Execution Hour

"Yes, the Gothic War came out of one of Games Workshop’s games called Battlefleet Gothic, which was a space combat game between gigantic capital ships. It was an age of sail, Napoleonic sea battles sort of thing, but in space. Andy Chambers designed that game, and it was a really good game. Execution Hour came out of one of the periods at the Workshop very early on, when we were actively looking for ways that we could support releases. And Gordon’s a veteran from the comics industry and novels and so on. The Gothic War features Abaddon, who is the arch-villain of chaos, and it’s one of his largest naval incursions into the Imperium, to break the back of the defenders and gain a foothold in Imperial space. It was this huge sector-spanning conflict to try and hold him back. Execution Hour is a story that tells of one of those giant spaceships – because spaceships in 40k are not the Millennium Falcon; they are gigantic, kilometers-long, floating cathedrals. They’re built like Cologne Cathedral and St Paul’s all in one, flying buttresses and marble statuary and brass and gold-plated filigree down the length of their hulls and so on. They’re immense, huge, stately things. Very wisely, the book didn’t confine itself just to space: there’s a planet that’s in the path of Abaddon, and it’s full of resources and valuable people and what have you, so they go down to the planet to evacuate them. So it plays on a number of levels: age-of-sail combat in space, with boarding actions and so on, but also the very personal moments of going down to the planet surface to rescue people and bring them home. Gordon really understood that kind of world, because of a lot of the stuff he’s done before. There are World War Two echoes in it, and that translates into the book. It gave a really nice scale to space combat, because a lot of what we’d seen in the films that we all loved was dog fights. George Lucas based many of those things in Star Wars on footage from World War Two of the fighter planes, dog-fighting at Midway and what have you. This book was a great way to show that even the fighters swarming between the capital ships are the size of a triple-decker bus. I also loved that it had an almost upstairs, downstairs dynamic between the bridge crew and the menials. You have the people below the waterline, the oil-stained men and women who were loading the torpedo tubes and throwing ‘coal’ into the engine. For them this was war at its most callous, because what they did ultimately had little to no effect, and they were at the mercy of people higher up the chain. Is our captain good? Are the gunners good? We can shovel the coal and pull the chains, and hopefully we’ve loaded the torpedo fast enough that they can get the salvo off. But our lives are at the mercy of people we will never meet, never see. And that dispassionate distance between those characters, I think, really added something to the scale of the Imperium, and the scale of the ships – that some of these people would toil in the darkness of a spaceship’s engine room and never see sunlight. They would be born in there and they would die in there, never having set foot on a planet at all. So this book oozes 40k character, that grim darkness of the far future where you are just grateful for this chance to serve the Emperor. It really hammers home the bleakness of the Imperium. But also these people are surrounded by this belief system, this osmosis of the Imperial mindset, so that it feels like something good to them. It helped really establish the character of 40k beyond a lot of other sci fi, and that’s partly what drew me to 40k way back in the day. A lot of the sci fi we were seeing was very clean, very optimistic. This future is not all clean and silver jumpsuits, it’s not Buck Rogers in the 25th Century , it’s not Star Trek . And don’t get me wrong, I love Star Trek with a deep and abiding passion! But they feed different things in me. The Executioner Hour did, for me, a really great job of reinforcing why I loved 40k as a setting, and the way that the characters manoeuvre through this insane universe. One thing I will take issue with is hopelessness. I love me some grimdark – I’ve written in it for over twenty years – but I never write from the point of view that this is hopeless . If everything is just terrible and dark and you can never win, then it veers, for my purposes, a little too close to just being nihilism. If there’s nothing for these characters to strive for, even if it’s an illusory light at the end of the tunnel that’s actually a train coming towards them, then I think you diminish their heroism. If there’s nothing to fight for, then just lie down and die! None of these characters do that. They always fight. Whether that is just to live another minute longer, or for some noble ideal that they think makes victory or sacrifice worthwhile, then that’s something – that’s hope, even if it’s a forlorn hope. I think there’s virtue in exploring the most terrible, cruel worlds imaginable, but still seeing people fight for something, regardless of what that is. There’s something noble in that. That’s what really appeals to me, because I love reading and writing heroic fantasy with the emphasis on ‘heroic’ . There’s a lot of discussion these days about the Imperium and the Space Marines, asking, are these actually the good guys? Because a lot of what they do is very questionable, and the regime they are propping up by fighting for it also has very questionable values at its heart, in some ways. But it’s the act of fighting for something that you believe in – even if those behind you don’t believe in that, it doesn’t diminish the courage of the characters. I think it gives us hope that even when things are so terrible, more so than we could ever imagine in this world, people still fight for something better. In many ways, that’s aspirational. Or maybe it’s just that we like to read about people having a worse day than us… Some terrible, bleak things happen to a lot of my characters. We started this conversation off with the fact that sometimes the bad guys have to win. But with everything, there’s variety of texture that makes things interesting. And if everything’s grimdark all the time, it becomes a bit one-note – just the same as if the good guys always win. So I like to vary everything up. That variety keeps me interested as a writer, and hopefully it keeps people interested as readers. I hope they come to my books thinking, “I’m going to be entertained by a cool story with cool characters, and I don’t know what it’s going to be. Is it going to be something just horrendous and I’m going to need a bath afterwards, or am I going to be inspired to do something?”"