What does the future smell like?
I spend a significant chunk of my working life thinking about this. To write fiction set in the 40K universe (or any other) you need to know how things look, sound, feel and smell. You need to convince your readers of the reality of the world your characters are moving through. You need to stimulate their imaginations with small, telling details that help them to believe in the place. You need to be able to describe how things feel, how they smell, how they sound if you are going to conjure up vivid images in their minds.
Games Workshop’s artists and sculptors have given us a very good idea of what the 41st Millennium looks like, but for the rest of it, you have some work to do.
Right now I am writing a story set in the Hive city of Irongrad; a vast, multi-layered urban mountain with the population of a modern country. I need, at least in my imagination, to walk its streets, and come back with a description that convinces. It’s a form of intellectual time and space travel. Once that’s done I need to be able to relate what I find to physical stimuli that readers can grasp.
How do I do that? By relating my descriptions to things that already work for me.
Let’s think about a Hive – what is it? Irongrad is a huge multi-level urban sprawl, a skyscraper the size of London that has grown organically over thousands of years. So there we have our first image; London but a London with another London stacked on top of it, and then another and then another and so on.
What does that suggest to you?
To me, it suggests something overpopulated and claustrophobic. The rich live literally on the top, in the spires. The class structure is reflected by the structure of the Hive itself. At the top, things are newer, there is more space, more light, more freedom.
Outside the world is a deadly volcanic hell. Inside there are hundreds of millions of people packed too close together. The life-support systems are over-loaded. Many of the people are armed and desperate. Most of them are over-worked and downtrodden. It’s the Middle Ages meets the Industrial Revolution — both very useful things to keep in mind when describing the 41st Millennium.
Think of being on the bottom of that Hive and feeling all of that weight pressing down on you. What if the ceiling collapses? Given what we know about the rickety systems of the 40K universe, it almost certainly happens.
Actually, in a horrible way, for a writer’s purposes, that’s kind of cool. There’s a unique sort of natural disaster implied there – a sort of Hive quake, where things collapse and whole sectors of the city are destroyed. That’s something for our characters to witness. Morbid I know—but, hey, we’re talking about writing Science Fantasy set in one of the darkest universes ever created here.
It also gives some interesting imagery. Think of areas which have already collapsed or are under repair, or are full of warning signs, and support trestles and huge hydraulic presses that hold up overloaded ceilings. Think of areas with broken treatment pipes in the roofs where sewage falls on those below like rain, literal shitstorms. Let’s make that sound a bit more 40K, let’s call them cloacal tempests. OK—I think we have seen too much evidence of my fetid imagination in action here. Let’s move on.
So we have a huge city with a lot of people. It is a controlled environment. The vast majority live in tiny apartments, stacked one on top of each other. Many don’t have kitchens. (This was the case in Victorian London. It is the case in many densely populated cities now.) People eat out in massive communal kitchens at their work-places or at vast open air food courts as people do in the tropics.
The air smells of too many people and too many overloaded systems, of sewage and trash and cooking food. What do people eat? We need to know that so we can describe how it smells. Mostly synthetic foods, I think, so there is a chemical tang.
How about fresh meat? What sort of meat are you likely to get in a Hive? Let’s leave aside the obvious answer. No. Wait a minute. Let’s not! The rich eat fresh meat. They can afford it after all. That makes meat a status symbol of sorts. There are those who might acquire a taste for human flesh. There are those in the lower hive, who, Sweeney Todd like, acquire meat for their luxury pies in nasty ways. At very least there will be urban myths about this stuff. At worst, our heroes will be encountering cannibal cultists soon.
Let’s file this stuff away for future use. Back to meat—how about rats or other vermin? This is 40K so these can be big. Maybe they are kept like pigs in pens in the streets. Maybe they are left to shuffle through the streets eating garbage as once they did in cities like London and New York. Why not? It’s an interesting detail. We have skewers of rat-meat barbecued in the street. It’s a luxury because it’s fresh meat. There is a telling detail. Eating rat is a luxury. A bit of cliché but what of it. I can spice it up by describing various dishes involving tails and paws and choice cuts of prime Grubb Street rat.
In Bangkok once I saw a cockroach that looked almost the size of my foot, scuttling up a dark alley. Maybe my imagination made it bigger than it was, it was dark and I was drunk, but hey, not here. In the 41st Millennium cockroaches are whatever size I want them to be. In goes cockroach stew. What does it taste like? I am guessing crunchy. (Before you go ew gross, there are apparently condiments that use extracts from roach glands—who said reading about Warhammer could not be educational?) Anyway, there’s a couple of smells to describe as our heroes move through those giant street markets.
There’s an implied ecology here —scavengers that live on refuse and which in turn are eaten themselves. They might even have been engineered for such things in the Dark Age of Technology. And all of this implies an ecology of trash.
Think about all those people, all consuming stuff, all tossing it out. The systems cannot deal with it. It builds up. There’s a smell for you. There’s also another implied economy—in Victorian London there were people who made a living picking through the trash. In modern Cairo they are still there. In this world, this is why they call some skavvies skavvies. Again, it’s 40K and everything is on a huge scale. Let’s have mountains of trash, piling up along the sides of buildings. More rich, pungent aromas to be described.
What about diseases? Surely this must be very unsanitary. Indeed. This fits right in with the medieval, plague-ridden feel of the 41st Millennium. We can make these diseases spectacular and horrible. Our beggars might look like mutants, their diseases look so bad. And there will be beggars, it’s the Middle Ages meets the Industrial Revolution, remember. Ramp this up to eleven, armies of beggars, swarming outside the temples, hobbling through the streets in endless processions.
Anyway, you can see the sort of thought experiment that gets us to the smell of the future.
So far we’ve been talking about a sort of generic Hive. I need a specific one, the one in my story. This is a city that has been under the control of a nasty heretical cult for thousands of years. The 41st Millennium is a religious age and the heretics are a very religious people. There is sacred imagery everywhere. The heretics worship the Angel of Fire. There are images of it all over the place —on public buildings, in public places. These statues are very striking. They have wings of fire—literally. Flaming gas jets emerge from the statues in the shape of wings. Is this technical possible? I have no idea. It is in the 41st Millennium. The people all wear holy symbols depicting the Angel. They have little statues of it in their homes. Somewhere in almost every work of art, there is a picture of the Angel. Wherever you go, it is there. There is no escape. It is as omnipresent as Big Brother.
I want another image—something bad is happening is this city. An evil is about to erupt. The shape of a generic Hive has always reminded me of a volcano. I want this Hive to suggest that specifically. How to do it? Well the core of the Hive is hollow, it has a caldera, a huge gaping mouth at the peak. Seen from above, from a distance this suggests a volcano about to erupt.
Why is the core hollow? The empty space is for an enormous Cathedral dedicated to the Angel of Fire. Symbolically the Cathedral rises from the very base of the Hive and emerges from the mouth of the volcano. The Cathedral is tipped by a statue of the fire-winged Angel the size of the Empire State Building. Seen from the distance it looks like a fire-winged god is emerging from the mouth of a volcano. It’s an image I like.
Back to the smell, to something specific. There is a gassy smell everywhere, small leaks bring it. This is something I remember very vividly from the gas cookers of my childhood and from living in bedsits with gas-fires in my youth. I remember the way it used to make the back of my throat tighten and dry out my sinuses. There’s a couple of physical symptoms right there I can describe. They happen when our heroes take off their rebreather masks. It’s a small but telling piece of physical description to tantalise the reader with.
This also gives me another detail of the architecture. There are huge gas-pipes everywhere. This is 40K, so they have to be on a monstrous scale and they have to a gothic religious feel to them. Lets have monster pipes climbing up the sides of buildings like metal ivy clinging to the sides of an ancient church. Lets have huge pipeways running between buildings. Hell, let’s put some buildings on top of them like there used to be on London Bridge and there still are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. We can have technical adepts crawling along their underside doing repairs with sacred power-mallets. And there’s another thing from my youth, gasometers, the tanks that held reservoirs of gas. They were huge metal things and looked as if they would be right at home in the 41st Millennium. They also occasionally exploded—the sort of disaster that fits right into a 40K story. Let’s dot them about the city. Gasometers and high powered military weapons will make for some interesting explosions at some point, I am sure.
This leads us to other stuff—giant pipes that run to the Cathedral and power the huge wings of the main statue and the literally tens of thousands of statues that perch on its side like an army of fallen angels.
Anyway, I think you get the picture. Good question to ask at the start of a new project; what does the future smell like? What are the telling details? Back to the 41st Millennium for me now.

The Angel of Fire is a story of the Imperial Guard during the Macharian Crusade. It follows three friends, Leo, Anton and Ivan, part of the crew of a Baneblade, who by a series of strange accidents and the occasional bit of heroism end up saving the life of Macharius himself. It also involves huge armoured battles, urban combat in the streets of a Hive and a particularly nasty bunch of pyromaniac Tzeentch cultists.

BrookM wrote:Oh gak oh gak oh gak oh gak: http://www.blacklibrary.com/Blog/The_-Imperial-Truth-is-a-Lie.html

Aurelian, the next Horus Heresy limited edition Novella is coming soon, really soon.

We can’t reveal too much more about it just yet (Alpha Legion spies are everywhere) but if you download Hammer and Bolter issue 10, You’ll be able to read the opening three chapters.

If you’re subscribed to the newsletter, you’ll be among the first to see the breathtaking cover art for this new novella. Believe me when I say that the art for Aurelian is one of the most iconic and impressive covers in the Horus Heresy series (and considering the series artwork consists of demigods fighting for the future of the galaxy, that’s saying something ).

If you haven’t already signed up for the newsletter, you can do it here.

All 3,000 copies of our last limited edition novella, Promethean Sun, sold out in a day. Make sure you don’t miss out on Aurelian - keep checking back here for regular updates.

Tomorrow we have an Interview with Andy Smillie, Black Library’s newest author, whose first short story you’ll also find in Hammer and Bolter issue 10, See you then.

iproxtaco wrote:

Why, oh why? Cruel world, you are too harsh! I bet this is a follow up which shows Lorgar kicking the gak out of Kor Phaeron and not being manipulated, or the book I've most wanted in the HH series. And it's a damn limited edition novella.

If you go here :

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/07/21/short-story-by-dan-abnett/

you can read " The Strange Demise of Titus Endor " by Mr. Abnett. For free !

If you enjoyed his Inquisition stuff then this should be right up your alley.

InquisitorMack wrote:Man, I wish there was a real Black Library where I could get a Black Library Card and take out Black Library Books without having to buy them.

Of course, late fees would be your soul.

But it would be worth it.

Interview with Andy Smillie


Andy Smillie is a first time Black Library author, making his debut in this month’s issue of Hammer and Bolter. We interviewed Andy for Hammer and Bolter, but the issue was so jam packed with content, we couldn’t squeeze it in.

We didn’t want you to miss out though (and Andy kept pestering us to include his interview) so here it is now:


What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just finished a short story about a Dark Angel fighting as a gladiator on a Dark Eldar arena world. It’s called ‘Reparation’, is packed with visceral close-combat scenes and should be appearing in Hammer and Bolter later this year. I’m about midway through a Gotrek and Felix short story called ‘Last Orders’ for inclusion in the anthology that’s out in April next year. I’m really excited about the project, as not only to I get to pen a tale about Warhammer’s most notorious duo but I get to share pages with Black Library fantasy-heavy weights CL Werner and Nathan Long. Josh Reynolds and John Brunner are also contributing to the anthology, and although they’re fairly new to Black Library, they’re both established writers with some great pieces of work behind them. Let’s just hope I manage to keep my end up!


What will you be working on next?
I don’t have anything confirmed yet, but I’ve just pitched a Flesh Tearers novel, so fingers crossed I’ll get the green light. The Flesh Tearers are a Blood Angel successor Chapter and like them their afflicted by a blood-rage and madness. Thematically, the Flesh Tearers are an interesting bunch to write about. They’re addicted to violence in a way that mirrors drug addiction, and must constantly battle with their inner selves to preserve a measure of restraint that allows them to fit within the rest of the Imperium. It’s powerful stuff, and it’s what makes them far more than superhuman killing machines. After that, I’d love to write another Warhammer story, perhaps about Galrauch the dragon – who wouldn’t want to write about a daemon possessed dragon? Having said that, I’ve also got an idea for an Imperial Guard story that takes its cue from Die Hard, and a story about a Tau sniper. I guess it’ll depend on how well my work’s received in the meantime.


Are there any areas of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?
Loads! Both the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes are so dense and full of cool characters, that there’s really no end to the interesting stories you can tell. My main problem at the moment is staying focused on the stuff I’m working on.


What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?
I’m re-reading Bill King’s original Gotrek and Felix shorts. They were some of the first Black Library stories I ever read and I want to make sure that my own Gotrek and Felix story pays homage to Bill. There’s definitely a different tone to Gotrek and Felix stories compared to other Warhammer fantasy tales, and hopefully immersing myself in Bill’s work will make sure my own story upholds that tradition.


Which book (either BL or non-BL) do you wish you’d written and why?
That’s a tricky one. I tend to like the books I’ve read because of the way another author has written them. If I’d written them they’d be different books, with different characters, themes and tone. Mainly I’m just glad to be writing, and hope that my own book (whenever it appears) will be well received.




Thanks Andy, If you want to read Andy new story Mountain Eater, download Issue 10 of Hammer and Bolter now. This month’s issue also contains an exclusive extract from Aurelian, a Dark Elf army besieging a Bretonnian castle, insidious Alpha Legionnaires and a new chapter in the soul drinkers Phalanx series. Download it today.


As well as Hammer and Bolter there are some great new products up for order today. Nagash Immortal, the latest in our time of legends range is available to buy, as is Imperial Glory, an Imperial guard novel. The Audio drama The Madness Within is available to buy as a Cd or to download and the web exclusive audio short, Vulkan’s Shield, is availabe to downlad. Finally we have the second Storm of Magic Novella Dragonmage, following on from the sell out Razumov’s Tomb.
That should be enough to keep you occupied until next weekor so, Happy reading!

It's been a while since we had a new video to show, and even longer since we had a new book about the Eldar. Today we mean to set both those right - with a trailer for Gav Thorpe's upcoming novel Path of the Seer. Gav's done a great job with the book, which follows the story of Thirianna as she seeks to harness her destructive psychic potential in defence of her ancient Craftworld and continues the theme of identity started in Path of the Warrior (book1 in Gav's series - check it out here). While the guys over at shroud have done an equally great job on the trailer. See for yourself:

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If you prefer your children of Asuryan wielding swords instead of shuriken catapults, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Graham McNeill’s classic high elves novel Defenders of Ulthuan is being re-released along with the highly anticipated sequel Sons of Ellyrion. You’ll find them both in the coming soon section of the BL website right now.

The awards just keep on coming here at Black Library. Scarcely a month after Darius Hinks won the coveted Gemmell Morningstar Award for his novel, Warrior Priest, Nathan Long’s Bloodborn has earned him a Scribe Award at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, California.



Congratulations, Nathan! The Ulrika novels have proven to be very popular with literary critics and Black Library fans alike, so we asked Nathan what he thought it was that made the series such a hit:



I think the Blood series has been well received because Ulrika was already a compelling character before being turned into a vampire - a proud woman warrior with strong passions - and becoming a vampire has only added another layer of fascination, giving her a dramatic internal conflict that seems almost impossible to resolve. How does a woman who has dedicated her life to fighting monsters deal with becoming a monster herself? Discovering how Ulrika works out this conflict is what has made the books so fun and exciting to write, and I believe it is what makes them fun and exciting to read.



If you’ve not read it already, you can get your hands on a copy of (the award-winning) Bloodborn here. The sequel, Bloodforged, is also available and follows Ulrika as she journeys to the Chaos-tainted city of Praag, shunned by her Lahmian sisters and hated by the humans she wishes to protect.

Make sure you visit us here on the blog tomorrow, when we’ll be showcasing some brand new cover art, and on Thursday when we’ll be announcing some exiting new titles for the year ahead. See you then.

Alpharius wrote:So, she's turned into a Vampire, but still wishes to protect us normals?

Alpharius wrote:So, she's turned into a Vampire, but still wishes to protect us normals?

reds8n wrote:If you go here :

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2011/07/21/short-story-by-dan-abnett/

... you can read " The Strange Demise of Titus Endor " by Mr. Abnett. For free !

If you enjoyed his Inquisition stuff then this should be right up your alley.

Jon Sullivan has once again supplied us with another wonderfully atmospheric and visceral front cover for a Space Marine Battles novel. It looks like those bloodletters’ warp-spawned jaws have bitten off more than they can chew – check out this unfortunate daemon, getting blasted in half by righteous boltgun fire.

The legionnaires themselves look no less intimidating than their Chaotic foes. Jon has emblazoned each legionnaire in iconography of flames and death, the close up detail is quite ominous.



Check out the full product page for Legion of the Damned, and set your reminder today.

If you voted for Architect of Fate, don’t worry, we’ll show that cover soon enough. Make sure you pop back tomorrow as we’ll be announcing the titles for the coming year.

THE STORY
Following the trajectory of a blood-red comet, the berserk World Eaters blaze a path of destruction across the galaxy in its wake. The small cemetery world of Certus Minor appeals to the Space Marines of the Excoriators Chapter for protection, but the force dispatched to deal with this grim threat is far too small and their losses against the renegades are high. Just as all seems lost, salvation is borne out of legend itself as sinister spectral warriors descend upon this planet of the dead, and the enemies of the Imperium come face to face with those who have already travelled beyond the realm of the living...

April 2012 • I

September 2011 • A5 (148mm × 210mm) 128page hardback, numbered, with marker ribbon, custom artwork and hand signed by the author • ISBN 9781849701068

Aaron Dembski-Bowden