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Sabbat War

12 June 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Warhmmer 40k

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war… sort of has to be, since it’s all based on a war game and if people weren’t fighting there wouldn’t be a game. But despite all the grimness, all the darkness, and all the war, the galaxy of the 40th (and now 41st) millennium can be a thrilling place to visit, particularly when your guide is Dan (The Man) Abnett – the writer who first got me reading Warhammer stories and one of the best, and hardest working, writers today. I’ve followed Dan’s stories of the soldiers and officers of the Tanith First and Only through all its many volumes, as the Man has written out his own vision of the 40k future in the Sabbat Worlds and they are among the best war fiction you could read anywhere. So it was a great honour to be asked to contribute a story to this anthology – edited by the Man himself (eeeeekkkkk!) – along with other 40k writers. It’s Dan’s sandbox and he has kindly invited us in to play. The story I’ve written for the anthology is, I think, the best 40k story I’ve written so far and it sits beside some other great writers. It’s an honour to be included among them. Here’s the full line-up of stories and writers.


This is What Victory Feels Like (Forever the Same) by Dan Abnett
Whose Voice is Heard No More by Graham McNeill
Glory Flight by Robert Rath
The Death of the Prophet by Marc Collins
Nineteen-Three Coreward, Resolved by Matthew Farrer
The Tomb of Vichres by Justin D Hill
Deep by Edoardo Albert
Armaduke by John French
Indomitable Spirit by Rachel Harrison
From There to Here by Dan Abnett

Sabbat War is now available to pre-order from the Black Library website, here, and goes on sale on 19 June. It’s going to be good (in the grim, dark, 40k manner of good of course).

See Us Talk

11 June 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Archaeology, Warrior

Paul Gething and I will be talking ‘Warrior’ and all things archaeological and Anglo-Saxon at an online talk for the Felixstowe Book Festival at 1:30pm on Saturday 26 June. This will probably be the last time we talk about the warrior that Paul excavated from the Bowl Hole outside Bamburgh Castle, so if you want to hear about screaming skulls, Thor’s thunder and lots and lots of bones, get your tickets from the Festival box office. Here’s the link.

Five Things About: Edward the Confessor

10 June 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History
  • The Wilton Diptych: Edward the Confessor is in the centre, with Edmund the Martyr on the left and John the Baptist on the right

According to Edith, Edward’s queen, the king had taken a vow of chastity, thus explaining their lack of children. Historians are dubious, taking this as Edith’s attempt to excuse herself from the calamity that befell her family in 1066.

Edward also had a sister, Godgifu, who married Drogo, count of the Vexin, and then, when Drogo died, Eustace, count of Boulogne.

When Swein Forkbeard died in 1014, Æthelred sent his ten-year-old son Edward back to England to help negotiate Æthelred’s return.

Edward began to rule in his late 30s. Only his father, Æthelred, among recent English kings had reached such an age. Edward would rule for another quarter century.

Edward, according to contemporary accounts, was a particularly tall man with rosy cheeks – no doubt kept ruddy by his favoured past time, hunting.

Five Things About: William the Conqueror

9 June 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: History
  • William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, King of England

Keeping it in the family, William appointed his half-brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux when Odo was still a teenager. After Hastings, William gave Kent to Odo.

William made his other half-brother, Robert, count of Mortain. Robert was one of his key lieutenants, before and after Hastings, when he became one of England’s greatest landowners.

William nicknamed his eldest son, Robert, ‘Curthose’, which can be translated as ‘Shortypants’. Relations between father and son were strained.

William had a passion for hunting that, after the Conquest, would translate into the creation of huge new hunting grounds in England such as the New Forest.

William’s third son, also called William and later king of England, was nicknamed ‘Rufus’ either for his red hair or his red complexion.

Adventures with Words: H.M.S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian

23 May 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

It’s just so funny! Yes, O’Brian writes like a dream, appears to have a direct line into the minds and hearts of early 19th century men and women, and recreates the language of the time with extraordinary accuracy while writing a story full of adventure, tension, romance and intrigue but what really stood out for me on this re-reading was how funny it was. The scene where Steven Maturin realises that Jack has been giving rum to the sloth that he has brought on board the ship is wonderful! ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.’

Adventures with Words: Kim by Rudyard Kipling

23 May 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
  • Kim by Rudyard Kipling

It’s not obvious from my name, but half of my ancestry is from the Indian subcontinent. My father is Sri Lankan – Tamil on his father’s side and Sinhala on his mother’s – and while Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was then, is not India, there is a wide thread of common culture and attitudes uniting everyone from the subcontinent whatever their religion – and there are a lot of religions there. You might ask how I ended up with a surname like ‘Albert’ with such ancestry? The answer lies, in part, in the pages of this book: British imperialism and its impact upon the other peoples of the subcontinent, the lack of an answer derives from the prejudices of the people too. For the short answer is that my father does not really know. He was born in 1923 – and is still walking miles at 98! – but all he can tell me is that at some point before he was born, possibly his grandfather, took a British name, either from his employer or in honour of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. The reason my father can’t tell me any more is that his parents’ marriage was a love match, made in the teeth of parental disapproval, since his father was Tamil (and Catholic) and his mother was Sinhala and quite a high-caste Buddhist (yes, I know that strictly speaking there should be no caste system among Sinhalese Buddhists but there is). His own grandparents disowned their children and the products of that marriage so that he only ever met his grandparents – on either side – once. That also meant he was cut off from much family history, and even more when his mother died when he was still quite young. There’s nothing equivalent to parish records in Sri Lanka, so on that side my family history cuts off with my father.

But I was brought up partly in and partly observing the culture of the subcontinent, and I recognise it. Which was why, when as a child I first started reading Rudyard Kipling’s stories, I recognised much that I knew. For this white, British imperialist was a better observer of, and more sympathetic to, the culture of the subcontinent than any other writer I knew at the time. Returning to his stories now, as a grown up, if anything I think he understood it, and portrayed it, even better than I thought when I first read them. Kim is a journey, on and around the Great Trunk Road, where the journey is really the point of the story, the journey and the people, all the chattering, laughing, thinking, talking people that make up the true richness of India. Kim is the story of a continent and the mark it left upon a young imperialist: India created Kipling and he was an honest enough writer to understand that. Kim is his thank you letter to India. It remains, to this day, possible the best novel about India ever written.

Adventures with Words: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

23 May 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

I’m old enough to remember how, back in the 1980s, it seemed like the horror genre was going to take over the world. Stephen King, of course, had started it: Carrie came out in 1974, Salem’s Lot in ’75, The Shining in ’77 and The Stand in ’78. Jumping on the bandwagon, a whole host of writers and publishers began churning out horror books through the following decade – and I was a big fan of them, picking lurid covers off the shelves at bookshops.

And then, it died. Not for Stephen King, of course, but for the rest. The blood-stained tracks became too trampled, the public lost interest, the publishers stopped publishing. The 1990s saw lots of articles written, asking variations on the question, who killed off the horror genre.

Now, having read The Turn of the Screw, I can answer the question. We did. We writers, we killed it off. Drove a stake through its heart, chopped its head off, pulled out its entrails and painted its drained blood upon the walls.

And that’s how we did it too: by piling up bodies, horror on horror, and forgetting that, for horror to work, there has to be something worse than death and the pain of dying; something much worse.

This is what makes The Turn of the Screw, and the other Victorian ghost stories, so effective: because these writers believed – or at least belonged to a culture that believed – that there are things worse than death. That a soul can be lost and, in its loss, something infinitely more precious than the mere pumping of blood and inflating of lungs is lost too.

After all, the problem with death, when that’s all there is, is that death ends everything. It’s the black curtain, the exit, the end, the close to suffering and the final release. Writing in a culture where death is the great, the sole, evil, robs horror of, well, its horror. Take away dread, the unspoken, wordless, formless dread of things and fates beyond and above and below death, and horror is reduced to variations on torture porn: how much can we make the protagonist suffer before his end? There is no horror in this, only the workings out of a monkey curiosity, drained of empathy.

So, for horror to work, then there must, indeed, be fates worse than death. It is the knowledge that this is true that makes The Turn of the Screw – despite Henry James’s rather curious prose style, so much more laboured and laborious than his brother, William James’s – into such a haunting book. And, reading it, tells us how flattened we have allowed our imaginative world to become.

Adventures with Words: Cloud Castles by Michael Scott Rohan

27 April 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

The final story in Michael Scott Rohan’s Spiral trilogy. The Spiral is the presence of the past – and the future – and the imagination in the present, touching the world at places of passage such as ports where, sometimes, it’s possible to turn down a road or enter through a door and walk into not a different world but the extensions of our world that have existed, that will exist or that might have existed and that did in the imaginings of someone. Cloud Castles avoids some of the problems of The Gates of Noon and marks a return to Rohan’s previous high standard. Steven Fisher, the hero of the two previous books, is finally beginning to change – it was getting difficult to imagine a man might have had the adventures in the Spiral that Steven did in the first two books without changing a jot – and the slightly forced far Eastern location of the previous book is abandoned for much more believable European locations. All in all a satisfying ending to the story.

Adventures in Books: The Cursed Fortress by Chris Durbin

12 April 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review

Sometimes, as a reader, you want to know exactly what you are going to get when you invest the time – a good four to eight hours of your life – into a book. Chris Durbin’s Holbrooke and Carlisle naval adventures, set during the Seven Years’ War, do exactly that: they provide solid, clear, well-crafted stories of derring-do backed up by the author’s own extensive nautical knowledge (he served in the Navy himself for many years). Now into his fifth novel, Durbin’s writing has achieved a wonderful clarity, like clear water, while creating characters that are almost as clear and wholesome as his writing. For some, this might seem like an indictment but for me, and I suspect many other readers, it is a welcome relief. Thank you, Mr Durbin. May Holbrooke and Carlisle sail on to further horizons.

Adventures in Bookland: Caves of Ice by Sandy Mitchell

12 April 2021
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Warhmmer 40k

Caiaphas Cain, reluctant hero of the Imperium, is back and this time he’s got a planet full of Orks and Necrons to deal with – and he’s not happy about it. One of the joys of this series are the footnotes provided to Cain’s unreliable and unpublished (within its 40k milieu) memoirs by Inquisitor Amberley Vail, a frequent associate and sparring partner for Cain and one of the stronger female characters within 40k. It’s a trope borrowed from the Flashman books, where Macdonald Fraser posed as the editor of the long-lost papers of Harry Flashman, but Mitchell takes the idea further by having Vail be a protagonist within some of the stories as well as a sardonic commentator, via a series of footnotes, to Cain’s adventures as well. It’s a great ploy that plays with all sorts of ideas of metafiction and helps put the Caiaphas Cain books into a different category from almost all other 40k fiction.