plenty of lasguns and action served on the side, of course!
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
SBF: Witchbringer is really Glavia Aerand’s story. I’ll take you into and out of a few other POVs (all of which I loved writing), but this is her tale from start to finish.
Daughter of a Cadian regimental commander who died with his regiment during the Fall, Aerand knew nothing but life in the Guard until a gradual psychic awakening on a Chaos-steeped world called Ourea forced her to relinquish company command within the Cadian 900th and board a Black Ship bound for the Scholastica Psykana. Whether by blessing or curse, she survives her training, and five years later she finds herself on the cusp of becoming a sanctioned psyker. Although she’s learned a great deal of control over her newfound powers, a piece of her longs for the simplicity of her former life, and she still struggles to see how she fits into the Emperor’s galaxy now that she has changed so much. She’ll continue to wrestle with that internal conflict throughout the story, sometimes it’s a battle she wins, and sometimes it’s one she loses.
Aerand’s return to the 900th regiment also lends an opportunity to revisit some old friends. Aerand’s old company sergeant, Olevier Corwyn, and several of her former subordinate officers will be waiting for her when she arrives, but five years is a long time, and her comrades have all changed too – some more than others. Whether or not Aerand can repair or rebuild those relationships will have to be seen.
But my favorite character to write was actually Witchbringer’s antagonist. In most of my 40k shorts, the enemy has been pretty faceless and voiceless, so I wanted to use the longer format of a novel to dive into exactly who Aerand and the 900th were fighting against. Without spoiling things for those who haven’t read the story, I had a blast writing the antagonist’s scenes, and in the end I’m not convinced they weren’t (at least partially) in the right.
ToW: Where and when is it set?
SBF: Witchbringer takes place shortly after the Fall of Cadia and the opening of the Cicatrix Malledictum. It’s been a few decades since Glavia Aerand fled Cadia as a child, just before the arrival of the 13th Black Crusade, and five years since she left the Cadian 900th and arrived at the Scholastica Psykana. The story opens at the Scholastica, but soon takes Aerand to a backwater world called Visage, a psychically hyperactive planet mired in legend and a deadly guerilla conflict. Isolated on a remote world without access to resupply or reinforcement, the Cadian 900th is outnumbered and surrounded by an insurgent enemy with the support of the local populace and the planet itself. And on a world where the fog and the seas are rumored to carry the faces and the souls of the dead, the odds may be even more against them than it seems.
ToW: You’ve written a pair of great short stories – The Weight of Silver and The Taste of Fire – that take place before the events of Witchbringer. Could you talk a little bit about these stories, and what they bring to a reader’s experience of the novel, and of Glavia’s character?
SBF: Of course, and thanks for reading them both!
My goal was to make Witchbringer a standalone novel that anyone could follow and enjoy, but it’s really designed as a companion to The Weight of Silver and The Taste of Fire. Those two shorts aren’t independent stories about the same character, they’re the start of the same story that Witchbringer continues. The steps in Aerand’s path from loyal soldier of the Astra Militarum to potent but-maybe-not-so-trustworthy Primaris Psyker.
Steve’s short story The Weight of Silver is featured in Inferno! Volume 3
Five years is a long time, but it’s not that long. Glavia Aerand still sees herself as the same soldier that left the 900th regiment, even though she recognizes she’s changed monumentally, too. That internal tension is what drives her throughout Witchbringer. And while I could have spent time flashing back or talking a lot about the past, I chose not to, because I think it’s better for readers to experience that backstory for itself. Witchbringer shows Aerand doing her best to pick up the pieces of her identity after a storm. The Weight of Silver and The Taste of Fire show that storm rolling in.
Plus, bringing Aerand back to the 900th meant that I got to bring some other characters back onto the page, too. So, while I hope Olevier Corwyn, Jarrah Kellipso, and Raniais Maltia will still be compelling characters in isolation, they’re definitely more fun to read about when you’ve met them before, because Aerand isn’t the only one in this story who’s changed.
Long story short, I think readers will enjoy Witchbringer on its own, but I’d recommend reading WoS and ToF first, if you can.
ToW: I’m not sure I’ve read much, if anything, before about the Scholastica Psykana and what life is like for adepts learning their craft – how did you find writing about this, and detailing one perspective at least on the darkness of this Imperial institution?
SBF: You probably haven’t. I’m not a lore expert, and I haven’t read every 40k story out there, but Witchbringer is the first major look Black Library has taken at the Scholastica Psykana, as far as I’m aware. Writing about a big, new topic like that was a bit intimidating but also a blast.
Writing fiction in an existing setting is really different from writing stories that are completely original. In a lot of ways it’s great, especially with a setting as rich and diverse as 40k, but it can make things a little bit…academic…at times. There’s so much lore to draw from, and so much established canon that new material needs to be consistent with. So, on one hand, you have this awesome, rich background to build on, but you also need to move slowly and do a lot of research to make sure the little tile that you’re painting fits with the rest of the mosaic. Getting to write Witchbringer was the best of both worlds. I still got the stability and support of the 40k setting, but I also got to explore some new ground and shine some light on a dark little corner of that universe that no one had really looked in before.
Listen, the Scholastica Psykana sounds like a miserable place. Nearly every psyker who arrives there does so against their will, and very few will make it out of the institution alive. But on the other hand, for someone like Aerand with enough knowledge of the warp and the fate of those who commune with it, the Scholastica is also her only ray of hope. Glavia Aerand was born with the Eye of Terror overhead. She stood face to face with witches and put them in the ground. So, when she begins to recognize her own psychic awakening in WoS and ToF, she’s appropriately terrified because she knows exactly how the story of an untrained psyker ends. So, while the Scholastica Psykana is as every bit as terrible as she could have imagined, she also believes it’s where she needs to be. Most other acolytes don’t have that insight, but most of those acolytes won’t be there long anyway…
Steve’s short story The Taste of Fire is available in Only War
ToW: How did you decide what approach to take with Glavia’s psychic abilities, and what you wanted her strengths and weaknesses to be? Presumably you could have gone in a variety of different directions (although premonitions featured heavily in the short stories, I guess)?
SBF: Playing with psykers gives an author almost endless possibilities, but I knew which direction Aerand was going pretty quickly. I’ve always been a character-driven storyteller, and I think that divination just lends itself to awesome character-based stories. Psykers can do so many cool things (and Aerand has learned to more than just interpret visions), but at her heart she’s a gifted seer, although even she recognizes just how treacherous visions and portents can be.
I have nothing against any other psychic disciplines – setting stuff on fire with your mind sounds awesome, and throwing people across a room with a look could sure come in handy. Shooting lightning from your hands might be a little less practical, but definitely makes for some cool action scenes, but there are other weapons in the 40k universe that can already do all those things. But glimpsing the future (divination) and reading minds (telepathy) are abilities that only psykers possess.
On that note, I also knew early that I wanted Aerand not to be a powerful telepath. I think that the combination of divination without real telepathy just makes for great character conflict all around. Here’s this psyker, who used to be a soldier, thrown back in with the comrades she used to command. She can see how much she’s changed, she can see how much they’ve changed, and she can even see bits and pieces of where this whole story is taking all of them. But what she can’t see is the one thing she wants to see most desperately – what do these soldiers that she spent her life fighting beside think of her now? Is there any way they can accept her when she’s not sure she can accept herself?
That might sound a little soft, but grimdark or not, that’s all most of us really want out of life – to be valued and accepted by our tribe. Without that light in the middle of a grim, dark galaxy, there are no stories to tell at all.
ToW: It’s interesting to see a character’s viewpoint change the way Glavia’s has, in this case from soldier (and leader) to psyker, with all the attendant difficulties that the change generates – not least when she returns to her old unit. What were you going for when you planned out the book, in terms of how you wanted to explore this change? And is the end result what you expected, or did it develop over time into something different?
SBF: Yeah, I really wanted this to be the most interesting part of the story for readers. Obviously, there are plenty of lasguns and flamers and what I hope are some really exciting plot moments, but I wanted Aerand’s character conflict to be the heart of the novel throughout. I also hope that readers can really relate. While most of us don’t wake up one morning with visions of the future, we all change dramatically over time, and there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves: am I really the same person that I was back then? Humans have been asking this question forever (see “Theseus’ Ship” and “Neurath’s Boat”), and I think they’ll still be asking it in the 41st Millenium.
I wanted to show Aerand struggle with those questions of identity, both in her own mind and in her external relationships. At the start of the story, she still views herself as the same officer she was in WoS and ToF, and she expects her old regiment to be the same, too. She quickly finds out that isn’t the case, and the soldiers of the 900th serve as a mirror that forces her to acknowledge those changes. She’s going to struggle to rebuild her sense of self, and so are those around her. Whether or not they succeed will determine whether or not they survive.
I had the luxury of going into this story knowing the characters pretty well, which meant I could really let them map things out for me. My editor, Will, and I had a basic plot synopsis when I started writing, but I wasn’t sure where a lot of the character conflicts would go. Aerand and her companions got to tell that part of their story themselves, and watching their interactions unfold was the best part about writing Witchbringer.
ToW: Witchbringer is inherently dark even as 40k stories go, with a sinister setting and just the nature of getting into the head of a psyker – how did you find writing a whole novel with this sort of darkness?
SBF: It’s kind of funny you say that, because most of the time I was writing Witchbringer I was wondering if it was dark enough. Don’t get me wrong, the setting is vicious. The Scholastica Psykana seems like one of the most unpleasant places I can imagine, and Visage seems even worse. But I wanted to make the backdrop as dark as I could, because I hoped that would make the light of the characters shine even brighter.
That’s one of the things I really love about grimdark – and I think the genre sometimes gets a reputation it doesn’t deserve for being nihilistic or fatalistic. We had a chance to talk about this some when we chatted last, but I really believe that the best path to resilience and long-term satisfaction is a hopeful form of pessimism. That might sound contradictory, but I don’t think it is at all. If you expect that the world is going to be kind to you, you’re going to be wrong, and you’re going to fall apart when you’re forced to acknowledge it. On the other hand, if you expect hardship and prepare yourself for it, you’re going to find more often than not that you’re capable of facing anything the world hands you. That internal resilience – that faith in yourself and your ability to shape your perception of whatever the world gives you – is the reason for hope in a dark world.
I’m a sucker for the stoics, and Epictetus puts it this way in the opening of Enchiridion: “There are things you can control in this world and things you can’t. You can control your own behavior and your own attitudes, but really nothing else. If you try to control all those things outside your control, you’re going to be miserable. If you focus only on controlling yourself, nothing in the world can shake you.” [That’s my personal, abridged translation, in case that isn’t obvious…]
Hopefully you got to see that all over in Witchbringer, and it’s something Aerand isn’t always the best at. But there are other characters in the story better-adapted to their galaxy than her, and watching them carve through the misery was a joy for me as a writer – I hope readers enjoy it too.
ToW: Given that Witchbringer is both an Imperial Guard in-the-trenches war novel and a character study of a Primaris Psyker, I’m interested to know what books or other media you drew from for inspirations and influences. Were there any key touchstones that you referred to?
SBF: That’s a great question. I knew up front that writing a Primaris Psyker story was going to be a big task – especially for my first novel – so I definitely did some intentional research on that front. I read through Dan Abnett’s excellent Eisenhorn tetralogy and Ravenor trilogy and really enjoyed both of those psyker stories. While I didn’t get a chance to read all of Rachel Harrison’s Honourbound, I did also look through some of her psyker scenes and found them really compelling as well. Aerand didn’t really fit perfectly into any of those boxes, though, and her background as a soldier first gives her a unique POV when it comes to her interactions with the warp. So, I hope I was able to build on the work BL authors have already done with psykers, while also carving out some new ground for Aerand.
On the Astra Militarum front, I wanted to tell a story of asymmetric, atypical warfare. We get a lot of chances in 40k to see big, pitched battles, massed campaigns, and wars that look more like the wars of humanity’s past than its present. Knowing that the Cadian 900th was going to be operating isolated in an unforgiving clime, fighting an insurgency embedded in a populace that was largely unsupportive, I tried looking toward more modern stories, particularly some from the Vietnam era. Not an exact parallel, but I re-read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War while writing Witchbringer. It’s a great all-around military science fiction novel, but it’s also clearly a story of the Vietnam War.
ToW: Witchbringer is not only your first 40k novel, but your first published novel of any kind – how did you find the experience, particularly in terms of balancing the requirements of the IP while still retaining your own identity as a writer
SBF: Thrilling, exhausting, and really gratifying – in that order. I wrote and revised Witchbringer during one of the busiest chapters of my life, and there were a lot of days I felt like I was barely keeping on top of it all. That said, the experience was such a positive one, and I really hope BL gives me the chance to do it again.
I have to pass along huge thanks to Will Moss, my editor, and the rest of the BL team, because they actually made that balance very easy. I already knew many of the characters in Witchbringer from previous stories, and I had some definite ideas about where I saw their arcs taking them. Will sat down with me multiple times before I ever wrote the first line of Witchbringer and listened to my vision for the story, then helped me improve it. Obviously, the IP sets some boundaries for you as an author, but in many ways that’s a relief rather than a hindrance – when you have a frame that you aren’t supposed to paint outside of, it lets you focus completely on the picture inside.
So, I went into Witchbringer with a great editorial team, a two-page plot synopsis that I’d re-worked a few times with Will, and a cast of characters that I really loved. From there on, I tried to let Aerand and the troopers of the 900th tell their story, and I just did my best to stay out of their way.
I’m not an edit-as-you-go kind of writer, so I got to watch the story unfold pretty quickly, and by the time that first draft was finished, I was excited enough about what I’d written to get me through the much less lively (but equally important) process of cutting, revising, and editing the novel you have in your hands. I think I dropped about 15,000 words from that first draft. The story definitely doesn’t miss them – I can’t even remember what most of them were.
ToW: Finally, if you developed psychic powers but could choose your own ability/abilities, what would you choose and why?
SBF: Oh, that’s a good one. Are we talking 40k universe psychic powers or ones in the real world?
For 40k, I’d have to go pyromancy. Divination is great to write about, but in a galaxy full of things trying to kill you, and full of people who are wildly afraid of anyone with psychic gifts, the ability to start stuff on fire sounds like the best of both worlds. On one hand, it’s highly practical, and has to be useful in a pinch. On the other hand, pyromancy seems like the psychic discipline least likely to get you murdered by your neighbors or shipped off to the Inquisition.
“Hey, did you see Steve start that Ork ablaze with his mind?”
“Naw, but I fried four with this here flamer, so I’m not sure what the big deal is.”
Real world? Any psychic power I want? The ability to know what everyone around me is going to say about 30 seconds before they say it. Full-on telepathy sounds like way too much work, but I think that would be enough time to come up with some killer comebacks and some witty one-liners.
Hey Michael, I really can’t thank you enough for talking with me. The best part about writing is meeting the characters that pop up in your head, but the next best part is watching other people meet them, too. It’s been a blast, as always, and I hope we get to talk again soon!
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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 out now.
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).
Check out Steve’s website for more information too.
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Huge thanks to Steve for agreeing to do this interview as part of the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar, and for once again taking the time to write such thoughtful, in-depth answers! Since putting this interview together I’ve read Witchbringer myself and I can confirm it’s great – so I hope this has left you full of enthusiasm to pick it up and dive right in.
If you haven’t already, make sure you also check out Steve’s Author Spotlight interview.
Witchbringer is out now from Black Library. Check out the links below to order your copy:
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