Writing Between the Lines: SF Author Dan Abnett gets Primeval

Dan Abnett is a science fiction novelist and comics writer who sits in an odd (and not unenviable) position. He’s written some 35 novels and has two decades’ worth of comics work spanning everything from Doctor Who to Iron Man under his belt. Almost every single thing he’s written, however, has been about someone else’s characters. He quite happily describes himself as a ‘tie-in writer’ – something that many authors would turn their noses up at. And yet, when I arrive to meet him outside Games Workshop just off the Headrow, there are already people waiting for the signing he’s not scheduled to start for another 45 minutes. And it’s only just turned 10am on a Sunday morning. Not bad, eh?

Dan’s in Leeds to promote his latest novel for Games Workshop, Prospero Burns, which spins out of the epic tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40K – all space marines, warfare on a galactic scale and HUGE guns. That’s not what I’m meeting with Dan about, though. We’re hunching over hot drinks in the Briggate Starbucks to talk about dinosaurs. His book spinning out of the TV series Primeval, dubbed Extinction Event, to be specific. Primeval, if you’re new to it, revolves around a British team put together to deal with monsters both from the distant past past and the far flung future that keep popping through holes in time.

As for what the book’s about and how it fits with the TV series (and why there should even be these novels) – I’ll let Dan tell you about that. “They [the production company] wanted the novels to be canonical – that is to say, they weren’t just spin-off novels, they fit into the timeline so they were considered part of the overall structure. One of the other things they said is, they essentially wanted me to use the budget of a novel to do something big that might be, you know, the sort of thing they might finally do in a Primeval movie, but they wouldn’t have enough money to do on a week by week basis.” Jurassic Park might be over nearly two decades old now, but dinosaurs on any sized screen still ain’t cheap.

The details of the book show that Dan is planning to max out your imagination’s budget, too. “First of all I take them to Russia, I take them to Siberia, where there is an incursion where lots and lots of late Cretaceous dinosaurs, including T-Rexes, are coming through. You’ve basically got the Russian army against very large dinosaurs, so there’s a sort of Russian Lost World feel to it. It’s not just one animal that’s come through in the middle of a shopping centre, it’s a whole area of forest that’s got a major crisis going on.

“[The Primeval team are] both threatened by the people around them (the Russian army is suspicious of who they are) and by the dinosaurs. It is just a massive romp… There’s the Primeval team, the Russian soldiers and this thing which is sort of stalking both of them. It gets very tense, and I think the credentials that I got writing, as I still do, the Warhammer 40K stuff for big action and big monsters paid off for that.”

It’s not all about the Russian army fighting dinosaurs, though. Dan has both the help and the hindrance of having to write characters that are firmly lodged in his readers’ brains, without the help of actors to bring them to life. “When you’re writing it you literally imagine those actors performing those roles,” he says.

“You think, ‘would it sound right if that character said that, or would it sound completely out of character’. And, also, (this is possibly a slightly sneakier thing) you think ‘how far can I push what they say and still have it sound right?’ Can you have somebody say something that is quite unexpected and therefore powerful, but is still entirely in-keeping with Connor or whoever.”

If you’re looking for a trick or sleight of hand for doing that, however, you’re out of luck. “I’m just applying my basic tie-in writer ability to listen to what they’ve done and try to reproduce it,” Dan says.

Despite taking obvious pleasure in his work, Dan’s more than aware of the stigma attached to writing tie-in media. “The weird thing is that there’s always been a real snobbery in books in particular. If you write tie-ins – a film tie-in or the novelisation of a film or TV show – there’s always a sense that you must just be crapping it out. You’re just some hacking writer who’s been given a pile of scripts and any old thing will do.

“I think that might even be the case on some occasions but I think that most people who write tie-ins take it very seriously and want the book to have some credibility as a book itself, rather than just as an adjunct to a TV show or a film.”

From Dan’s point of view, however, there’s more than a whiff of irony to that attitude. “Interestingly, because I started out in comics before I started writing novels, in comics that snobbery doesn’t exist at all, because most comics are tie-ins. That is to say, if you’re a comic book writer, your great ambition might be to write the X-Men. Well, somebody else has already written the X-Men, the X-Men exists as a world, it exists as a franchise. You’re just taking over for a while. And nobody thinks there’s anything wrong with that… So, you actually actively chase down something pre-invented rather than inventing your own thing.”

Irony aside, there’s been a change in the wind in recent years. You could look to the recent Doctor Who novel produced by SF/fantasy fiction legend Michael Moorcock, or the continued life of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comics helmed by none other than series creator Joss Whedon. We could also, however, look right at Dan.

On arrival in Nottingham the day prior, Dan tells me, “I discovered that [Prospero Burns] was the Number 1 SF book in the UK, the Number 1 SF book in the United States, and had gone in in its first week to the New York Times bestseller list in the mass fiction list – not the science fiction list, the mass fiction list – at Number 16.

“I’m very pleased that, in terms of a marketplace, readers don’t seem to make the distinction they used 10 or 20 years ago between this being a ‘cheap tie-in’ and that being a ‘proper novel’. They will embrace a well-written tie-in and take it to the top of the bestseller list as much as they will anything else.”

I’d love to pick Dan’s brain for longer, but the coffee’s long-since cold and, more importantly, there’s now a queue sticking out across the top of Thornton’s Arcade. Dan’s public awaits…

Good news! We have a couple of copies of Primeval: Extinction Event to give away. If you’re on Twitter, just tweet, “I right fancy winning a copy of @VincentAbnett’s Primeval: Extinction Event with @culturevulture’s #PrimevalComp http://bit.ly/dVqAo4”. If you’re not on Twitter, just tell us what your favourite dinosaur is in the comments section below! A winner will be picked at random on Monday.

Mark Johnson is a Leeds-based video games journalist and occasional freelance writer on the subject of comics. He can be found on his blog, Twitter and Tumblr.