Despite 2020 playing silly buggers, I’ve managed to keep chipping away at the wordface this year. So, barring any major, global catastrophes (they never happen, do they?) I’ll have three new books published in 2021. One’s still under wraps but a couple have just been announced over on the GW site. It’s always exciting working on Warhammer fiction but these two are particularly special. And aren’t those covers amazing?
Liber Xenologis is a super-plush, fully illustrated coffee table book detailing the various horrific aliens that plague mankind in the 41st millennium. I was amazed by some of the content GW allowed me to cover in this book. I’ve always loved the more obscure corners of 40k lore and this book gave me chance to write about creatures and events that have only been hinted at before. It’s also crammed full of new art that is simply jaw dropping. Seriously, I think people will buy extra copies so they can cut pages out and frame them. The Black Library team have done an incredible job with this one. It’s written in-character, from the perspective of Rogue Trader, Janus Draik. He’s a character I know well from the Blackstone Fortress novels and he’s perfectly suited to this kind of work (if a little biased). The book also gave me a chance to revisit lots of the characters from the BSF novels and games, as Draik interviews the various inhabitants of Precipice. I see this as a combination of a 40k background lore book and a continuation of the Blackstone Fortress novels.
Gitslayer is my second chance to hang out with the irascible relic, Gotrek Gurnisson but it’s the first time I’ve ever written a book set in a fungal asylum(!?). It picks up where Ghoulslayer left off and it gives me a chance to explore the Slayer in more detail as he attempts to find a purpose in the Mortal Realms (beyond knocking heads with people). I think Gotrek’s one of the coolest characters to emerge from the Warhammer universes (credit due to William King for dreaming him up) so I’ll keep jumping at chances to write about him.