Adventures In Tie-In Fiction: Ciaphas Cain
I am not, strictly speaking, a fan of Warhammer 40,000. I got into it for a few years when I was a kid, along with every other nerdy boy I knew, but I was always much more interested in assembling and painting the miniatures than actually playing the wargame, and since that’s an expensive hobby to sustain when you’re a child, it didn’t last long.
My dormant interest in the hobby was rekindled by reading Arthur B’s reviews of the extensive tie-in fiction range, which reminded me that the setting is absolutely batshit insane in a way that I remember finding kind of stupid and off-putting as a child, but which I can appreciate now as an adult since I’ve realised that said stupidity is fully intentional, and indeed a big part of the charm for many people. Thus, over the years I have spent an amount of time scrolling the labyrinthine Warhammer 40k wiki that’s frankly embarrassing for someone who doesn’t play the game or collect the models, or even play any of the many, many video game adaptations. But I’ve never actually taken the plunge into the tie-in novels—until today.
A brief primer for those unfamiliar. Warhammer 40,000 is a sci-fi miniatures wargame created by Games Workshop in the 80s and is, as far as I can tell, one of the most popular tabletop games out there alongside D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Tonally, it feels like a cousin to the likes of Judge Dredd and the other 2000 AD comics, being British sci-fi with a heavy dose of satire and a distinctly grimdark tone (indeed, Warhammer 40k is where that phrase came from—it’s a portmanteau of part of the game’s slogan, “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war”).
Set in the 41st millenium (or sometimes in the 42nd, the game’s ongoing meta-plot has advanced recently in ways I’m not entirely caught up on), the game depicts a nightmarish galaxy of empires, aliens and hyperspace daemons where every faction is at least partially evil, and the human faction is far, far from being the least evil. 40k was originally a spin-off of the original Warhammer, a medieval fantasy game, so a lot of the factions are clear analogues of your stock fantasy races, but given a sci-fi twist—the Eldar are post-Tolkien elves with a lot of the familiar tropes attached, the Orks are…orcs except in space, the game recently brought back their version of dwarves as a full faction and they’re as into mining as dwarves usually are, only now their version of mining involves consuming whole planets. In addition to the sci-fi element there is magic and mysticism present, mostly stemming from the Warp that facilitates faster than light travel and the various powers that lurk within it—including Chaos, which is a faction of straight-up demons.
Apart from the whole grimdark thing, about which more in a moment, 40k’s distinguishing feature is how metal it is. Every single aspect of the setting is cranked up to 15. the Space Marines aren’t just guys in power armour, they’re eight foot tall genetically-enhanced supermen with poisonous blood who use handguns that fire exploding shells instead of bullets. Battles can result in billions of deaths and entire planets exploding. Humans have forgotten how technology works, so a priesthood of cyborgs keeps things running with prayers and incense. A normal Imperial battleship looks like this:
And that’s just the human faction. Some of the aliens are even more over the top.
About those humans, I mentioned that Everyone Is Evil is one of the underpinning concepts of the setting. The primary human faction is the Imperium of Man, the reconstituted scraps of an older, fallen galactic civilization that’s like several flavours of communist and fascist dictatorships crossed with a medieval theocracy. It was created by the Emperor of Mankind, a psychic Übermensch who founded the Imperium during a galaxy-wide campaign of genocide aimed at wiping out all intelligent alien life in the galaxy, and who is currently a vegetable kept alive by the daily sacrifice of thousands of innocent psykers. Most of the Imperium’s citizens live in conditions of grinding poverty and exploitation, and all are subject to immediate execution—or worse—if they step out of line, commit acts of heresy against the Emperor, or have the misfortune to be born with a genetic mutation. The Empire’s Inquisitors and police force are constantly breathing down their necks, watching for the slightest sign of disobedience or unorthodoxy, and if they’re lucky enough to be born on a planet away from Imperial scrutiny then they’re probably either being ruled by a petty monarchy that’s almost as bad, or they’re scrabbling for survival on an absurdly dangerous hell-world. Purging the heretic, the alien and the mutant is the constant mission of the Imperium, all in service of the will of their God-Emperor who may or may not even be sentient enough to care anymore.
It may have struck you that that last sentence sounded a wee bit like real-life fascist rhetoric, only aimed at fictional mutants and aliens instead of other humans. Herein lies the big problem with Warhammer 40,000, one that has been a bit of an albatross around the franchise’s neck: you can insist until you’re blue in the face that the Imperium are not meant to be the good guys—and Games Workshop has—but the fact is, as the most prominent human faction in the game, most players and consumers of the spin-off material are going to view them that way, simply by default. All of the other factions are daemons or aliens with mindsets and cultures that are very different from out own, which is a good thing in a fictional world, but that means that most newcomers to the setting will naturally gravitate to the humans in power armour over the psychic part-fungus Orks or the xenomorph-esque Tyranids.
Now, that’s the majority playerbase, who maybe lose track of just how vile the Imperium is supposed to be but who at the end of the day are just having fun and don’t mean anything sinister by it.
Then there are the actual fascists, or fascist wannabes, who look at this dystopian expansionist empire that rules its people with an iron fist and aggressively purges degenerates and foreign elements, and thinks “Hell yeah, this is awesome! And kids play it!”
It must be said that Games Workshop didn’t help themselves in this regard by historically depicting the Imperium as composed entirely of white people. I genuinely think this was simple ignorance and not anything more sinister, but yeah, not a good look when there are actual neo-Nazis hovering around your IP. Thankfully they’re now taking aggressive steps to correct this, but there’s still decades of past material that’s uncomfortably Aryan.
Is this actually a big deal? Am I over-reacting? Well, if you were online in the run up to the 2016 election, you might have seen memes depicting Donald Trump’s head photoshopped onto a body clad in golden armour, often semi-ironically declaring him the God Emperor of America. The base image used for that meme was artwork of the Warhammer 40k Emperor.
Whoops.
I’m not saying Warhammer 40,000 is capital-P Problematic or should be cancelled or anything. I don’t even necessarily have an issue with the people who get a bit too carried away with their enthusiasm for the Imperium. Take one look at the Star Wars fandom and you’ll see that for many people, there is an undeniable allure in playing as the bad guys. I’m experiencing this myself right now—I’ve gotten into Helldivers 2, a game based heavily on the satirical jingoistic culture of the Starship Troopers movie, and me and the rest of the community are having a jolly old time declaring our undying love for managed democracy while we rid the galaxy of alien filth. Eventually we are probably going to have to stop the music and have a serious conversation about that, especially since the actual fascists are already worming their way into the fandom, but right now it’s 99% harmless fun.
I see this as similar to how people read historical fiction, or run serious historically-accurate LARP campaigns, or even get into military re-enactments: There’s something enticing about immersing yourself in a culture and worldview that’s radically different from your own, and there’s an extra thrill that comes with playing as bad guys. There is a strain of historical and speculative fiction right now that seeks to remove elements of oppression and bigotry even from settings where they should logically exist so as to open the format up to all, which is perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned, but at the same time there’ll always be people who want the warts-and-all version. A setting like Warhammer 40,000 that’s drawing on a lot of unpleasant real-world history, but directing it at fictional antagonists, is a way to indulge in this kind of thing in a manner that has less capacity for harm, even if it isn’t entirely harmless.
(At the same time of course, I would not begrudge anyone who found the entire concept tasteless and didn’t want to engage with it at all. To each their own).
With that very long preamble out of the way, we now come to the question of tie-in fiction. You’ve got a setting where the obvious audience insertion point is a horrific totalitarian nightmare and most of the other options are just as bad, even worse, or alien enough that writing from their perspective is going to take you into the niche of xenofiction. And yet, your parent company has started up a whole publisher dedicated entirely to pumping out tie-in fiction for their tabletop game portfolio, of which yours is by far the most popular. How do you approach this?
One option—which I gather quite a few Black Library writers have taken—is to grab the bull by the horns and unflinchingly confront the reader with the unfiltered bleak horror of the Imperium, uncomfortable historical parallels and all, forcing them to question even their fictional consumerist loyalty towards such a depraved institution.
The other option is to make it a comedy.
On that note, I recently read through two entire omnibuses of the long-running Ciaphas Cain series, comprising six roughly novel-length yarns and some short stories. In my defence, I was laid up in bed and unable to do much of anything else due to chronic illness. But also in my defence, I actually had a pretty good time.
Ciaphas Cain is a commissar in the Imperial Guard. As that title probably suggests, this is a role that’s heavily based on the political officers of the WWII-era Red Army, and like those officers, a big part of a commissar’s job is shooting soldiers in the back if they show signs of cowardice, heretical thought, mutation, Chaos corruption, or just if the commissar feels like it. Cain doesn’t do that, being highly atypical for a commissar: instead of fear, he relies on building a genuine rapport with the soldiers under his command, getting them to follow his lead through respect and admiration.
(“The commissar who doesn’t act like a commissar” seems to be a recurring character type in the Black Library’s output, along with Inquisitors who don’t really act like Inquisitors and so on. Which is one way to write about people working for a dystopian hell-regime: just make them atypical. The galaxy is a big place after all, there’s going to be a lot of different attitudes at work).
Cain doesn’t do this, it must be noted, because he actually gives a shit about the soldiers under his command. In fact, he’s a massive coward who is primarily concerned solely with preserving his own life, preferably in a comfortable environment with lots of good wine and access to attractive women with a penchant for men in uniform. Unfortunately, due to some comedic twists of fate during his first deployment, Cain gained an entirely underserved reputation for heroism that he was then obliged to maintain throughout his career, which eventually grew to the point that by the time of his death he was known far and wide as the Hero of The Imperium, a legend cemented by his officially-published memoirs.
While writing these memoirs, he authored another, much more accurate record his adventures: the Cain Archive, a disorganised autobiographical jumble that told the true story of his life. The stories we’re reading are extracts from that archive, tidied up and annotated with footnotes by Inquisitor Amberly Vail, who Cain had an on-again off-again romantic relationship with whenever their paths crossed long enough to allow for it. The Archive is being presented to us by an Inquisitor because, naturally, there’s no way it could be allowed to fall into the hands of the public, lest the legend of the Hero of The Imperium be irrevocably tarnished.
This is a concept which, if your only contact with the Warhammer 40k universe is via my description above, might seem jarringly out of place with the whole grimdarkness thing. But in fact, Warhammer 40k has always had a heavy layer of dark comedy lurking under its skin. A big part of the appeal of the setting is that it takes itself deadly seriously, but both the players and Games Workshop are fully aware of how stupid and absurd the whole thing is and are winking at each other while pretending to take it just as seriously as it takes itself.
The tone of the Ciaphas Cain books represent the further end of that comedic bent. They’re not outright slapstick comedies, they still take place in the same setting as the rest of the canon and they treat the Imperium and its enemies seriously, but they’re more willing to acknowledge and play into the inherent silliness of the universe than, say, the faction codex books would be.
(Although even the codexes aren’t afraid to get in on the lulz: I distinctly remember an illustration from my childhood of a horde of xenomorph-esque Tyranids where one of the aliens is, for some reason, driving a car. There are probably more of these easter eggs scattered about that I didn’t notice)
I would describe the tone of the books as Terry Pratchett-esque, albeit considerably subdued. The humour comes mostly from the over-the-top personalities that inhabit the absurd world of the Imperium, the random twists of fate that shove Cain onto the frontlines despite his best efforts to avoid being there, and Cain’s own acerbic commentary laid on top of all of it. Amberly Vail’s footnotes add another layer of humour, as she has quite the witty voice and interacts with Cain’s narrative in entertaining ways.
So when I say that these books are comedies, I do not mean that you’re going to be rolling on the floor laughing or boarding any ROFLcopters. You may, in fact, not Laugh Out Loud a single time. But you’ll probably have a smile on your face, in between those moments where the books get serious and kill off side-characters who you’ve become attached to—because at the end of the day, these are still hardboiled military SF yarns. If you’re looking for gory battle scenes, desperate last stands and gritty military action of both the terrestrial and space variety, you will find plenty here, alongside political machinations and mysteries to solve.
The second omnibus takes an interesting approach by setting its constituent novels at different points in Cain’s career—very soon after his first deployment, in the middle when his legend has been firmly established, and after his retirement—and links all three with an ongoing mystery plotline that plays out over most of Cain’s lifespan. Earlier books in the series had alluded to the basic outline of how Cain’s career progressed, but in sufficiently little detail so as to leave plenty of room for later books and stories, and it was cool to see the series even this early trying for something more ambitious than just purely episodic adventures.
None of this would work if home slice Cain himself wasn’t an interesting character. The way Mitchell handles him is very similar to how authors of historical fiction deal with protagonists who would have held viewpoints repugnant to their readers: massage the character so that they’re for some reason atypical of their culture thus have values closer to a modern-day person. You can absolutely go too far with this and create a character that feels implausible for the setting, but Cain isn’t an example of this problem. A good illustrator of this is his view on religion—while he’s annoyed by “emperor botherers” and seems to overall have very little regard for the organised Ecclesiarchy, his private memoirs make it clear that he does still have complete faith in the Emperor as a spiritual leader and god-figure; he just thinks that the Emperor has better things to do than act on behalf of lowly Commissars, and thus feels that appealing to divine aid is pointless and a liability when you could be taking more pragmatic action. This feels like a completely believable mindset for Cain to have, whereas someone with his background outright rejecting, or even questioning, the Imperium’s state religion would be unthinkable.
And of course, Cain is also atypical of his readers in that he’s a snivelling coward who only cares about his own skin.
Right? That is, after all, the whole premise of this, isn’t it?
Well, kind of, but not really, and that’s where my biggest gripe about the Cain content I read for this post comes in.
There’s a few different dimensions to this problem. The first is that Cain accidentally blundering into the frontlines while trying to escape or run away happens far less frequently than Cain being obliged to volunteer for dangerous roles in order to maintain his reputation. In fact, based on what I’ve read it seems like the former scenario basically stops happening once his heroic reputation is cemented, which occurs very early in his career. From that point on he basically always acts the way his job and his reputation would require him to, except he thinks about how he’d rather run away and hide while he’s doing it. There’s a bigger problem with this that I’ll get to in a moment, but in addition this approach is just not nearly as much fun. Some of the funniest moments in the two collections were those chronologically earlier stories where Cain ends up in trouble via outright cowardice and stupidity (such as when he rescues Amberly Vail by charging selflessly into a burning building…which he does because he himself set the building on fire without stopping to consider the repercussions if he’s found responsible for accidentally killing an Inquisitor) and I was disappointed to see them stop.
The other problem with this approach is that it ties into a larger issue with Cain’s characterisation, where the books often seem to forget that he’s meant to be a coward at all. Sometimes, especially in the earlier-published material, his inner monologue is genuinely callous to a degree that’s almost shocking, where he thinks of the soldiers around him as meat shields to hide behind and genuinely doesn’t seem to care about anyone but himself, besides maybe his aide Jurgen and the two commanding officers who he spends most of his career serving alongside. But more often than not he is clearly acting to preserve he lives and wellbeing of his troops, he just keeps insisting that he’s really doing it for pragmatic reasons like currying favour with the rank-and-file soldiers so they’ll be more likely to watch his back in a firefight.
To a large extent, this is fully intentional. As Amberly Vail states in her footnotes, Cain was his own worst critic and it’s clear that his reputation as a hero wasn’t as unearned as he liked to insist. Indeed, getting this idea across seems to be part of the motivation behind Vail organising and disseminating the Archive to her Inquisition colleagues to begin with, which is a neat idea. But the books are far too ham-fisted about conveying this idea. What I expected was to have to read between the lines to get a glimpse of the actual heroism underneath Cain’s self-interest; instead, more often than not it was the other way around.
I said a moment ago that Cain did something “over and over again”, and that leads us to my other big problem with the books, which is that they’re incredibly repetitive.
Every time Jurgen is mentioned, we’re told that he smells bed. Every time Cain is in an enclosed space of some kind, we’re told that he feels comfortable in enclosed spaces and can navigate them easily because he grew up in a hive city. Every time he says something nice to bolster the troops’ morale, we’re told that he’s doing it for self-interested reasons. The books were intended to be largely stand-alone so I can understand that each novel would need to have some of this at the beginning in order to get fresh readers up to speed, but it happens every single time, sometimes multiple times a chapter.
Likewise, the prose itself tends to repeat words (Mitchell really loves the word “attenuated”) and phrases (nearly all gunshot wounds are described as “bloody craters”) ad nauseum. Every single line of dialogue has to be paired with a character action for some reason, which means there’s masses of pointless gestures thrown into each conversation, from a very limited pool. Take a shot every time someone shrugs or nods their head, and you will swiftly die of alcohol poisoning.
The other major flaw with the prose is the descriptions, or rather the lack thereof. The books seem to have been written with the assumption hat anyone reading them is going to be familiar with the Warhammer 40k universe, and thus there is very little description of…well, anything, from aliens to military hardware. If you don’t already know what an auspex is, or how a salamander and a chimera tank differ from each other, then prepare to read with a wiki open on your phone.
I can ultimately put up with this, because I recognise that these books are being written for pre-existing Warhammer fans and I’m coming to them as an outsider. It’s kind of frustrating, but it’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is the near-total lack of scenery and setting description. As I’ve mentioned before, the Warhammer 40k universe has a very unique gothic-punk aesthetic, and almost none of it comes through in the writing here. Even if you’re intimately familiar with the source material, I imagine anyone reading these books is still going to default to picturing Cain and pals in generic sci-fi surrounds, because the narration very rarely gives you anything else to work with.
These are fairly big wounds right in the heart of the Cain omnibuses (you could describe them as “bloody craters” in fact), but here the thing: I blasted through two collected volumes of this stuff, and you all know how easily I drop books. Despite all the flaws, the stories themselves are a lot of fun to read.
In one of his reviews Arthur compared the Black Library output to the old pulp sci-fi and fantasy novels, and I think that’s appropriate. There are quick, breezy and cheap reads (cheap as in the resources that probably go into writing them, they’re actually kind of pricy even in ebook format) designed to be pumped out in volume to a very particular audience. And in that regard, flaws and all, they’re not bad.