Deathworlder

"This is Victoria’s first novel for Black Library, and it’s a cracker. The Astra Militarum, the Imperial Guard, have had some definitive Guard novels – like Dan’s Gaunt’s Ghosts series. But they’re very specific in their time period and their characters and what have you. So Victoria taking on the Catachans was really cool. We hadn’t really seen a huge amount of them, and they’re such an interesting regiment… The Imperial Guard are often thought of as the cannon fodder – don’t worry about them, there’s millions of them, plenty more where they came from. But the Catachans… Imagine you’ve got every 80s action hero, the bulging muscles and the one-liners, and stuck them in a book. And that’s essentially what Deathworlder is in the best possible way. It’s a novel about impossible odds, as a lot of 40k books are. The Imperial Guard are stuck in a world that is in the final death throes of being devoured by the Tyranids. The Tyranids are an extra-galactic race of ravenous killers. They devour planets, consume the biomass, and then use that to feed this flesh forge in their hiveship, to craft ever more dangerous organisms. And every part of the fleet is connected – whether it’s the flesh-boring beetles that they fire from their guns, or the giant norn queens, and so on – every one of them is linked in this Gestalt consciousness, the hive mind. What really appealed to me with this upfront was this was never a book where the good guys were going to triumph. This world was already lost. It starts at the point of “We’re all going to die”… and that’s a really interesting kicking off point. Normally we start with the threat, and now we will go and face that threat, and hilarity and adventures will ensue. Whereas this one starts with, “We’re all going to die. Now what?” They’re offered a last ray of hope, a Mechanicus facility, where there’s something of vital importance, something more important than the survival of the planet; if they can get it and then get off world. But everybody else is left behind to die, and that’s considered a fair trade. We follow a group of Catachans led by Major Wulf Khan, charged with fulfilling this mission; and on the way, she collects some Cadian survivors from a fortress that was basically overrun and destroyed. It’s a ‘men on a mission’ movie… although there’s actually a lovely balance of male and female characters in this book, which is something we’ve been trying to do for a long time – to bring in a sense that this isn’t just boys’ -own-adventure stuff. So you get to see this group navigate through a world overcome by Tyranids, with spores and bio-organism fogs and pools that are digesting everything and turning it to mulch; and that means everything , the buildings, the people, the food, the fauna, the flora, everything organic is going to be dissolved and eaten. Seeing that up close is fascinating; it’s such an interesting setting for the story. We see their lust for life and survival – because the Catachans come from a world where everything is hostile. It’s like Australia turned up to eleven. Everything there is hostile, poisonous, carnivorous, deadly. But even to the Catachans, this book’s setting is extreme, so we get to see these extremes coming at one another over the course of the book. The fun was in seeing who was going to live to the end… Victoria did a great job of capturing the spirit of what makes a Catachan warrior – this fatalistic attitude that from the day you’re born, you’re a dead man. You’re in a world that actively wants to kill you at every moment. If you just have to accept that you’re dead, then you can live each day with real vim and vigour. So while they don’t laugh in the face of death and the planet’s destruction, they can cope with it probably better than most other regiments might, who would maybe give in to despair. Victoria did a great job of capturing both their spirit, and how they would react to this; and also the visceral nature of a world in its final death throes. It’s a really interesting read. And she has an impressive command of some disgusting vocabulary when it comes to horrible bio things melting your flesh… There are rules that represent fortitude and fighting skill, but yes, not necessarily mental state, other than leadership. And it’s very easy to almost transpose a plastic miniature into a character in the books, so that they don’t feel the terrors we might feel. How a human would react in this insane universe is often something that can be neglected. But Victoria did the psychology really well, the mental toll that it takes seeing a planet dying around you and your comrades being ripped apart by alien xenomorph predators. That has an effect, even on a Catachan. It highlights the humanity of them, even though they’re larger than life characters."