Ian Watson obit

The first Warhammer 40k author, Ian Watson, has died

Watson’s Inquisition War trilogy and novel Space Marine are unlike anything else in Warhammer 40k fiction.

 He was not on the list.

Ian Watson, prolific science fiction author and the first novelist to write Warhammer 40k tie-in novels, died on April 13 in Gijón, Spain, according to a notice by the official website of obituaries for the Asturias region. The author and co-author of 35 novels, Watson wrote the  Inquisition War trilogy and the standalone novel Space Marine in the early '90s. His voice is completely distinct from the many Warhammer 40k books that have come after.

Born 20 April 1943 in the English Cathedral city of St. Albans, Watson's work before becoming a novelist included teaching English in both Tanzania and Tokyo, and teaching 'Future Studies' at Birmingham Polytechnic. His first published work was the short story "Roof Garden Under Saturn" in New Worlds magazine, 1969, while his first full length book was the young adult story "Japan: A Cat's Eye View" the same year. In 1973 his first published sci-fi novel, The Embedding, was considered for several awards, and the French translation won the Prix Apollo in 1975.

Before Games Workshop opened its successful Black Library publishing arm, the firm made several attempts at getting Warhammer books off the ground. In 1987 GW recruited David Langford, a SF author and a reviewer for White Dwarf Magazine, to pitch a publishing partnership with Penguin. Langford in turn set about trying to recruit established authors, and Watson was among them - but he declined.

Watson took to writing for the GW Books imprint with aplomb. In an interview with Stephen Baxter originally published in Vector magazine, Watson says "I learned the Encyclopaedia Psychotica Galactica… then hallucinated myself into the 40K milieu, and began to have enormous mad fun in broodingly, Gothically, luridly going over the top". Not all of the authors who contributed to the first generation of Warhammer tie-in novels used their own name, but Watson did. He wrote four novels: Inquisitor, Harlequin, and Chaos Child, which formed the Inquisition War trilogy, and the standalone Space Marine.

Watson's novels represent Warhammer 40k in a germinal state, when many conventions of the setting, from the mundane to the metaphysical, were yet to be defined. His writing style is often lurid, and often highly sexed - outside 40k, one of his most infamous books is Orgasmachine, a dystopian SF story inspired by Japanese comics and the speculative  erotica published by Essex House in the 1960s. While this makes the books a jolt for anyone entering from regular Warhammer 40k, Watson brings out the weirdness, inhumanity, and paraphilic obsessiveness that lurks in the subtext of the insane Imperium of Man.

When Watson describes Space Marine neophytes being forced to feast on a vile banquet of poison and decaying carcasses to test their newly implanted Omophagea, he is both stripping away the glamour that attracts to the surface layer of Warhammer 40k, and obliquely referencing the canonical erotic novel "120 days of Sodom" by the Marquis du Sade - a claim you can't make of any other Warhammer 40k author.

The actual publication of all of Watson's 40k books was disrupted by Games Workshop's internal publishing project collapsing, and was ultimately completed by Boxtree by 1995. Reprints of the books would be a long time coming even after GW successfuly launched Black Library. The Inquisition War novels were eventually republished, with the first volume retitled from "Inquisitor" to "Draco" to avoid confusion with the recently released wargame of the same name, starting in 2002. To square away canon conflicts, Watson penned an in-universe foreword to the volume, denouncing the entire thing as a tapestry of lies. Watson's writing career continued well into the new millennium, and you will find his official biography and bibliography on his website. He is survived by his wife Cristina Macía, and his daughters Jessica Black and Laura Watson. His farewell ceremony is being broadcast via YouTube from the Gijón-Cabueñes Funeral Home at 11am PDT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST on Tuesday 14. His obituary notes "At the express wish of the deceased, do not buy flowers. BUY BOOKS".

The best source for information about Watson's relationship with Warhammer 40k is Stephen Baxter's article 'Freedom in an Owned World', originally published in Vector magazine issue 229, in which Baxter interviews the authors who wrote - or at least, were asked to write - the pre-Black Library Warhammer books. I have relied extensively on his work for this article.

If you're a fan of Ian Watson's work, why not share your favorite parts of it in the Wargamer Discord community - and blow the minds of the regular 40k fans who've never encountered him before.

 

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