"The modern master of the gamebook format" (Rob Sanders)... "Can do dark very well" (Jonathan Oliver)... "Green gets mileage out of his monsters" (SFX Magazine)... "It takes a firm editorial hand and a keen understanding of the tone of each piece to make a collection this diverse work, and Green makes it look effortless" (Starburst Magazine)... "A charming blend of camp creatures, humour, and genuine horror" (Set the Tape)
I may be slightly late to the party on this one*, but I become aware that Games Workshop have released a new Defiler deamon engine for Warhammer 40,000.
Seeing this reminded me that there is a scene in my Warhammer 40K novel Iron Hands where Iron Father Gdolkin goes up against a Chaos Defiler. Iron Hands is available to buy as an eBook from Black Library, and here's an extract to give you a taster...
The wall at an angled junction ahead of them had collapsed into the defile, creating a slope of spoil and earth leading up out of the labyrinthine network of trenches. Then the Iron-Father saw a shape looming up over the crest of the trench, between the Iron Hands and the ordinatus, that made their struggle so far seem like nothing more than a combat training session.
The monstrosity rose up before Iron-Father Gdolkin and his battlebrethren like some obscene amalgam of machine and unholy warp entity, a crab-like creature in form, all pistoning claw-limbs, studded with snagging barbs and cruel spikes. Mounted upon this clanking undercarriage was a baroquely forged gun-turret tank-body in which was contained the malevolent entity whose presence leaked from the rusted war engine like acid, tainting the very air around it with vileness. The main gargoylemouthed cannon of the monstrous construct was ably supported by the reaping gun of an autocannon of archaic design. A robotic arm flexed and stretched like living steel, culminating in a mass of mechadendrite tentacles, writhing with an unnatural life of their own.
Above the thorax portion of this oil- and slime-dripping creation of Chaos, a daemonic visage, formed of rust-discoloured steel, stared down on the Space Marines, as if they were nothing more than insects, baleful witchfires burning behind its eye-slits. A ragged plague standard fluttered in the steady wind blowing over the battlefield above the trench line bearing the unmistakable insignia of the Plague God and the name of the blasphemy: Ebolus. It stung Gdolkin's remaining biological eye to look upon it and he could see glyphs of the Lord of Decay forming in the rusty scars covering the metal of the machine. Each joint was emblazoned with the eight-pointed star of the Fell Powers.
Gdolkin shivered involuntarily. The whole horrific fusion of machine and Chaos-spawned daemon drew a toxic miasma of noxious fumes with it, more polluting than the industry-ruined atmosphere of Fornax Orbis Majoris. It clung to the construct like a second skin, and made the air feel greasy. Sooty exhaust turrets coughed yet more foulness into the air from the impossible engine, pounding its pistons inside the machine beast like the beating of some daemonic metal heart.
'Ferrus be with me.' Gdolkin muttered, feeling the power source of his axe thrumming in his right hand...
To continue reading the story, click here to buy Iron Hands from the Black Library today.
Today I received my latest royalty statement from Games Workshop. It may be a while since I last wrote for Black Library but I still get a few pounds and pence in royalties each year from sales of my novels and short stories, thanks to the prevalence of eBooks.
I thought it might be interesting to share the best-selling titles, based on earnings. So, here we go...
Monday saw the release of Krakenbane's Curse, a new Age of Sigmar short story by Yours Truly.
A few of the short stories I have written for Black Library over the years are available as digital eShorts and three of the six novels I have written set within the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes as eBooks. Why not check out one of them today?
Unbelievably, my very first published novel, the Warhammer short story collection The Dead and the Damned, is 20 years old today! What's more, it is still available to buy from the Black Library as an eBook.
The Warhammer universe explodes with adventure and sudden violence as Badenov's Band, rogues and brigands all, take on all comers as they roam the Old World. Led by their raven-haired commander Torben Badenov, whose lust for glory is only surpassed by his ferocity in battle, the motley gang roams the wretched towns and haunted forests fighting until every last unholy creature they encounter joins the dead or the damned.
One of the best things* about The Dead and the Damned being published, apart from the fact that it was a proper novel**, was that Clint Langley produced the cover. Since 2002, I have written another 15 novels, many of which are also still available to buy as eBooks.
* One of the worst things was it was the first book of mine that was reviewed in SFX Magazine, and the reviewer gave it one star. That was a humbling experience.
Ten years ago*, Abaddon Books published by seventh Ulysses Quicksilver adventure, Anno Frankenstein. Here's the blurb taken from Amazon:
Ulysses Quicksilver, agent of the crown, jumps into a time vortex pursuing Daniel Dashwood, a madman bent on sharing modern technology with Hitler’s forces and changing history to suit his evil ends.
Rewind several decades, to the time of the Second Great War, to Darmstadt. The Nazis are battling the steampunk empire of Magna Britannia, cooking up necrotic super-soldiers in the gothic towers of Castle Frankenstein.
In the forests outside the castle, other forces are gathering. Ulysses’ father is there, proving that dashing good
looks and a talent for swashbuckling adventures run in the family, and wondering why his British masters have partnered him with weakling scientist Dr. Jekyll. The ladies of the Monstrous Regiment are also there to help, but there may be other gothic monsters in the hills...
“Jonathan Green gets mileage out of his monsters, with big action set-pieces that read like things we’d like to see in a rip-roaring summer movie.” - SFX Magazine
I had a lot of fun, riffing off the works of Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stan Lee et al, and I think that comes through in the novel, which is the longest** Ulysses Quicksilver adventure in terms of page count.
If you've yet to read it yourself, the good news is that Anno Frankenstein is is in Rebellion Publishing's January ‘Time Travel’ eBook sale. The eBook is available worldwide, until the end of the month, for only 99p! However, please not that this discounted price is only valid on the Rebellion Publishing webshop.
“Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.”
"I think the most important thing when writing a novel is to find out who your characters are. Once you start getting to know them, everything else will fall into place and the plot will be determined by the way they act and react."
Apocalypse is what it's all about in the Warhammer 40,000 universe at the moment, and some of the books the Black Library has produced, that feature apocalyptic battles, are being given a renewed push as a result.
Obviously, the War for Armageddon omnibus gets a mention, which, although it doesn't contain my two Armageddon novels, does include my Black Templars' story The Relic.
And while we're on the subject of apocalyptic battles, several of those that occur within my novel Iron Hands are definitely on the apocalypse scale, so why not check it out?
"Writing a novel is like putting a grizzly bear through college. You know there's a vague chance this might work out and maybe even change the world, but you are still being mauled constantly by something ungrateful."
Having launched my blog 11 years ago, to keep readers informed about my various projects, I've finally got round to setting up a subscriber list, so that I can keep interested parties informed even more effectively.
If you sign up to receive my Newsletter, you will get the lowdown on all the different things I'm working on - from short stories to novels, and gamebooks to anthologies - as well as advance notice of when new Kickstarter projects are launching and information about events I'll be attending.
It's rather appropriate, seeing as how today on the blog it's Warhammer Wednesday, that I should have been working on some new proposals for the Black Library this morning.
But the reason for today's post is to remind you that this Saturday, 24th February 2018, is Black LibraryCelebration day.
As well as being a celebration of 20+ years of fantastic adrenaline-fuelled fiction from the worlds of Warhammer, the brand new Inquisitor Eisenhorn novel, The Magos is being released on Saturday, along with Josh Reynolds’ new Warhammer 40,000 novel Lukas the Trickster.
There will be all sorts of other goodies up for grabs, including an exclusive resin Citadel miniature of Inquisitor Eisenhorn, a Lukas the Trickster model (which is usually exclusive to the GW Webstore), a commemorative collection of Black Library Postcards (featuring 100 pieces of cover art from across the history of Black Library novels), and a themed Warhammer 40,000 journal. Not only that, but every purchase made on the day will be rewarded with a free gift of a Black Library Celebration paperback containing six short stories - two each from Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40,000 and The Horus Heresy.
I will be stopping by the Warhammer store on Tottenham Court Road on Saturday (hopefully in time to pick up some goodies myself) but I won't be hanging around too long as I have another commitment on the 24th February.
And as to those proposals? You can be sure that I will let you know if anything comes of them...
Did you know that Charles Dickens was born on this day in 1812? Which means that he was 31 when he wrote A Christmas Carol. My first novel The Dead and the Damned*was published when I was 31, but that particular book certainly hasn't endured like Dickens' novels have.
And despite having had the idea several years previously, it wasn't until I was 46 that I actually started to write the first Scrooge and Marley (Deceased)story, The Haunted Man, which takes as it's premise, 'What happened after the events of A Christmas Carol?'
But it is pure chance that meant I was writing a new Scrooge and Marley (Deceased)story actually on the occasion of Dickens' 206th birthday. Maybe that's why the story, which I had really been struggling with up until now, started to come together at last today.
Let's hope I can finish it tomorrow. After all, the submission deadline is on Sunday...
* More a glorified short story collection than a novel.
So here's an extract from my seventh Ulysses Quicksilver Pax Britannia novel Anno Frankenstein...
Amiens, France,
1943
General
Sir Henry Stamford Raffles raised a large pair of brass-rimmed binoculars to
his eyes and scanned the enemy lines in front of him on the other side of the
battlefield.
A low mist drifted across the black
water craters between the barbed wire lines. Beyond the pitted, churned-up grey
muddy mess of No Man’s Land the men and machines of the Third Reich were
arrayed; everything from standard troopers and Jotun-class tanks to clanking
units of bipedal Landsknechts and even the occasional remade abomination.
The Nazi menace was persistent, he’d
give them that.
Raffles lowered his binoculars,
placing them on the silver tea tray his batman was holding out ready beside him
and picking up the cooling cup of tea next to them. He took a sip, the leather
armchair creaking as he eased his bulk back into it, crossed his ankles on a
footstool in front of him and took in the Magna Britannia forces, of which he
was commander-in-chief, with a proud, rosy-cheeked grin.
To
his left stood the massed ranks of the Galahad and Gawain regiments, ten
thousand automata strong. To his right were arrayed the combined might of
Lancelot and Percival; another ten thousand head of robo-infantry. Supporting
them were the gigantic land battleships Samson
and Atlas, their arms replaced with
mighty cannon and mortars, Gatling guns and iron spear-firing ballistae. He
could hear the mighty roar of their engines as their crews stoked their
boilers, thick black smoke and geysers of white steam rising from their towering
smokestacks. The land battleships of the Wellington Dreadnought Brigade were
indeed a sight to behold, the Britannian flag snapping from the banner-poles in
the chill autumnal wind.
And
there were men of flesh and blood amongst the forces too – weapons crews,
engine teams, stokers, droid handlers, engineers, tacticians, not to mention
the trusted Tommy foot soldier and those men piloting the stalker tanks and
Trojan support vehicles that followed the automaton infantry – but there
weren’t many. Only a couple of hundred compared to the twenty thousand
grunt-bots. And, as General Kensington Gore, the oft quoted First Great
European War general and all round hero, was famously remembered for saying,
“Give me one hundred droids or, failing that, a thousand ordinary men.” But
then he had been virtually half-automaton himself.
It
was a sign of Raffles’ status and rank that he had been afforded the privilege
of leading the Magna Britannian forces at Amiens into battle from atop his own
personalised pachyderm-droid Hannibal.
Before freedom-threatening war had come to the heartlands of Europe for a
second time, he had served in India, where the vision of the monstrous
robo-phant charging the gates of Bombay had sent many a revolutionary fleeing
for his life.
The howdah shading Raffles and his
batman from the weak rays of the milky sun – the commander-in-chief’s command
post might have looked out of place, had it not been for the Magna Britannian
iconography that had been worked into the ornate scrollwork of the giant droid’s
flanks.
Raffles
eased himself back into his chair. He could feel the comforting rumble of the
boiler bubbling in the guts of the metal beast as its own engines were stoked
with coke, ready for action. He was going to enjoy this. It was going to be a
walk in the park, but he was looking forward to it anyway.
Putting
the china cup to his lips at last, he took a sip. He grimaced; the tea was
cold. With a flick of the wrist he sent the contents of the cup raining down
over the side of the pachyderm onto an unsuspecting automaton below. He rattled
the teacup and its saucer back onto the tray.
“Is
the pot still warm?” he asked of his batman, without once taking his eyes from
the battlefield vista in front of him.
He could see sinister airborne
shapes – something like birds and something like flying bombs – circling and
wheeling above the enemy lines. He was comforted by knowledge of the fact that
above his own forces the Darwin Corps’ tamed
Pterosaurshung
from the airborne eyries of the airship Harridan,
ready to swoop down and rend any enemy aerial forces wing from wing.
Lister
put a hand to the silvered teapot sitting on the small stove at the back of the
howdah, testing the temperature. “Yes, sir.”
“Then
poor me another cup.”
“Right
away, sir,” Lister replied dutifully.
“Do you think we’ll win, sir?”
Lister asked as he passed the general a steaming cup. It only remained for the
general to add the cream or lemon as he saw fit.
Raffles turned a withering gaze upon
his batman.
“The Germans are losing this war,
Lister, their resources are stretched to the limit and this is a last ditch
attempt devised by the Führer and his lackeys to hold back the inevitable. Show
some backbone, man! Whatever happened to your stiff upper lip, and all that?
Mark my words, we’ll have this all wrapped up in time for Tiffin. Then we’ll be
in Paris in time for cocktails and Berlin for a little hair of the dog
tomorrow. You mark my words!”
General Sir Henry Stamford Raffles
took a sip. “Ah, that’s much better.” Satisfied, he placed the cup carefully
back on its saucer on the tray, exchanging it for the speaking tube hung on its
trunk-like hose in the bracket on the other side of his chair. He raised the
speaking horn to his mouth.
“Men and automatons of the Magna
Britannian Fourth Cybernetic Expeditionary Company, we march to war, that we
might eradicate the Nazi menace once and for all. We march for Queen and
country! We march for freedom from oppression! The command is given, and that
command is – atta–”
But Sir Raffles’ command to engage
was drowned by a scream of burning air and boiling mist as a beam of
retina-searing light, like fire from heaven, streaked down out of the sky. It
hit the front row of Galahad regiment which vanished in a blinding flash of
concentrated sunlight. The crump of the explosions that followed in the wake of
the beam’s unkind caresses reached Raffles a moment later.
The
flaming spear vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving Raffles blinking
grey supernovae from before his eyes and seeing nothing of the automaton
infantry line but a mass of fused and burning wreckage that might once have
been man-shaped droids.
The beam came again, a sustained
blast this time, taking out the entire front line of Lancelot to his right.
Raffles
was out of his chair now, panic rendering him silent.
The
giant Atlas was the next target of
the devastating death ray, the British colours cooking off its hull plating
under its fiery fury, the Britannia flags flapping from its exhaust stacks
reduced to blackened cinders that were then carried away as glowing orange
embers on the firestorm wind following the beam’s onslaught.
Two
seconds later, the shells inside the giant’s right arm cannon touched off.
The
force of the explosion flattened almost all of Gawain regiment and even
threatened to send the Hannibal
crashing over onto its side, but the pachyderm stood firm, all ten tons of it.
“By
all the saints!” Raffles spluttered as he picked himself up off the floor of
the howdah, his ears ringing. The tray beside his seat was swimming in hot tea
now, the cup tossed over by the force of the explosion. “What the blazes was
th-”
His sentence remained unfinished as
the super-heated death ray found its next target.
"When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometres or swim for fifteen hundred metres (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."
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