RAPID FIRE: Matthew Farrer Talks Enforcer: The Shira Calpurnia Omnibus

Welcome to this instalment of Rapid Fire, my ongoing series of quick interviews with Black Library authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.

In this instalment I spoke to Matthew Farrer about his fantastic Shira Calpurnia series, which is available to order right now in a newly-reprinted version of Enforcer: The Shira Calpurnia Omnibus.

As usual, let’s get straight to the questions and Matthew’s answers.

Track of Words: What’s the elevator pitch summary for the Shira Calpurnia series?

Matthew Farrer: A strict and straight-arrow Adeptus Arbites commander finds her new world is a jungle of strange customs, twisted politics, and hidden agendas, where none of her old certainties feel quite so certain any more.

ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?

MF: The major character is Shira Calpurnia Lucina, Arbitor Senioris of the Imperial Grand Precinct of Hydraphur. This is a new position for her at the start of the series, the culmination to a stellar career that’s brought her up through the ranks and halfway around the galaxy, and she’s acutely conscious of the demands that her new rank (and her distinguished family line) will require her to meet.

Calpurnia’s the only character we follow from book to book. There’ll be appearances from her Arbites superiors and the assorted officers she ends up commanding, and a cast of aristocrats, Imperial Navy officers, Rogue Traders, members of the Ecclesiarchal sisterhoods and priesthoods, Inquisitors and Mechanicus magi, and more.

ToW: Where and when do these stories take place?

MF: They’re centred on and around the world of Hydraphur, one of the most powerful and prominent systems in the Segmentum Pacificus and the headquarter world for Battlefleet Pacificus. Crossfire takes place on the world itself, with a brief jaunt up to its enormous encircling station the Ring, and Blind is further out in the system aboard the Bastion Psykana, hidden on an eccentric orbit way out amongst the system’s space defences. Legacy steps out of Hydraphur itself a little to follow two subsets of the cast from their starting points further out in the Segmentum but most of their scenes are spent in transit.

The books were set in the contemporary 40K setting at the time they were written, which is to say that they predate the recent upheavals in the setting with the fall of Cadia, Guilliman’s return and so on. If you’re sharp-eyed there are one or two references to timeline events in the books – it’s long enough after the First Tyrannic War and the Sabbat Worlds Crusade for both of those to be part of commonly-known Imperial history, for example. Legacy takes place at the same time as various portents and strange disturbances were spreading across the Ultima Segmentum in the leadup to what became the Eye of Terror campaign. (There are a couple of very oblique mentions of same in the text, but it doesn’t tie in with that event as such. That was really just laying a bit of pipe in case I wanted to do something more direct with it in later stories but I never did.)

ToW: Are there particular themes running across all of the books that readers can expect to see when reading this series?

MF: The theme that I consciously built into all three books is that humans need no help to make trouble for ourselves. The books are very deliberately set on a wealthy, stable, well-protected world far from any warzone. There are no swarms of ravening xenos, hordes of warp-borne nightmares or surly ten-thousand-year-old power-armoured traitors with scores to settle. (The one time we do run into a warp entity in the books it’s more a sort of quasi-animate industrial accident rather than a story-defining antagonist.)

But the thing is that really, this universe doesn’t need any of those things to carry a good story. The timeless human failings – greed, jealousy, fear, desire for power, zealotry, the whole gamut – are always with us. And since another theme that the series explores is how the Imperium’s culture is this nightmare funhouse-mirror reflection of our own, you get this fascinating chance to hold all these elements up to it and see what looks back out at you.

If you’re on a safe world and are only barely aware of the sorts of horrors that we as players and readers know about from our Codices, if you’re housed and fed and you spend your days buried so deep in the workings of this giant labyrinthine Imperium that you could go half a lifetime without meeting anyone from outside your organisation or even your tiny subsection of it, and your hours and days are regimented according to schedules and doctrines laid down a millennium before you were born…what scares you? What do you long for but dare not admit to? What do you want badly enough that you’d murder for it? What’s important enough for you to die for? What revolts you so much that you’d willingly burn if it meant burning that thing along with you?

Crime stories are great for these sorts of questions, by the way, because they push you right to the edge of what your fictional society considers to be transgressive and throws questions about authority, humanity, law and the value of life into sharp and bleeding relief. I’ll talk a bit more about that below.

ToW: Is there anything that you’d recommend readers check out before reading this series?

MF: I did try to make sure these books would stand alone as much as they could, so they wouldn’t depend on anyone having read this novel or that Codex for the stories to work. A basic general knowledge of the 40K-verse ought to be enough to get the full flavour of the thing and there are one or two particular references that people might pick up if they’ve read particular other works, but nothing’s essential.

ToW: Why these stories? What made you want to write them in particular?

MF: I’ve talked a bit above about how I was drawn to this particular part of the setting by its strangeness and how these really cool themes kept bobbing up out of them. It was also kind of fun to be able to home in on parts of the setting that hadn’t yet had a lot written about them and – I know this is going to sound selfish, but to get to them first, plant my flag there a bit. There’s a bit of an ego boost in knowing that there’s this part of a setting out there that’s in the shape it is because that’s the shape that you made it, even if it’s something as minor as a piece of terminology or a particular visual cue.

ToW: What were your main influences when writing these stories?

MF: I like to say that everything a writer reads, sees and hears is an influence to some degree, it all goes back into the chemical pool in the backs of our minds to dissolve and recrystallise. Often I don’t really know myself what might have influenced a particular story, at least at the time, but with these books I can name a couple.

I read Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith not long before I wrote the books, and I remember that being a big influence. It’s the story of a detective investigating a grisly multiple murder in Soviet Moscow, and I was struck by the way that the cops in the book had to keep justifying their activities as serving the ends of the revolution and reinforcing the inevitable righteousness of Communism. It wasn’t enough to treat murder as self-evidently wrong, they had to frame crime and punishment through the Party’s ideological rhetoric, something the protagonist struggled with a bit. (I admit I may be oversimplifying here, I’m going on fairly old memories of the book at this point.) But that was what got me really thinking about what it might be like trying to enforce the law and bring about justice in a system built on ideas about justice that are totally different to our own. And what would a protagonist look like who willingly embraced those different ideas and made the reader look across this huge cultural divide to try and understand their commitment to a completely different framing of right versus wrong? Once I started thinking about that an Arbites story was the natural next step.

The second big conscious influence which comes out in the books at the character level was Ancient Shadows, a novella from Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time sequence. Its protagonist is a dour time-traveller named Dafnish Armatuce, from a famine-struck and fanatically austere society, who finds herself at the End of Time where scarcity has been vanquished so totally that its inhabitants simply can’t grasp the concept of self-denial. Poor Dafnish’s culture shock has its echo in how I saw Calpurnia’s worldview contrasting with the Hydraphur aristocrats she deals with in Crossfire.

Honourable mentions go to Gormenghast and Gulliver’s Travels. There were two specific things I had in mind from them. From the former, an early scene where the reward for creating the finest sculpture that pleases the ruler is the chance to walk up and down the tower’s ramparts for a short time at sundown. That’s it, that’s the whole reward. From the latter, the courtiers of Lilliput putting tremendous effort into mastering these gymnastic challenges that would win them the right to wear different-coloured threads tied around their waists, which then had huge implications for positions and prestige at court. (Again, I may have some of the details a little off, it’s been a while.) In each case I liked the idea of a culture that had had time to grow so complex and quirky that something so apparently trivial to an outsider could have this amazing, life-changing significance to an insider. Calpurnia’s status as a fish out of water outsider (which she wasn’t in the original imagining of the story) was to help bring out this aspect of the cultures she interacts with – the Hydraphur aristocracy, the Ecclesiarchy, the Rogue Trader flotilla, and the weird turned-in culture of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.

ToW: How do you feel the series as a whole fits together? Did your vision for the whole thing change over the course of writing all of the books?

MF: I’m not sure I had a vision for ‘the whole thing’ going in. There was a certain feel that I knew I wanted, that feeling of strangeness, the dystopian darkness expressed through this over-the-top baroque pageantry. But there was never a tight long-term plan for the Calpurnia books, no metaplot arc. My recollection is that I approached each book as its own project.

When I look back on them I tend to see technique issues more than anything. I feel that Crossfire hangs together best as an overall story, but on a scene-by-scene level I’m most pleased with some of the set-pieces I was able to create for Legacy. Blind has a more fatalistic, elegiac tone to it that I think I intended at the time but I think that led to it drawing threads from the first two books together rather better than it might otherwise have done.

ToW: Alongside Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn series, the Shira Calpurnia novels are often referenced as great examples of ‘domestic 40k’, away from the big battlefields. Was that an intentional aim as you were writing them?

MF: Oh, yes. The work that defined my vision of the 40K-verse was the old Codex Imperialis from the game’s second edition. A huge portion of that was devoted to the Imperium, and there were lavish lore sections on all these Adeptus arms like the Astra Telepathica, the Administratum, the Ministorum (long before they got their own high-profile fighting force). Those were really the sections that caught my imagination. In a lot of ways a battlefield is pretty simple and relatable, even to civilians: here you are, weapon in your hands, there the enemy is, weapon in theirs. That sense of fascination came from trying to imagine myself into the lives of the everyday people I read about in those texts and saw in those incredible John Blanche pieces. Drawing on that, trying to build on it and pass on my own version of it, was absolutely an intentional aim.

ToW: How does this story compare to the rest of your work? Is it a familiar style, or a departure?

MF: I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about how to answer this one. Thing is, at the time I was writing them these books made up the overwhelming majority of my work – a quick bit of mental arithmetic suggests that Crossfire on its own more than doubled, maybe tripled, the amount of words I had in print. So for a very long time there was no real ‘rest of my work’ to be a departure from, those books defined it. Writing them was a fundamental part of actually developing my style. It would be easier to turn the question around and look at how other things I’ve written develop from the style I developed on the Calpurnia books. I consciously tried for something more grounded and colloquial with Junktion, for example (and first-person, which I don’t tend to use much, helped with that a lot). I tried to go the other way for short pieces like Faces or The Masters, Bidding and try for a style that was more deliberately baroque and evocative in and of itself. Currently with Urdesh I’m trying to strip it back a bit and make the prose sleeker and pacier. We’ll see how that works out.

ToW: Are there aspects of Shira’s story that you would still like to continue and write more about? [MINOR SPOILER AHEAD]

MF: At this point? No. There was a point where I was thinking of these stories as an open-ended series that I could take through many more books, and I’d been giving some thought to a fourth book to the point of having a rough concept worked out (a title, even: it was going to be called Ashes). But once I had a little distance on those stories, the trilogy seemed more and more to be complete within itself, and trying to bolt more stories onto it felt like the wrong move. I know there’s some feeling that the final book ended on a cliffhanger, but I don’t share that. While the story doesn’t show her final fate once she’s returned from the Bastion Psykana (even I don’t know what becomes of her), the third book took her to a concluding point in her own personal story. She’d had her own commitment and faith in her role and duty put to the severest test and could take pride in how she had met that challenge. I found that a satisfying note to end on.

I never say never about these things, but here and now I don’t see myself doing any more Calpurnia stories.

***

Thanks so much to Matthew for taking the time to provide such in-depth, fascinating answers to these questions. You can read a review here of the first novel in this series – Crossfire – and a few further thoughts about that book here.

If you fancy taking a look at some other Rapid Fire interviews, just click here. If you’ve got any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, on Facebook or Twitter, or by emailing me at michael@trackofwords.com.