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| Chris Wraight |
One of the strangest aspects of being a writer is the long gap between signing off on a manuscript and seeing the book actually appear on sale. Right now, I’m in the middle of penning a story about Luthor Huss set in the Old World, but the novel of mine that’s getting the most attention is one I finished in the middle of last year: Battle of the Fang. Although this doesn’t officially go on sale until June, there have been copies doing the rounds since March, when a few hundred visitors to Black Library Live 2011 got hold of the first batch. Since then, a few more have been sighted at places like Adepticon and Salute, so they’re slowly getting out into the wild, and it seems like as good a time as any to look back at how it got put together.
When I was asked to pitch for this project, I started by listing a few objectives:
1. The book would explore the workings of the Fang in detail. We’d learn about its layout, its defensive capabilities and its varied defenders. In addition to the Space Marines, there would be mortal characters. The Fang is truly vast, and as such it has thousands of mortal inhabitants, each of them capable warriors in their own right and part of Fenris’s rich culture of warfare. There would also be a detailed map of the interior, one around which the tactics of the battle would revolve closely.
2. The workings of a whole Great Company would be shown. The story of the siege of Fenris is an epic one, and I wanted to depict (almost) all troop-types of the Chapter in action. As a result, we would get to see Wolf Lords, Rune Priests, Wolf Priests, Iron Priests, Wolf Guard and Blood Claws all doing their stuff. Each kind of warrior performs a very different function in the Space Wolf military structure, and I wanted to reflect that in the way the characters responded to the siege. In addition to that, a certain very famous Venerable Dreadnought plays a central role.
3. The Thousand Sons would be taken just as seriously. Although the book is firmly about the Space Wolves, and is told from their point of view, I wanted the antagonists to be fleshed-out characters with their own motivation and rationale. The Thousand Sons are absolutely deadly fighters, albeit with a very different style of warfare to the Wolves. Just as in the case of the Fang’s defenders, we would get to see Sorcerers, Rubric Marines and Spireguard in combat, plus a few more esoteric units – and, of course, the small matter of a daemon primarch.
4. The story would be linked to the greater 40K continuity, and not just be a random battle. I aimed to pitch the novel firmly within the narrative established by Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett in their Horus Heresy books. Everything that happens in Battle of the Fang refers back to the events on Prospero, over a thousand years previously in the timeline. Both armies look back to that encounter with bitterness: the Thousand Sons because of their sense of betrayal, the Wolves because they didn’t finish the job.
5. There would be more at stake than the survival of the Fang as a fortress. Although that’s obviously the main story, I wanted to explore other strands of Space Wolf lore too. There are plenty of mysteries surrounding the origins and nature of the Wolves of Fenris, and Battle of the Fang aims to shed some light on some of them.
So those were the key ideas I started with, after which came the long (and hugely pleasurable) job of devising characters and plotting out the story. For all that, the book ended up being very difficult to write. Every Space Marine Battles project has the hard task of being faithful to established passages of background lore scattered across various publications, while also being a proper book-length story. That balance gave me some thorny puzzles, mostly concerning the timing of certain events and the roles of a couple of key characters. After many late nights at the keyboard, I finally ended up with a draft that made sense (to me, at least).
The result, I hope, is a book that tells the story of one of the galaxy’s most iconic sieges with all the depth and complexity that it deserves. When it goes on sale in June, you’ll have the chance to make your own mind up. I really hope that fans like what I did with the story – it was both a challenge and a privilege to write it.
In the meantime, here’s a tiny snippet of the action to leave with you, courtesy of Harek Ironhelm:
As the bands of metal that held Ironhelm back were withdrawn, the Great Wolf thundered down the ramp and on to the soil of Gangava. The night sky was the colour of old blood, striated with the dark tracks of his Chapter’s vehicles plummeting into range. There were buildings all around him, huge black spires of iron that jutted upwards, linked with bridges and mass transit tubes. Spotter lights whirled, trying valiantly to give the defensive gunners something to aim at, and there were wailing klaxons somewhere far off. Already the broken hammering of heavy weapons fire had broken out close to his position, echoing from the precipitous flanks of the structures around him.
Ironhelm breathed deeply, enjoying the familiar sounds and aromas of war as they filtered through his helm. Kill-urge was already pumping around his system, priming him for the extreme and sustained violence to come.
‘So we come to it at last, brothers,’ he growled, hefting his frostblade and thumbing the energy field into life. ‘Let the killing begin.’
Posted by The Black Library Team. Thanks Chris Wraight The 13th CIE is waiting with eagerness for the coming of this Novel... To know more about Chris Wraight and his Novels background visit the Black Library Authors Section or have a look at his Blog... 'Kodiak Out'
