INTERVIEW: Graham McNeill
~A guest interview by The Gaming Kingdom’s: Kris Sherriff
Another exclusive for us here at the Gaming Kingdom we managed to get an interview with author Graham McNeill. So without beating around the bush for too long, lets get right to the interview.
KS: Hi, Graham and thanks for answering a few questions for us. So a stock question to start us off, do you remember what it was that attracted you to the Wargaming hobby and do you have a preferred system/background?
GM: I first got into the hobby via the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, and I still have my battered copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain on my shelves to remind me. I collected and played all of them, before graduating to role-playing, where I spent altogether far too much time developing worlds and characters and plots. My players never got to see or interact with a lot of these, but they made the world seem more real to me and, by extension, them. As the adventures I wrote became more ambitious in their scale I needed a system of rules to allow us to fight mass battles. A brief flirtation with the AD&D Battlesystem soon led me to Warhammer and 40K…and the rest is history, I fell in love with the darkness of the background and the scale of the games, and played them every weekend with my mates, writing campaigns, new rules, new characters and all manner of ‘between-game’ stories. I love both backgrounds, since they’ve developed into such rich and varied worlds. I prefer reading 40K fiction, but writing Warhammer fiction. Odd, I know, but that’s the way it goes.
KS: Do you still make time for role-playing and gaming and what are you favorite armies/systems and are you working on anything hobby related at the moment?
GM: Very much so. Every Wednesday the guys gather round my house for a spot of role-playing. We’ve been playing for the last eight years and have ventured into the realms of Cthulhu, Serenity and WFRP. Currently we’re playing through an AD&D campaign, which is proving to be great fun. On the Wargaming front, I don’t play as much as I’d like to, but every now and then I dust off the Empire or Space Marine models for some dice rolling.
KS: What part of working for GW did you enjoy the most and is there any project that you are most proud of other than your Black Library Books?
GM: I enjoyed all the work I did for GW, but the project I was most proud of was the Witch Hunters book I did with Andy Hoare. At the time, we felt that 40K had drifted into an arena where it had lost some of its gothic madness and after the Daemonhunters book I did with Phil Kelly and Andy Chambers, these books put that insanity back, front and centre. We got to come up with some really cool concepts, got some great miniatures for the project and I’m very proud of what Andy and I did with that book. Oh, and the Black Templars…and the Empire…and so on.
KS: The Horus Heresy books have been a big success, how did they come about and was it always planned to keep them running?
GM: Yeah, they’ve been amazing, and we’ve been blown away by how much people have gotten into them. Doing Heresy books was something that had been talked about for a long time, but I’m glad it’s taken us this long to do it, as I don’t think we were ready to do them before now – certainly I wasn’t. Basically, a whole host of us BL writers got together with the editors and GW background guru, Alan Merrett, to talk about what was involved; the history, the characters, the themes and, most importantly, what differentiated a book set in HH times from one in the Age of the Imperium. That last part was, for me, the most important facet of what we were going to be writing, because these novels should read as completely different types of book from a regular 40K story. They shouldn’t just be 40K books with different names, they should read and feel like something totally different. As to how many books there will be in the end, the answer is that there will be as many as we think are needed and as many as people want to keep reading. As long as there are ideas and stories to tell, we’ll keep telling them.
KS: As you entered the Heresy series with book two, what was it like taking over the reins of characters rather than working on ones you had created yourself?
GM: It was a challenge, that’s for sure, but one that turned out to be a real pleasure. Continuing a series kicked off by Dan Abnett was always going to be hard work, but continuing it after such an awesome novel as Horus Rising, was the biggest test and honour of my career. I read the manuscript of Horus Rising over and over to make sure the characters and plot was etched in my brain before starting. What made it easier for me was that Dan had crafted such well-rounded characters that it was easy to get a handle on them and get them to walk and talk the way they did in the first book. Dan and I were in communication with each other all the time during the writing of these books, zipping ideas back and forth to make sure the two books really gelled. I think you can really tell there was a lot of care put in them and it’s something that’s been commented on by the fans, so that’s very gratifying.
KS: On to the next book in the series Mechanicum, what’s it about and where does it fit in the series?
GM: Mechanicum starts slightly before the Istvaan massacre and covers the fall of the priests of Mars to Chaos and sheds light on what was going on in the minds of the Adepts, Titan Legions and Knight Households while the galaxy was tearing itself apart. One of the maxims we have with HH books is to always bring something new to the table and to always try and show people something they didn’t know or turn something they thought they knew on its head. The novel follows the exploits of a number of characters, but the central one is Dalia Cythera, a lowly transcriber from Terra who gets caught up in events that will have far-reaching consequences for the galaxy at large and which have their origins in the far past of Old Earth…
KS: I hear on the grapevine that you tried to keep Space Marines to a supporting role only in this book. Was this a conscious decision or just something that happened while you were writing?
GM: It was something that evolved in the writing. Originally, the Space Marines were going to be much more prominent characters, but as the story came to life, I realized that I was drifting from the point of the book, and that was the Mechanicum. It wasn’t the Space Marines’ story and I cut back their scenes, though I still gave them some screen time, as they do play a part in the final fall of Mars. The more I cut them away, the happier I felt, as it meant I was staying ‘on-message’.
KS: I know that Dan Abnett was really pleased that he got to uncover some big secrets in Legion, have you got any planned for us in Mechanicum?
GM: Hell, yeah. I can’t really say what they are without giving it all away, but I think there’s going to be plenty of fodder for the conspiracy theorists out there.
KS: What about your Ultramarines Series, Uriel Ventris is back and The Killing Ground is in my pile of books waiting to be read (so don’t spoil it for me) but do I have more of the same to look forward to or do you have a new direction planned for him?
GM: After Dead Sky, Black Sun I had my characters in a place that needed some real planning to get them out of without the readers being cheated. The Killing Ground is the characters’ odyssey home and it gets them back in a way that I felt dealt with the circumstances of their return in a way that was exciting, interesting and, most of all, fair. I mean that in the sense of feeling right. Think of the scene in Stephen King’s novel, Misery, when Paul Sheldon writes the first scenes of Misery Returns for Annie and she is raging that it’s not fair, because it ‘cheats’ in relation to what went before. Well, I didn’t want that, so I put a lot of thought into how to get my boys home in a way that would prevent me from being hobbled by an angry fan. The next book, Courage and Honour, is halfway done and is a much more back-to-basics story, with Space Marines doing what the do best. It’s a step up in scale for the Ultramarines again, since the last two books have just had Uriel and Pasanius as main characters. This book has a full company at war and the next one will be even bigger!
KS: On the Sigmar trilogy, I really enjoyed reading the first book and can’t wait for the second. One thing that struck me about it was that it felt a lot more mature, in a similar vain to the Ambassador Books. It still has the grand battles that Black Library books are all about but there is a lot of depth to the characters and the emotion of the moments really come through. Was this something that you went in to the book planning to do?
GM: Absolutely. I never write for gamers, I write for readers, and I’d never write a book I wouldn’t want to read myself. If all I want are battles, I’ll play a game of 40K. A story’s not worth reading if there’s no depth to the characters and I always try and write each novel as though the game doesn’t exist. I avoid anything that breaks the illusion of the novel’s events not being ‘real’, say by referring to a unit type (that isn’t an in-world name) or a piece of terminology that could only be known by a player. It’s the emotions of the characters that keep you reading a book and that’s paramount when it comes to telling a gripping story. If you don’t care about the characters, then what does it matter if they live or die, win or lose?
KS: Do you have any other things that you are working away on? What else is there for us to look forward to?
GM: On the novels front, after Courage and Honour, I’ll be moving on to the second of the Sigmar trilogy, which will be called Empire. I can’t wait to get to this one, as it has lots of big battles, some really nice character moments and some stories of Sigmar that we’re not so familiar with. After that, it’ll be onto the concluding part of Defenders of Ulthuan. My first Starcraft novel, I, Mengsk is out in January. What else… oh, yeah, Fire and Honour issue 2 is out just now and we’re looking at the pencils for a four-part Ultramarines comic strip. So, lots to look forward to!
KS: Space Hulk or Hero Quest?
GM: Space Hulk, simply because you can’t beat the idea of Terminators in a haunted house.
KS: Lord of the Rings Trilogy or Band of Brothers?
GM: It has to be Lord of the Rings. I could watch those movies over and over again and never get tired of them. Everything about them came together in an amazing way to craft something incredible, the likes of which I doubt we’ll see again in movies for a long, long time.
KS: The Emperor or Horus?
GM: That’s a tough one. Before embarking on the HH books, I’d have said The Emperor, but having read and written Horus, I have much more sympathy for him and now feel the tragedy of what happened to him. The more we write of the Emperor, the more we see what a ruthless bastard he really was. And though it may damn the galaxy to oblivion, I’d side with Horus, simply because it looks as he and his lads are having the most fun. For now, anyway…
Well that’s all the questions I had for Graham and I would like to thank him again for answering them for us. If you want to find out more about his books and what he is working on you can check out his website at http://www.graham-mcneill.com/
~Bigred here. Some interesting thoughts in there. Speaking of mechanicum, you can expect my review of it coming up soon. Comments?
