It’s been a while since my last Rapid Fire interview with a Black Library author, but I’m back with my first of 2024 and it’s a doozy – please welcome the fantastic Victoria Hayward to talk about her debut novel, Deathworlder! After several great 40k short stories, I’m sure I’m not the only reader who’s been looking forward to Victoria’s first novel (which goes up for pre-order from BL/GW tomorrow), and joining the ever-growing and consistently impressive range of Astra Militarum novels, Deathworlder promises to be a Catachan novel like no other. If you’re keen to find out more about what to expect, we’ve definitely got you covered with this interview.
You’ll notice that this is a pretty long interview, because there’s loads of good stuff to dig into! So strap in, and read on as we really go into detail about this fascinating-sounding book. You can expect in-depth considerations on what makes Catachans so interesting to write about, and how Victoria developed her particular interpretation of them (including thinking way back to the original planetary settlers!); why the Tyranids make such great adversaries, especially as this is set during the last days of a doomed world; a delve into Victoria’s writing process…and loads more!
***
Track of Words: Huge congratulations on your debut novel coming out! To start things off though, could you tell us a bit about Deathworlder and what readers can expect from it?
Victoria Hayward: Thank you so much!
Deathworlder pitches Catachans against Tyranids during the end-stages of the consumption phase. We are mere days away from this world being a barren rock with no seas and no atmosphere – with even the most fragmentary speck of life having been broken down and consumed.
Our squad has been under siege, watching as the skies writhe with the nightmare forms of the orbiting hive fleet. They are given one last chance to make a difference, one last chance to do something meaningful – but it means crossing a world in the throes of destruction.
So – readers can expect some gnarly scenes of socking it to the xenos, a LOT of Tyranids (in terms of both volume and variety), some insights into Catachan culture, a Baneblade being jump-started, a few Sly Marbo jokes, plus love, loss and tiny Tyranids. I hope very much it includes everything that you might want to see against a backdrop of the cosmic horror of a world being dismantled.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do readers need to know about them?
VH: Our squad is led by Major Wulf Khan (Catachan 903rd Night-Shrikes). She’s a battle-hardened veteran. She knows exactly how bad things are on this world, but it’s her job to get her troops across the apocalypse. She will move heaven and earth to protect the soldiers who follow her.
Sergeant Rutger Haruto is Khan’s second. He’s very sharp and analytical, and probably rather different to what most people might expect a Catachan to be, once you get past the fact he’s a massive, grumpy-looking unit. Haruto is strongly motivated by doing the right thing – which precludes any other loyalties.
Trooper Falke Adair is another of Khan’s troops – and is absolutely the archetypal Catachan. She’s the biggest and most physically powerful character in the book. She’s hot-headed, cocky and rude, but loyal to a fault. She also has a cheeky sense of humour which manifests itself through bad jokes, and teasing everyone.
Lieutenant Kaede Anditz (Cadian 82nd) is precise, professional, highly skilled and a little uptight. He carries a serious burden with him throughout the novel. He absolutely has as hard a time adapting to the Catachans as they do to him.
ToW: Where and when is this set?
VH: We are on a geoformed gem-world called Lazulai. Once beautiful, with a rich culture and cities built from precious stones and green, sighing fields of tisane – but the inequalities of the world have caught up with it. The gem-workers dying of lung disease, the moth farmers whose feet rot off after long days spent labouring in livestock shit – they didn’t feel the benefit of Imperial rule. And so, they turned elsewhere – to an Emperor with rather more arms…
And in terms of when, we are bang in the middle of Hive Fleet Leviathan’s latest activities.
ToW: What is it about Catachans that, for you, makes them interesting as characters to write about?
VH: I love writing them so much. They’re irreverent, pragmatic, they have a cheeky sense of humour. They also clearly have a rich oral history and folk culture, as we see in the legend of Sly Marbo.
Baked into the background is that they also have different approaches to regiments from other worlds – we all know they’re not fond of commissars, for example. Catachans elect their officers, whilst on Cadia, the officer rank can be hereditary. How do these differences affect Catachan perceptions of, and interactions with other regiments?
On a planet where everyone is massive and strong, that’s a common trait, not an outstanding virtue. So what is treated as a virtue on Catachan? What is valued?
ToW: While the Catachans perhaps haven’t had quite as much page time as Cadians, they’re still a pretty familiar regiment which a fair few authors have tackled. How did you go about deciding who/what the Catachans really are for you, and what angle you wanted to take with them, to set your depiction apart?
VH: This was a really fun thing to do. I should preclude this answer by saying that mine is obviously just one interpretation – as you’ve said, this is what Catachans are for me.
So, I imagine that most people (including in-universe!) might look at Catachans and think they know everything about them. But I wanted to dig a little deeper and do some thought experiments, I suppose, about what might lie under the surface.
In terms of my thought process, I went back to the beginning of what we know about Catachans, to think about their origins, how they became ‘Catachan’ – and how this process might have formed and impacted their culture.
It’s very interesting to me to consider the experience of the original settlers who crash-landed on Catachan. They wake up to find themselves on this nightmare jungle planet where everything is poisonous or trying to eat you, or both. What kind of people does that grow? It seemed to me that from the start, to survive on Catachan you’d have to rely on each other. It was always going to be them against the jungle. It didn’t strike me that you’d function very well as an individualist society in an environment where the resources are so strained, and the margins between survival and death are so slim. You’re not all going to survive, but you want your people to live on, so you have to look out for each other. You need to be watching each other’s backs all of the time – there’s not space to be selfish, or to place yourself first. There’s no margin for error.
This is actually akin to a concept in cultural anthropology called a levelling mechanism. It’s a practice in some cultures to manage people within a community who begin to consider themselves better or above the rest of that community. Basically if you get too big for your boots, you’ll be dealt with. You don’t get to endanger your people through selfishness or recklessness, or to look down on them. In my short story Nightsider Imperialis that’s essentially what happens within the Catachan squad as a practical example of this.
So, with this quite egalitarian and pragmatic underpinning in mind, I considered the ways in which this might manifest, how this might look in terms of interactions with other people. I think they’d probably assess value in a fairly holistic way – I don’t think they’d automatically write someone off who wasn’t like them. Rather I suspect they’d be asking ‘Okay, so what do you bring? How do you help us survive?’ If you all think and do stuff in the same way, there’s probably a gap in your approach. So yes, I reckon there’d be little room for conceit or misplaced judgement because there’s a cost to that that you can’t afford on Catachan. Superficial prejudice is a luxury they can’t afford. I also think they’d find the fact that on some other worlds officers can inherit their positions to be highly suspect. Catachans normally elect their officers because they’ve proved themselves worthy of leading. That’s another tension that’s quite fun to explore in terms of interactions with other regiments.
Generally, I figured that they’d be very collaborative, and consider problems as a collective. This is partly practical, because you need to rely on others, but also I thought about what kind of stories Catachans would tell about themselves, and their own understanding of how they came to be Catachan. I like to imagine they might have an oral history and a sense of this settler legacy – a LOT of people wouldn’t have survived during the time the settlers were figuring out how to live on Catachan. For example, whichever poor bastard tried to find out whether barking toads were edible. But – they’re still part of the Catachan story. Without them, the settlers wouldn’t have learned to survive. The people who didn’t make it learned the hard lessons for their people. And when you go through something as horrific as those settlers did as a community, you make that mean something. You make that into legend.
The other thing I thought about was how Catachans might feel about their planet. It’s vanishingly unlikely that once you leave your world as a soldier, you’ll ever return. So how does that feel, when a planet has made you in such a tangible way as Catachan makes Catachans? Absolutely everything is trying to kill you in horrific ways, even the climate is poisonous – but you wouldn’t be you without it. It will have been a constant participant in your life until the day you leave. There’s a beautiful concept in Welsh, about Wales, which has no direct translation into English – ‘hiraeth.’ It roughly means a heartsickness for your homeland. a yearning and sadness for something forever lost in time and place. There’s a deep wistfulness to it which I could imagine might sit within many Catachans, this sense of loss of a part of yourself, that the rest of your life will be lived without a world which you will have been in dialogue with since the day you were born.
I hope it feels as if we get to hear about Catachans from their own perspective as well. I mentioned that it seemed likely they had a rich oral history too. I suspect record-keeping was likely a challenge in the early days which is why it would have been important to tell sagas and legends to each other – to build a sense of who they were. This is where the idea for Catachan poetry came from. I should say upfront, I’m afraid you don’t get to hear any! That was something I wanted to leave to the imagination 🙂
Anyhow, I could bang on about this all day because I find it fascinating! But yes, that was how I approached it, based on the lore and source material. I hope it gives readers a slightly different angle to think about it from too.
I will caveat all of this by saying that in amongst this quite in-depth consideration, we have my favourite character, Trooper Falke Adair, who is a big dumb jock who teases her squadmates a bit too much and tells really bad jokes. But she’s also fiercely loyal and can rip a Tyranid in half with her bare hands.
So I like to think we have the best of Catachan, in all of its forms 🙂
ToW: Can you tell us a bit about your decision-making process in terms of choosing to not just pit Catachans against Tyranids (which is a great combo), but also to set the story during the end phase of a Tyranid invasion?
VH: Haha thank you! So as soon as I knew I could have Tyranids as an adversary I was thinking about the setting/planet and what that might look like. I knew I wanted the world to once have been very pleasant (at least for some of the people living there) but to have fallen into a terrible state of disrepair. Once you start thinking about that in the context of having a Tyranid invasion on-world, the only logical next step is to see that through to the end.
I also don’t believe that we’ve had a novel set entirely during the consumption phase. I loved Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Day of Ascension, and it made me curious to explore what might happen next. How might cults react when they see the reality of their ‘angels?’
Also, I thought it would also give us some opportunities to explore some really gross things in a new format. Such as – what if the actual air is eating you alive at this stage? The whole planet is digesting everything, being transformed into a huge, digestive machine. Everything is going to be so thick with xenos spores, that’s going to start causing you some pretty nasty problems.
The scenario also allows us to put some real pressure on the characters. There’s no deadline like a ‘within a few days this planet will be a barren rock’ kind of deadline!
There’s also something perversely fun about picking up a story where most others finish. By the time Tyranids arrive on your world, things are normally already over. If you’re seeing a hive fleet, you’re really up spore creek without a paddle. And this is really the end for this world. Nobody can save it, there is no turning back. The fighting is pretty much over, most of the settlements are destroyed, there’s no meaningful defence, most people are already dead. So we have this feeling that we’re sort of backstage after hours. The show’s over, there’s a guy with a broom sweeping upstage, the lights are off. Nobody is supposed to be here seeing this bit where the Tyranids are mopping up the last biomass. But we get to stay, and watch what happens.
ToW: How do you find world building within the scope of 40k – i.e. finding spaces and freedom within the bounds of the IP to do new, interesting things with locations and ideas?
VH: Oh it’s great. 40k is such a fun place to be working in. It’s an aesthetic and a vibe as much as anything, and I think the possibilities are boundless, really. There are new and horrible conundrums to pose for humanity at every turn, and the eye and lived experience of every creator working in the setting is going to turn up something slightly different. For me, each story starts with something like a little fragment – normally a predicament or a tension that a character finds themselves in. The setting allows for many, many tensions within characters struggling with their purpose, or humanity, or desire to survive. Tensions are where you get the really interesting character development, and 40k is basically a setting of nonstep tension, so it’s great for that!
In terms of thinking about the IP – I really, really like asking theoretical questions and seeing what spiralled out of that. As I think is probably evident in my answer about how I approached writing Catachans haha! I like considering the lived experience and culture and ways in which people in the setting might construct their worlds and individual meaning and purpose. And there are endless possibilities for that.
In terms of locations – being transported by place is something I’ve always enjoyed as both a reader and a writer. I’ve been lucky to write quite a range – cities like Varangantua, but also a singing desert in my short Blood Sands, a night forest in Nightsider Imperialis, and a tropical jungle in The Carbis Incident. And obviously now, a Tyranid apocalypse in Deathworlder. That was especially fun because obviously the environment is going to change across the course of the consumption phase, so exploring those shifts was pretty cool. Lazulai is a world I invented too, and it was a lot of fun to think about how it started out, where things went wrong and so on.
Just generally, there is such a huge legacy of creation in this setting, it’s like an incredible tapestry on which games designers, sculptors, artists and writers have been working. To be able to pick it up and embroider a corner of it is really special. Everyone makes a unique contribution to this cohesive whole – and the creative community is fantastic. Every single Black Library author I’ve encountered has been a total legend. Just universally supportive and collegiate. Everyone loves what they’re doing, and brings something different to it and is excited to see what others do and bring too.
ToW: When you’re working within an IP like 40k, do you pay much attention to the legacy of great stories – in this case Imperial Guard stories – that have gone before, or do you just concentrate on making it the best book you can?
VH: Absolutely both – so many of us writing in the setting have been inspired by reading Gaunt’s Ghosts for example. Naturally, I went back to the Catachan classics for research purposes as well as reading the work my colleagues have been doing in the Astra Militarum imprint that Deathworlder is part of. Of course I can’t not mention Justin Woolley’s Catachan Devil here, and Andy Clark’s Steel Tread which I absolutely loved. It’s a darned good adventure! We’ve obviously got Rob Rath, Jude Reid and Justin Hill doing sterling work in and around Cadia. I also have to mention Rhu James’ tank short here, The Sum of Its Parts, which is gorgeous.
So yes – lots of great work and I’ve barely scratched the surface there! But everyone works in such a unique style and I think it’s so important to retain your own voice. For me, the work of my colleagues acts as an inspiration and gets me excited to write – but I think the best way of paying tribute to their creativity is to give voice to my own. We’re absolutely singing in a choir here, a big, awful grimdark choir 🙂
ToW: Looking beyond the bounds of Black Library fiction, what other influences or inspirations did you draw upon with these characters and this book?
VH: Oh gosh, well, I’ll start more generally with a couple of authors who really inspire me as both a reader and a writer. I love Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice and read it on repeat. It’s both so elegant and glacially enormous and clever, but at the same time so warm. I adore Breq and just find the character dynamics so perfect. I think Leckie’s worldbuilding is so graceful and skillfully deployed.
I was listening to an Alan Moore talk about the art and magic of writing, and he recommended Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the basis of the terrible, violent beauty of McCarthy’s language. It was just mind-blowing to read, a sublime, awful onslaught, but one you can’t put down.
Now, thinking about writing Deathworlder specifically, I read quite a few first-hand accounts of jungle warfare. I always try to make sure there’s a grain of reality when I’m writing science-fiction, and that’s often about sensation. I hope I’ve managed to evoke how it might feel to be in such an environment.
I drew a bit on some anthropology too when I was thinking about Catachans – although not in a scientific way, I should hasten to add. More as an inspiration. I mentioned the levelling mechanism concept before, but thinking about the development of cultures generally was something I found very interesting. There’s a lovely poem by Neil Gaiman which I think chimes with the themes I was considering. It’s called ‘The Mushroom Hunters’ and it’s about the first humans, and the first scientists, and how we learn collectively.
Finally, in the process of writing this book I think I listened to the Darktide soundtrack more than anyone in the world because it came to be a thing I had to have on while writing.
And of course, I was inspired by the decades of art depicting the unique and nightmare grandeur of the worlds of Warhammer. John Blanche’s work absolutely underpins the strange, murky and brilliant horrors of the setting. There are nods to other parts of Warhammer history too – keen-eyed readers may spot one scene in particular with some Mordheim-flavoured weirdness.
ToW: You’ve had a range of BL short stories released already, but how does it feel to now see your debut novel about to hit the shelves?
VH: Absolutely incredible. I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid, but new books weren’t something we were able to afford growing up (they still feel like a luxury even now!), so to think that I’m going to be holding a brand new novel with my name on it is absolute magic.
It’s probable I’ll scream every time I see it on a bookshelf.
ToW: Could you give us an overview of your general writing process, and whether that changed at all over the course of writing this novel?
VH: My stories always start with a glimpse of character and a situation they’re in. It’s a bit like peering through a keyhole. I have to get on the other side of the door and get to know them, but there’s a little moment of something I’m privy to that means I know they’re worth talking to, as it were. I build up more about them and their relationships from there, which spins into scenes and character moments.
For Deathworlder, I started with Major Wulf Khan. I had a clear, initial image of her, standing grizzled and stoic on the battlements of a fortress on this beleaguered world, regarding this nightmare hellscape of chitin and quietly smoking a cheroot. She’s kind of a father figure archetype, a physically powerful and dignified veteran who is generally measured and wise, but will walk through hell to protect her soldiers. She experiences conflict at times between this personal imperative, and her role as an officer. But Catachans don’t get to choose whether they become an officer – they’re elected. She’s in this position of trust because her troops believed she should be, and so she cannot fail. She must find strength from within herself to keep going.
It’s that mental and emotional stamina you find when you need to be strong, in the face of extraordinary circumstances to keep going for the people you love. I think we all of us at some time in our lives will encounter that, although it’s normally figurative, but for Khan, at the end of this world, that’s literal. Anyway, once I knew this about her, the rest of the story began to unspool itself, and the events that had to happen to Khan started to become clear to me!
Something I’ve learned over the last few years is that my approach to plotting and story design is very character-driven. I previously struggled trying to engineer plots for my characters to move through. I didn’t find this process very inspiring, or natural. Working with my mentor, Gav Thorpe, has been amazing because he helped to unlock my understanding that you can in fact let characters themselves be the story, and allow their wants and mistakes and the fulfilment or frustration of their desires to become the plot beats. Once that had clicked for me, things became much easier. It seems obvious now because it chimes with the types of stories I like to read as well, but this is an example of where having someone to bounce ideas off is invaluable!
Outside of character design, I do think about environments quite a lot. I have a think about the different locations we’re going to see, what they’re going to feel like and smell like and so on. I sort of build ‘sets’ so that when we get to them, they hopefully feel quite texturally coherent. There were of course many more ‘sets’ and characters in the novel than I’m used to preparing for a short, so it ended up taking quite a lot of time!
Victoria’s excellent short story Bone Armour is featured in Grimdark Magazine issue 30
ToW: How have you found the creative process of working on this novel, alongside the BL editorial team and the other BL authors?
VH: Oh fabulous. Really, really good fun. It’s such a good feeling to be part of a team with the folks at Black Library – to know that you have someone on your side, equally ready to chat through fun scenes and tricky plot points. My wonderful editor was so generous and patient, as were the whole BL team and also the wider team of folk at GW who are so passionate and knowledgeable.
The Black Library author community is absolutely wonderful – it’s truly a gang of good eggs, and I benefited greatly from their support, advice and friendship over the course of writing this novel.
It’s nice to be in a position where I owe a lot of great people a lot of pints!
ToW: From a writing craft perspective, is there anything in particular that you learned during the process of working on Deathworlder?
VH: This sounds silly, but I learned how to write a novel! I found it very different to shorts, and although logically I thought it would be like those, but bigger – that was wrong.
The shape and pacing were all theoretical before, but having actually gotten in there and done it, I have a practical sense of it which I think has only come with actually doing it.
ToW: To finish off, if you were to join the 903rd what sort of role do you think you’d take, and why?
VH: I would 100% be Adair’s little minion, helping her bully any commissars assigned to our unit.
***
Victoria Hayward is a trained historitor who spent her youth serving as an acolyte in a Games Workshop store. She writes about black holes and the palaces of despots in her day job as a science communicator and her favourite corners of the 40K universe are those occupied by the Inquisition – which is all of it. Her work for Black Library includes the Warhammer 40,000 novel Deathworlder, and the short stories The Siege of Ismyr and The Carbis Incident. She resides in Nottingham, where she keeps birds and practises printmaking.
Follow Victoria on Twitter and Instagram.
***
Huge, huge thanks to Victoria for agreeing to this interview, and for taking so much time to write these brilliant, in-depth answers – I know I won’t be the only person super keen to read Deathworlder after reading this interview! It sounds amazing, and I can’t wait to dig into it.
See also: all of the Victoria Hayward reviews and interviews on Track of Words
Deathworlder is up for pre-order via Games Workshop tomorrow, or on Amazon now ahead of its publication on the 25th of April – check out the links below to pre-order* your copy:
If you enjoyed this interview and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.