Interviews Dan Abnett by DJ Forrest

Guardians of the Galaxy, Torchwood and more

At the time of the Interview, Guardians of the Galaxy was only previewing the trailers, the film itself hadn’t aired in the UK.  My interest in the film had been primarily Karen Gillan’s role as Nebula, but when I discovered that Dan Abnett had written the comic book story involving the band of ‘criminals’ I wanted to know more. 

Hi Dan, the film trailer looks awesome, and after extensive research I discovered that this story like so many before it derived from a comic book.  When I looked even further there were many stories involving the Guardians of the Galaxy.  I do have a couple of questions regarding the characters.  First has to be, the fact that unlike other characters in say, The X Men, or the lone figures such as Batman, here we have a band of ‘criminals’?

To someone who hasn’t read the back story of the Guardians can you tell us a little bit more about them, especially to those of us who still haven’t seen the film?

Dan: The Guardians of the Galaxy were an original ‘cosmic’ Marvel superhero team created in the late sixties, who popped up from time to time in the Marvel Universe as guest stars. When I was working on Marvel’s cosmic titles, around 2008, I was drawing on the vast range of half-forgotten Marvel cosmic heroes as potential characters, and set up a team book made of some of my faves (Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora etc), who had basically been solo characters. They were all rogues and misfits, but I had them band together into a sort of ‘outlaw hero’ term. The team needed a name, so I borrowed the GOTG title from the almost dormant original team (totally different characters, set in the future). The new GOTG book became a hit, and to my surprise, Marvel Studios decided to use it - the team I put together and some of the tone and storyline -  as a movie to expand their cinematic universe into the cosmic. I was amazed and delighted. The director, James Gun, acknowledged that my run on the book was the inspiration for the film, and I got set visits, screen credit etc. Slightly mind-blowing. And now those forgotten misfit characters are household names. Oddly, I have since taken the original 1969 team line-up, and rebooted that as Guardians 3000, bringing to the old (future) team back into the Marvel Universe. I don’t think you need to know much to enjoy the great movie: it’s superheroes in space, and it explains its core concepts as it goes along. And it’s immense fun.

They’re a very mixed bunch of characters, from human, animal and a walking tree! Why are they different from your usual team of heroes, and are they heroes?

           

Dan:  Definitely heroes, just not ‘famous’ ones like the Avengers. They do what they do because it needs to be done, and no one really recognises them for their efforts and sacrifices. And they’re an odd bunch, but they’re aliens. Even the human-looking Star-Lord is not entirely an earth human.

How did you feel when you learnt the news that there would be a film of the comic book you created?

Dan: Shocked, puzzled, and then delighted.

As we do when we’re creating a character and we imagine their voice and who might play them, did you have an idea of who the characters would be in your head, and who had you considered to be the character played by Chris Pratt?

Dan: I guess I had voices for them when I was writing for them but - unusually for me - I did not ‘cast’ the characters to lock them down. I usually do that to give me some idea of how they act and what their presence is, imagining them as famous actors in a movie. But with GOTG, not so much…. ironically Chris is amazing as Star-Lord.

Did you also do the illustrations for the comic books, or have a say in how the characters would look?

Dan: I just write the scripts, but I do make a lot of suggestions about physical appearance, costume, etc. I work closely with the artists, devising and refining character designs when we create new things.

The character that is played by Karen Gillan in the film is as far as I’ve read, a villain, is her character true to the original idea?

Dan: Yes. Nebula was an older, pre-existing character that has gone through several visual make-overs during her comic lifetime, and the movie look is pretty close to the definitive Nebula in the comics. Karen looked amazing. Nebula is a villain, but (like Gamora) she has a complex backstory - she isn’t a born villain, just a dangerous individual who is the product of her upbringing and history.

How does it feel to have your creation immortalised on the big screen?

Dan: Gratifying but very weird. It’s odd to see them in the flesh (and odder still to actually meet them!)

Torchwood novel: The Border Princes was my first introduction to your writing and I loved the book.  It was one of my first ever Torchwood novels and I couldn’t put it down.  It did throw me at first that there was a stranger in the team.  Where did the idea for The Border Princes come from?

Dan: Thank you.  I was approached to write one of the first three Torchwood novels before there was a series to watch. It was being made, so there were just scripts to read, no footage to look at to gauge what it would actually be like. I visited the set, and got a full ‘briefing’ and during the visit I had the idea for the plot. Not sure where it came from, but the device of the ‘other’ character gave me some creative freedom, as we were working in the (semi) dark. I only saw the first episode after I’d finished the book, and was pleased and relieved to have got the right feel.

Writing what you do in both comic book and novel, have any of your story ideas, chapters etc, spooked you while you’ve been writing? That sense that someone is sitting behind you watching you from the dark corners of the room?

Dan: Surprisingly often. Sometimes they come to life and tell you what they’re doing. I don’t mean they manifest, I mean you find yourself writing stuff that you weren’t planning or expecting, and you realise the character has sort of drawn the story in their direction.

As this is another Marvel comic book story does this mean that there will be many more sequels to come?

Dan: GOTG? I believe the next film is already planned.

We recently reviewed your Who novel The Silent Stars Go By http://projecttorchwood.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-mothership-who-book-review-silent.html Were the Ice Warriors your favourite monsters from Classic Who?

Dan: I had several faves. I started watching Who when it was Jon Pertwee, so I love Silurians, Ogrons, Draconians etc. Ice Warriors were classic foes to me, but interesting because they weren’t actually ‘evil villains’. Also, they had a status in the canon that was surprising given their comparatively few TV appearances.  They hadn’t been used in a while, and I requested them for the book. It took a while for approval because - unbeknownst to me - the TV was bringing them back. As it turned out, the return of the Ice Warriors was held over to the next season, so I got my go-ahead to use them.

Outside of the world of Who and the Guardians, have you written any other novels, and are they all horror/fantasy/sci-fi?

Dan: Yes, over fifty, and they’re mostly SF or fantasy. A couple of Dr Who novels, Primeval, Tomb Raider, a lot of Warhammer and Horus Heresy, a GOTG novel, an Avengers novel - out now - and several original novels.

You wrote Torchwood: Everyone says Hello for BBC Audio, will you be involved in Torchwood’s revival on Big Finish audios?

Dan: I haven’t been approached, but I’d be happy to. Writing for audio is a real pleasure, and a very stimulating challenge.

Are you involved in any new projects that we can look out for in the coming months?

Dan: I’m writing a Secret Wars series for Marvel, Masters of the Universe and the Flash for DC, another Tomb Raider book, plenty for 2000AD (Sinister Dexter, Kingdom, lawless and Grey Area), and I work a lot in games (Alien: Isolation and Shadow of Mordor, for example).

Thank you Dan for a wonderful interview.

Author photo by James K. Barnett

Who Reviews The Silent Stars Go By by Tony J Fyler

Written by Dan Abnett

ISBN 978-1-849-90243-4

‘Life is Hard, Death is Easy, Nothing is What it Seems’

Before there was Cold War, pitching the Eleventh Doctor and Clara against a lone, though suitably kickass Ice Warrior in the base-under-siege setting of a submarine, there was a sense that it was the Ice Warriors’ ‘turn’ for revamping, for bringing back into the fold as a New Who species. They’d been spoken of in The Waters of Mars in relatively positive terms, given their rather ambiguous past in the Who world – savage, logical, warlike, noble, the Ice Warriors, almost right from their beginnings, were more than a ‘monster of the week’. Brian Hayles had written them originally with a complex honour code, a feudal societal structure (warriors and lords), and against a Time Lord who lovingly referenced Patrick Troughton at almost every opportunity, it seemed both inevitable and very very right that after the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans and the Silurians, the Ice Warriors would claim their place in the ongoing story of Doctor Who.

Into that environment of expectation stepped Dan Abnett with The Silent Stars Go by, a wintry tale of Ice Warriors and the Eleventh Doctor, with Amy and Rory by his side.

There are many Who monsters that work better unseen for the majority of the time, as a threatening presence, only popping out now and then to confirm the reality of their threat, scare the children to scurry behind their sofas, and then disappear back to the shadows, so you know they’re there.

Some of the best on screen Ice Warrior stories have taken that approach to the Martian giants, using them as a threatening ‘something’ before they emerge and lumber off down corridors. The Silent Stars Go By is happy to give more than a nod in this direction: the planet Hereafter is a long-distant Earth colony, where the humanoid colonists, the Morphans, are experiencing inexplicably harsher and harsher winters. Livestock go missing. Then members of the community disappear.

And then of course, with the Tardis’s unerring (if moderately malicious) sense of timing, the Doctor turns up, just when the moment is ripe for him to be suspected of all sorts of unlikely or unfathomable things. So – not so much with the base under siege this time for the Ice Warriors, much more in the ‘planet with weird stuff happening’ mold.

Now – there’s often a criticism of Classic Who that some of the middle episodes are padded out with lots of running down corridors. People have a tendency to underestimate how difficult it is to write a good ‘running down corridors’ mid-section. You have to set up your world explicitly, and there has to be a good solid reason for running down this particular corridor at this particular moment, only to run back up it twenty minutes later for an equally good, believable and ideally peril-filled reason. You have to deliver credible threat, credible solution, and credible environment infrastructure to run down, or crawl down, otherwise it’s just running down corridors.

What Abnett – a workmanlike writer who cranks out the product with a startling efficiency – delivers in The Silent Stars Go By is a really good, old school, Classic Who five or six-parter, but with a New Who Doctor, New Who independent and capable companions, a tiny smattering of timey-wimey goodness and a hard-smacking denouement that reveals the story is not what you’ve thought it is all along.

The characterization and dialogue in scenes with the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory is pretty much spot-on, and you can easily read it in their respective voices. The Morphant civilization feels real, and raw, and has an edge of desperate crankiness to it, which you can imagine creeping in winter after winter as the joy of life is eroded by bitter cold, by not enough to eat, by hope turned gradually to disappointment, to an expectation of failure. The Morphants who befriend the Tardis crew are at least adequate one-story people, even if you wouldn’t ever clamour for a Return to Hereafter story to see how they got on.

The Ice Warriors themselves here are extremely well used – evolving from ‘green monsters’ spotted in the distance to green scaly giants, chasing people at a speed more reserved for the imagination-rich media which don’t rely on costume. Their interactions are evolved from those in the Classic era here too, which is taken just far enough to give a Christmas-morning thrill, without pushing into territory where they don’t ultimately feel like the Ice Warriors we know and love (as arguably they were on screen in Cold War, when Skaldak ‘left his armour’ and went skittering about the place all naked and fast as a whip).

The timey-wimey element here is actually used for fun, and to make life more difficult when a simple resolution appears to present itself, and the contradictory nature of the Ice Warriors – warlike but noble and open to reasoned debate and negotiated settlement – is played for all its worth towards the end of the story. The book’s killer final act revelation though still delivers a punch that flips everything you’ve been through on its head and makes you look at Hereafter in a whole new light (another touch of the New Who dynamic melded with the Classic Who structure). There’s a distinct feel of the relationship between the Doctor, Amy and Rory being advanced here – it feels more like Late Ponds than Early, with both Rory and Amy, having been landed in precarious situations, making friends, finding solutions and adding substantively to the solution of the mystery of Hereafter’s malfunctioning (or misused?) terraforming unit.

Overall, if Cold War didn’t float your boat, or if you long for the sight of squads of Ice Warriors pounding across icy landscapes and industrial complexes; if you want to dip back to the rhythms of the Eleventh Doctor and the Ponds, or if you just want a cracking wintry Classic Who story with some New Who nuances, you won’t go far wrong with The Silent Stars Go By.