With more than 30 Warhammer novels to his credit Guy Haley has spent much of his career mapping out our grim dark future. Willard Foxton Todd speaks to him about his early experiences with wargaming, his career and the, often brutal, reality of being a fiction writer in the 21st century.
Guy Haley is one of Britain’s most successful science-fiction & fantasy authors, with an astonishing 920,000 copies of his books sold in all formats. A former editor of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine he is, perhaps, best known for his Warhammer novels. One of the key architects of humanity’s grim dark future in the 41st millennium his latest novel, Dark Imperium: Godblight is, at the time of writing, the number two best-selling book on Audible.
At the same time Haley has also written several acclaimed original works and his Richards & Klein series of sci-fi detective novels (imagine Sherlock Holmes as a genius AI) has recently been collected into a new, revised, omnibus edition and published by Angry Robot. We caught up with Haley to discuss how tragedy led him to RPGs, the world of writing in 2021 and a lot more besides…
Wyrd Science: So what was your first leap into gaming?
Guy Haley: In 1983, my house burned down, and my dad got us Dungeons & Dragons. And he ran a few games of that for me and my brothers. I would have been about 10 years old.
But earlier than that, my dad was a toy soldier dealer - he’s a world expert on Britain's toy soldiers. So I used to go and sit in his room when he had his friend round to play games, this was the 1980s, there was thick blue smoke over the gaming table and they’d let me roll the dice. And then I'd get sent off to bed. So yeah, I've been I've been gaming ever since I was really really young. Like really, really really young.
WS: I'm really fascinated by the baroque idea that your father was a toy soldier dealer – did he let you play games with his toy soldiers or were they in a display cabinet, perfect and pristine?
GH: Well, he dealt in loads and loads of different kinds of models. So quite a lot of the time he was playing wargames with his friends, he always played a sort of mid 19th century wargame, but set in a world of their own devising and they used 54-millimetre scale Airfix or Britains Deetail models. So I did get to play with those.
He also had these beautiful building blocks made from actual cast stone. And we used to spend ages in his office building these giant mansions and then he’d let me get these Edwardian wind-up tinplate tanks to drive through the castle walls and knock them down. It was awesome. So yeah, I did get to play with some of them.
Obviously, there were more expensive ones I didn't get to play with, and there were toy soldiers in cabinets. My dad is a very keen collector of Courtney knights, which is a sort of a solid cast range of very, very beautifully painted models based on a 1950s idea of the 100 Years War. I spent ages looking at them because they were just such marvelous, marvelous figures. See, I've been surrounded by toy soldiers my entire life.
WS: So having grown up in this idyllic world of gaming – well, idyllic apart from your house burning down – do your own kids play?
GH: I've tried to get my son into Warhammer and 40K. He loves card games and board games but, the thing is, he doesn't have that draw to the models that I do. I really love the models, I always have done but for him... It's like they're cool but they don't exert that magnetism. He touches on the Warhammer stuff; he thinks Necrons are cool and he likes Cavan Scott’s Warhammer novels. But for him, the world revolves around Marvel comics.
WS: So you mentioned Cavan Scott's young Warhammer novels, which I think are a really interesting kind of jumping off point into the inevitable Warhammer chat. Is it difficult writing Warhammer when the audience is so incredibly broad?
GH: It is a very broad audience. There’s men who are in their 60s that read my books and children, both male and female, who are the same age as my son or younger, who read my novels. It is incredibly difficult writing Warhammer novels, but not for that reason.
WS: Why is it so hard?
GH: I’ll give you an example. When [Warhammer 40K] 8th edition was released, I was asked to do the tie-in book for the release, and my editor said, “Look, you can write whatever you like, but obviously it's got to have Primaris Space Marines in it.”
I said to him, “Well, you know what, you've just brought Roboute Gulliman back, it would be ridiculous not to have a novel about it.” But then Roboute Gulliman is *the* main character in 40K at the moment. I have to tell stories within those restrictions. He's got a model, he's got a lot of rules, I can't cut his head off or turn him to Chaos or kill him or do anything like that.
So, within the strictures that this is a model for a wargame, you have to find a way of telling a meaningful story that actually has heft and consequences.
That's the biggest difficulty of writing stories for these kind of large IP franchises, you're very limited in the absolute change you can effect. So you have to find a way how to fight against the fact that all stories need a progression of events, which end with some form of consequence and the character has to change because of it. Because if you don't have that, then you don't have a story.
So the real trick is finding how to do that but without really changing anything. You've got to change things, but without changing them. And that's really, really difficult, tricky and challenging.
WS: It’s a trick you’ve really mastered – your Horus Heresy novels in particular feel massively consequential. Is there a weight when you're writing about something like the Horus Heresy that you yourself have been reading about for 25-30 years?
GH: There is a huge weight. And there's two things actually that I want to unpack a little bit. One is that writing the Horus Heresy is in some ways easier than writing 40K because the Horus Heresy has a laid out mythical story arc with a beginning, a middle and an end.
And it is full of consequences, right?
You've got a psychic dude who may or may not be a god, trying to save humanity, or maybe not, who can tell. He's got twenty superhuman, oops, eighteen superhuman sons. There’s all these mysterious things going on with aliens and whatnot, and then at the end someone betrays him, he kills his son and he’s imprisoned on a golden throne, which stands for humanity falling into a slow decline, right? You can't get more consequential than that.
But to come back to the original sense of your question - I was absolutely shitting myself when they asked me to write my first Heresy novel. When they asked me to do that, they introduced me at one of the first events I went to as a Horus Heresy writer and I actually said to the guy who introduced me “I'm not comfortable with you doing that, I'm really not”, I was really, really like, “I'm not worthy”.
This was Games Workshop’s biggest fiction line and I was really nervous about it in a way that I haven't really been about writing any of my other novels.
Because it was just... It was a big responsibility. It really was.
WS: But you’ve now written 30 novels, both for Games Workshop and your own creations, and gained an enviable reputation as a writer who can produce quality at speed and on deadline. How do you keep doing it?
GH: I like to think I've got a really professional attitude to writing. For me, you've got arts writers and you've got crafts writers. I think I'm a craft writer. In the sense that for me, writing is like building a chair, you need to learn the trade - everyone can nail two bits of wood together. But not everyone could turn out a Chippendale. I'm not saying that I turn out Chippendales, right? But you could definitely sell my metaphorical chairs in any furniture store and they'd pass muster.
For me it's about writing to the tone and the standard that the market wants. And also I don't agonise over what I write, sometimes I'll write loads, I know writers who will bin tens of 1000s of words, because they're not happy with where it's going. For me, it's like, how do I make these 10,000 words work? How do I make them better, it's more a thing of tweaking stuff and tweaking it until it functions.
And I think that's very much a consequence of being a journalist and a magazine editor where you’ll literally have situations like “We need this 3000 word feature written in an hour and a half.” It needs to be written and what is finished goes in the magazine, because it's going out the door to the printing press.
But not only that, it has to be good. It can't be crap, it can't just be any old 3000 words, it's got to tell its own story. It's got to be the right standard. So yeah, I was forced to write very, very quickly and that became a defining characteristic of who I am now.
WS: That’s very modest. As well as being one of the engines of creativity behind Warhammer, you've also written several original novels, titles like Emperor’s Railroad, Richards & Klein and Champion of Mars, all of which have been well reviewed.
Are those like an indulgence? Do you enjoy writing them more than licensed fiction?
GH: I don't know. What’s different is different. One of the things I always wanted was to be successful in my own right. I mean, if I could have my big dream, I'd like to produce a piece of original fiction which was commercially successful.
All of my books have been much beloved by the editors that have published them and worked with me on them and they've generally been very favourably reviewed. But they haven't found an audience, and I think part of that could very well be that they're just simply not good enough, right?
But I think a large part of it's down just the state of the fiction market. In this day and age there are just so many books being published all of the time. When I started writing it was difficult to get published. But then once you were published it was fairly easy to find success because they invested the time and the money in you to publicise your book. And if you had an editor that believed in you they stuck with you even if you had several failures.
Nowadays, you still get a little bit of that. But mostly they publish loads of books and see what sticks to the wall. And if you're not successful right off the bat, quite often, that's it. You only get one chance, one strike and you're out.
My first few books didn't do terribly well. The first book I published was Richards & Klein, a comedic, quite philosophical, near future, science fiction. It’s been re-released as an omnibus recently and I've taken the opportunity to completely rewrite it and bring it up to the standard of my novels today. I do know that if it sells enough, and that's not a huge amount of books, then there will be a sequel to it.
When I wrote those books a lot of people really, really loved them, but they suffered for a number of reasons. One of which was that internet book piracy was at its absolute height. When it came out I was heartbroken to find it on pirate site after pirate site after pirate site. And I think it came really, really close to actually destroying my writing career before it began.
So then I had to publish some books under a pseudonym. I wrote three books of a five book series set in a fantasy world, under the pen name KM McKinley. I thought, this is brilliant, this is really going to hit home, people are going to love these. But no.
Part of reason for that, I think, is that the week they came out twenty-six other fantasy novels in the English language were published. Ironically, I think this massive choice is driving people towards these big franchises like Star Wars, Warhammer and Doctor Who, because you know what you're going to get. And, I think, as the years have gone by, the standard of writing on all of those fiction lines has gone up.
There were always a few gems back in the day. But I remember when I was a young journalist I was given a tie-in novel to read and was like, “Oh, really do I have to?” You know the quality wasn't often there, some of them were dreadful. Of course, some books of original fiction are equally dreadful!
But the real reason that I didn't like tie-in fiction, when I was younger, was that it didn't feel consequential. You knew someone's going to release a TV episode or a film in six months time which is going to totally invalidate it.
One reason I write for Warhammer is it's not like that. When we write stuff it goes into the universe and, by and large, it becomes part of the part of the canon because that's the nerd impulse, right? You want everything that you like to be real and true.
But- getting back to your original question - I wouldn't really say it's an indulgence. I like the freedom that writing my own stuff offers because I can decide that I'm going to kill the main character.
But I've discovered, as time goes on, that I think I've tried far too much to be clever in my original fiction. My son's very interested in storytelling and one of my brothers is an aspiring screenwriter and I say to them, you must tell the stories that people want to read, they expect stories to follow a certain path.
You can monkey around all you like with narrative expectations but don't expect to sell any stories, because people then feel cheated. You know, they feel like things haven't worked out the way that they anticipated then they're not interested. You can bend the rules, break them a little bit, George RR Martin does it very, very well with his Song of Ice and Fire. But at the end, it still follows that hero's journey, it's just you don't always know who the hero is.
Godblight is out now published by Black Library
Richards & Klein is also out now published by Angry Robot
This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Volume 1, Issue 2 (Sept '21)
