civil service whose offices span continents and in which generations of clerks might grow up, grow old and die without ever meeting anyone outside even their own tiny sub-sub-branch of their own organisation, so gigantic are those organisations. Take the natural tendency of any human organisation to develop increasingly weird and inward-looking agendas as it gets bigger, feed it through the crazy distorting mirror of the 40Kverse and see what you get. The final piece was Calpurnia herself, who owes a lot to one of my favourite Moorcock characters: the time-traveller Dafnish Armatuce, a dour puritan, inculcated to the point of brainwashing with maxims about austerity and self-denial, who finds herself in a fabulous post-scarcity society where those concepts have no meaning and who is utterly unprepared for it, mentally or emotionally. When Calpurnia dishes out some arse-kickings to witless, narcissistic aristocrats I like to think she's handing out some of what Dafnish was longing to do at the End of Time. 7. Aside from the Enforcer omnibus, you have written an excellent short story in one of the Horus Heresy short story anthologies and numerous other short stories for Black Library. Do you have any new 40K projects on the cards that you're allowed to speak about? Do you have any non-BL projects that you'd like to talk about? My current 40K project isn't in a good state to be talked about at present, but I'll put in a word for my newest novel, Strange Flesh, which has just