One of the best things about running this blog is getting to talk to authors. Today I’m happy to present an interview with Victoria Hayward, author of the upcoming Warhammer 40,000 novel Deathworlder. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Q: For those who don’t know you already, please introduce yourself.

Hello! Like many of you, I first wandered into a Games Workshop store as a kid and was captivated by the whole gnarly aesthetic of the setting and the energy of the community. It’s been a constant in my life and friendships since, so it’s been absolutely awesome to have the opportunity to write in the setting.

I’m a historian by training and a big fan of birds, so those are things you’ll see surfacing in my stories, as well as a bit of a penchant for the gross.

Q: Your debut novel Deathworlder comes out on April 13th. What can you tell us about it?

Deathworlder pits Catachans versus Tyranids in a fight ticking down to the death of a planet. The novel starts as we’re entering the end phase of a Tyranid invasion. The Imperium has lost the war for the world. There are huge, awful hive ships in orbit, the sky is churning with xenos and even the air is starting to consume living tissue as the entire ecosystem is turned into a massive, planetary digestive process. It’s a very bad place to be and nobody is coming to rescue our protagonists.

In the midst of this, Major Wulf Khan is given one last mission – one last opportunity to do something meaningful at the end of the world – and sets out with a small squad into the apocalypse.

It’ll be for you if you’d like to see Catachans in a jungle, a really large number of Tyranids, and character-driven drama in the midst of an apocalypse!

Q: Science fiction is a broad genre. What is it that appeals to you?

I think just that! It contains multitudes, and allows us to experiment with concepts we’ve never before had to wrestle with, or to transpose contemporary challenges into fresh contexts.

The first Science Fiction I remember reading was H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon when I was at primary school and Andre Norton’s Android at Arms soon after. Images from those books are lodged in my mind even now. Their strangeness and ability to transport you from your everyday life compelled me then as it does now.

As well as difference, Science Fiction can of course provide a space for familiarity and belonging. As a kid who grew up with Star Trek I found a lot of resonance with seeing people and selves I’d never seen elsewhere who really spoke to me. And of course, wonderful communities have grown up out of science fiction. I first walked into a Games Workshop when I was fourteen or so, and the friends I made there still remain some of the most important in my life.

Q: The tyranids are possibly the most alien xenos in Warhammer. How did you approach such inhuman characters as a writer?

Haha, well firstly, never approach a Tyranid too closely! 😉

For myself, I was very interested in keeping them very alien and other. Folk have done some sterling work in the setting unpacking alien minds (I’m thinking Nate Crowley’s brilliant Necrons here) which I love, but for Tyranids, the thing I personally find exciting about them is that they’re not going to be like anything else you will ever have seen or trained for. I see them as the strangeness and coldness and vastness of space personified – anything you think you understand about forms of life won’t apply here. They’re their own, terrifying, weird thing and I tried to keep it that way. I think humans are generally quite interested in understanding and communicating (although we’re not always very good at it), so encountering this adversary where you have no points of reference by which to understand its motives or essential nature is terrifying.

So yes, I didn’t want to give our human characters too much they could hook onto that would feel familiar about their adversary. The only lens we really have into Tyranids are the frameworks of understanding that the Genestealer cultists put up around them – but of course this understanding is going to be parsed through a human brain. They’re never going to have the full picture of what the hive mind really wants. We see this to great effect in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Day of Ascension and the Warhammer+ animation A New Life.

Q: You’ve written short stories for the Inquisition, Astra Militarum, and Warhammer Crime. With such varied characters, do you find any themes that you keep coming back to?

Ooh, that’s interesting to think about. I think I like writing people reckoning with themselves. Perhaps finding themselves in situations where the people and structures that gave them identity and purpose have become unstable and they have to confront the core of who they really are without those things.

I think I often come back to writing odd couples. You’ll see a few of those in the novel certainly. I especially love when one of the couple makes bad jokes, and the other patiently tolerates them. This is something I certainly value in my own relationships and therefore I do put into my own writing.

Texture and atmosphere are things I enjoy writing very much. Imagining something beautiful or terrible, ideally both. I suppose it’s a little like the Romantic concept of the sublime – the fear and awe at the vast power and grandeur in nature and the overwhelming sensation it generates. Except instead of Vesuvius erupting, we have endless seas of Tyranids swarming across a world, grotesque and multitudinous and unstoppable in endless variations. The vast power is overwhelming, the flows of obliteration, unthinking and absolutely uncaring. How do you possibly reckon with that or confront that as a single human body with a frail human mind? One of the horrible scenes I most liked to visualise for Deathworlder was a drowned cathedral, reclaimed by the sea, with Tyranids swimming in the dark waters. The thought of the endless, cold depths sucking at the stonework and statuary was delicious.

Q: How does your approach differ between writing short fiction and a novel?

It’s very different. There was much more collaboration and planning in advance to get the plot nailed, and of course you have the luxury (and challenge!) of playing out character arcs and plots across a much greater span.

I need to do a lot of character work upfront along with a lot of ‘set building’ – thinking about texture for example. There were of course many more ‘sets’ and characters in the novel than I’m used to preparing for a short, so I did a lot of reading and planning upfront and did end up going down a few rabbit holes with that.

Q: With Catachan fighters and Tyranids existing in miniature form, have you been tempted to recreate your novel on the tabletop?

Oh my god. Okay my first reaction is that I would LOVE to see this, but I have created an absolute nightmare for anyone trying to do it because there are so many different Tyranid forms in there. We’re at the end of the consumption phase, but obviously that happens at a slightly different rate across a world, so you have overlapping Tyranid forms/functionalities present. And I absolutely took every opportunity to have as many types of Tyranid as I possibly could!

In terms of modelling, I do dabble with painting every now and then, but without any particular ability. Maybe it would be nice to recreate a set piece, build a diorama of one of the more dramatic moments? I’d certainly be over the moon if anyone out there recreated anything from the story.

Q: Warhammer is one of the cornerstones of the Grimdark genre, but what does the term ‘grimdark’ mean to you?

Well, I think there are the kinds of things people are most likely familiar with around the moral ambiguities. I have a friend who classified it very nicely as a genre of ‘bad people who make bad decisions, then bad things happen.’

So you know what you’re not going to be getting in terms of a nice, happy tale – but there’s also the scope that working in this space opens up to operate outside normative story paradigms. It’s very interesting as a writer to be able to subvert heroism and how people interact. Expectations are different about the shape of stories. Efforts aren’t required to be paid off, loyalty or bravery aren’t always rewarded, and happy endings are unusual.

When we’re talking about Grimdark and Warhammer, the aesthetic is of course integral. We have decades of incredible art exploring the decaying grandeur and weirdness of 40K and if you play the games, of course you will yourself have held grimdark in your hands. It’s a real, tangible thing. That’s one of the reasons that I spent a lot of time thinking about the visuals, which hopefully will come across in the novel!

Next up is a little game I like to call d20 Questions. I roll dice, and we see which random questions you end up with.

Q5/20: What was the first science fiction book you read?

I think it might have been H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon when I was at primary school. I recall it being horrifying and fascinating! I remember very vividly the bit with a tentacle sticking out of a jar and the appalling idea that the alien had been placed in there when it was an infant to perform only a mechanical function.

Q9/20: Who is an author you wish more people had heard of?

She is already well-known, but until everyone in the world has read Ancillary Justice, I’m probably going to recommend Ann Leckie 😂. It’s one of my favourite books in the world and I revisit it often.

Q17/20: Which is the best Star franchise- Trek, Wars, or Gate?

Gotta be Trek although I do have a soft spot for Gate.

Finally, where is the best place for people to get updates on you and your work?

I’m variously on Twitter/BlueSky/Insta as @writerVH

I would like to say a big ‘thank you’ to Victoria for agreeing to this interview. Deathworlder is currently available to pre-order, and goes on sale from Games Workshop tomorrow, with a wider release date of the 25th for those who prefer Amazon or Waterstones.