![]() ![]() And one day, they sent me this pile of photocopies: sketches, paste-ups, notes. The editors kept me fed with all the latest fluff and hot new supplements, just to keep me in the loop. So the grim nightmare of the far future, where there is only war and the galaxy’s alight and everyone’s got a headache, was pretty much my thing. I’d been working for the Black Library for a few years, producing a variety of things, most notably the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels. Know the one? Guy with a scalp full of cables, a black fur coat, a double-headed eagle familiar on his shoulder, a gold-chased bolt pistol in his hand? Yes, it is good, isn’t it? It’s called Inquisitor Tannenberg, it’s by John Blanche, and it has been reproduced in various places, including the Inquis Exterminatus. There is a rather gorgeous painting that many of you, I’m sure, will be familiar with. So I’m delighted to be able to say that in the case of Eisenhorn (which is the umbrella title we’ve given to the cycle of novels and linked short stories collected in this spiffy volume), I know exactly where the idea came from. Then, when I actually need an idea, professionally speaking, I rifle through this scrap-head resource and eventually come up with something that makes me go ‘Oh, yeah, that’d work.’ Except, of course, for the occasions when I find something that makes me go, ‘What is that? A “B”? What’s that word? Did I write this?’ I use notebooks, old envelopes, Post-its, the backs of shopping lists, the foreheads of passing children, whatever’s to hand. I jot stuff down, anything, everything, as it occurs to me – yes, on trains, or planes, or sofas, or seesaws, or the queue at Tesco – so I don’t lose it. Owning, as I do, a mind as reliable and watertight as the average game of Ker-Plunk!, I have learned to become something of a note-taker. Rather less quick-witted than either of them, I regularly struggle when I get asked about ideas and their origins, and usually come up with some old cobblers about ‘sometimes, if I’m on a train, things just occur to me.’ or ‘you never know when an idea’s going to hit you.’īecause you don’t. In a similar vein, when asked where she got her energy from, my daughter Lily answered, ‘Woolworths.’ Ba-dum tish! ![]() ONCE, WHEN ASKED where he got his ideas, David Mamet replied, ‘I think of them’. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |