03 - God King (51 page)

He touched the headstone and looked to the east.

“Soon, my love,” said Sigmar. “Soon.”

Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six
years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the
plunge to become a full-time writer. In addition to twenty novels for the Black
Library, Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy stories and comics, as well
as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His
Horus Heresy novel, A
Thousand Sons,
was a New York Times bestseller and
his Time of Legends novel,
Empire,
won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend
Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with
where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.

Join the ranks of the 4th Company at
www.graham-mcneill.com

BL: What attracted you to writing for the Time of Legends series, and the
Sigmar character in particular?

GM: If you’re going to write about anybody historical in the Old World, as
far as human characters go, it’s got to be Sigmar. He’s the character who casts
his shadow the longest over the Empire. Everything he’s done is legendary, so it
fits the Time of Legends series perfectly. Telling his deeds and humanising them
without reducing them was a real challenge. Sigmar’s story had to be epic, but
he had to be a real character that wasn’t just going to steam through everything
in the way that a Space Marine would. He was human, he was fallible, he didn’t
win all the time, he was wounded and bled, but his story still had to be
suitably grand-scale.

BL: This trilogy is your first Warhammer Fantasy fiction for some time—how
did it feel returning to that setting?

GM: I was really looking forward to it—I love writing fantasy. I don’t get
to do as much of it as I would like. I was really excited about it, even though
this series is very different to writing Warhammer, because the Warhammer World
as we know it from contemporary books just doesn’t exist yet. This is very much
a proto-Empire; we’re seeing a land of barbarians and tribesmen change from one
state of affairs to another, albeit slowly, taking their first steps towards the
Empire as we know it.

I’ve always loved writing fantasy books—axes swinging, cavalry charges,
that’s the kind of stuff I enjoy the most. I write it a lot quicker than
I write 40k and Horus Heresy—I find those require a much more meticulous
approach, and they need more reworkings along the way before I am happy to hand
the manuscript in. Fantasy novels tend to flow a lot quicker and I am much more
pleased with the initial output. It feels more natural because you can relate to
the characters much more easily than in 40k. They still want much the same
things that we do—a roof over your head, companionship, family. In 40k
characters are more worried about not being crushed by daemons or orks invading
your home world. In Warhammer you still have concerns of beastmen and ogres and
orcs, of course, but the characters’ immediate homely concerns are much more
familiar to us. That’s probably why it’s easier to write, but that also presents
its own challenges, because you still want to make it feel like a different
world, not just a historical setting.

BL: As you say, Sigmar casts a long shadow in the history of the Empire. How
do you approach writing about a character that is so well-known within the Games
Workshop background?

GM: You need to make sure he gets plenty of “wow” moments in the books—flying through the air to smash a dragon ogre in the face with Ghal-Maraz,
fighting Nagash, any number of big moments. You also give him enough humanity to
make sure he has the strength, the understanding and the wisdom to be better
than everyone else. There’s no getting away from it—Sigmar is the greatest of
the Empire, the one who has the vision to see beyond the petty in-fighting and
tribal wars. He can see that the race will either live together or die alone.
Therefore he needs to come across as the kind of person people would follow into
battle, or listen to when he speaks and change their lives based on his words.
That comes with his charisma, but all sorts of things go into making a character
charismatic. You’re trying to capture a somewhat indefinable characteristic
there.

Essentially I tried to cherry-pick the personality traits I wanted to give
him that were interesting and fun and heroic but also making sure he wasn’t
all
that—he wasn’t all square-jawed, Sgt. Rock, leading from the front. He
did suffer loss, he wasn’t infallible, he did go off at the deep end—he is an
Unberogen tribesman barbarian warrior at the end of the day, not a gentleman
soldier! The key to making him work was to give him a rounded personality.

BL: How about approaching those events that are detailed in the background?
How do you go about making those tense and dramatic, even though the outcome is
already known?

GM: Taking events people know and put a surprising twist on them has always
been the writer’s challenge with this series and the Horus Heresy. We know
Sigmar wins at Black Fire Pass, that’s a given, and I’m not going to try and
subvert Warhammer history by saying he didn’t! But still, making it tough for
the hero is important. I often use the Bruce Willis/Steven Seagal dichotomy—in
Die Hard
John McClane was always beaten up by the end; he was bloodied, his
feet were in tatters, his vest was covered in dirt—you could tell he’d been
through the wars. You watch something like
Under Siege
and at the end
Steven Seagal has hardly broken sweat. You never really felt he was in danger,
whereas with John McClane, while you always knew he was going to win, you didn’t
know what kind of state he was going to be in.

And that’s exactly it for these books. Even though you know someone will make
it, you can beat the hell out of them along the way, both mentally and
physically. Also, if you build up the characters that surround your hero, they
can serve as a means of hurting the main character through their loss. That way
your readers feel that, though a victory has been won, a terrible price has been
paid to get it. If you create good enough characters, you become attached to
them along the way. If some people are lost, you feel there has been tension and
things for you to worry about, and you still wonder who is going to live and who
is going to die.

BL: There are some epic battles throughout this trilogy, and none more so
than in
God King.
How do you go about capturing the full glory—and
horror—of warfare?

GM. I often draw sketches of the battle and scenes that are going to happen,
picking out the key moments pivotal to the flow. Keeping things coherent, so
that the reader can follow what’s going in, is important. But it also needs to
be ragged enough that you feel the confusion that people in the battle suffer—they can only see what’s happening for a few yards around them, their immediate
vicinity. They can be fighting and think they are kicking ass, not knowing that
the rest of the army has collapsed and is running back to the wall! Or they can
be winning, but see a few folk running and think the battle’s lost.

It’s essentially a mix of camera distances—sometimes you pull out and show
the shape of the battle, the flanking and the manoeuvres, the strategic
elements; sometimes you’re right in the thick of it, and sometimes you’re with a
couple of units charging through… varying that allows you to show the progress
of the battle as well as the nitty-gritty of it. As much as any student of
historical warfare or writer of battles might say “I’d love to see a battle”,
you really wouldn’t! It would just be the most horrifying slaughter you can ever
imagine, and trying to remember that is important. You want those moments of
glory; you want the cavalrymen breaking the enemy line and surging through and
the feeling of exultation that comes with it. But you also have to remind people
that we’re not glorifying in this—the fact remains that thousands of people
are going to die and be maimed for life. It’s bloody and it’s real and it can be
glorious, but it’s also horrible.

BL: The second book of the Sigmar trilogy,
Empire,
claimed an
unprecedented success when it won the David Gemmell Legend Award recently. How
did it feel to win, and what has it done for your career?

GM: It was an awesome moment. Being a huge fan of David Gemmell, to win an
award bearing his name was a real affirmation, and proved to me that tie-in
fiction is just as legitimate a form of writing as any other. People were voting
for the book that they liked, and, although I didn’t know David Gemmell, I
suspect that’s the sort of thing he might have approved of. It was very
unexpected given the competition that was there that night—I never thought we
would win it. I’m still pretty
“wow”
about it, because
we
did
that—my website, the BL website, readers and friends and fans around the world
really joined forces to make it happen. I’ve no idea what margin we won by—and
I don’t want to know if it was by one vote or a million votes—but either way
it was an amazing effort from everyone who banded together.

As far as changes to my career, it’s a bit soon to tell, but I’ve got an axe
above my computer now, so that’s certainly good!

BL: And what can we expect from Sigmar next?

GM: Well, the biggest challenges (that we know of…) have been met and
overcome in these three books, so I’m pretty much free to take the story
wherever I want now. I’ve sown some seeds in the trilogy—particularly the last
one—for future stories, ones that will allow me to explore the time of Sigmar
in new ways, and tell quite different stories, not just Big Bad arises and We
Must Defeat It stories. There’s moments of awesome still to come, just not how
you might expect them…

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