Stephen Baxter article on WH40k

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I just thought this was too fascinating not to share.

Cloaked link detected.

The article is too long to quote, so I'll just include the opening.

Freedom in an Owned World

Warhammer Fiction and the Interzone Generation

'"Curse all manling coach drivers and all manling women," muttered Gotrek Gurnisson, adding a curse in Dwarvish ...'

That's the first line of 'Geheimnisnacht' by William King, the first story in the first book of Warhammer fiction, the anthology Ignorant Armies, published in 1989. Since that beginning there has been published a whole string of books, magazines and comics, set in the universes of the highly successful war games and role-playing games marketed by Games Workshop (GW).

Partly because of the involvement of Interzone editor David Pringle, who was editor of the GW line from 1988 to 1991, over the years several prominent British writers of sf and fantasy have contributed to the various series, many from what used to be known as the 'Interzone generation'. My own involvement was modest, two short stories published in 1989 and 1990; there have been much more significant contributions from David Garnett, Kim Newman, Brian Stableford, Ian Watson and others. Today GW publishes new and reprinted fiction — great mountains of it, in fact — under its 'Black Library' imprint. But over the years GW fiction itself has been the subject of a saga of gamers and business suits, of orthodoxies and heresies, of Stakhanovites and rebels, of collapses and recoveries, of intriguing lost possibilities, and of struggles for literary freedom in an 'owned universe'.

I've been arguing for some time that somebody ought to do a proper study of this saga. Well, nobody more qualified than me took up my challenge, and if you want something done … My aim here is to set out an informal history of GW literature, especially that of the Pringle period, based on the personal recollections of those involved, told as far as possible in their own words. I'd love to see a proper academic study of this body of work some day.

My own first exposure to the GW fiction project came in autumn 1988, with a phone call from David Pringle.

[/quote]

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

A lot of interesting stuff in there, though it seems like it's several years old. It mentions Cain in the context of being a mere spin-off novel and Dan Abnett has not even a dozen novels to his name there.

[Connor MacLeod]

It also talks about William King still being a going concern, which IIRC he isn't (more the pity)

[NecronLord]

That's an old article, and mostly reflects on Baxter's experience with GW. He wrote, among other things, a story about a crashed Slaan assault shuttle (or something) buried in the chaos wastes in WFB in Ignorant Armies. Good stuff.

[andrewgpaul]

It's been a while since I read The Star Boat; didn't realise it was him. It's an OK story, but I never liked the 'intrusion' of SF into Warhammer. The Song was good, though.