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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29197 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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I literally can not sit down and read a book after a whole day of starting at a screen with text on it. I just manage sneaking in some audiobooks when traveling between cities or rarely on a chill saturday.

I very much relate to this, and I worry about it, because back when I was a college student I’d read long-form fiction for pleasure all the time. My inclination to do so has been in steady decline since then.

One of my resolutions for 2025 is to try rebuilding my pleasure-reading habits via simpler, more accessible, and more addictive reading projects — cheesy fantasy, military sci-fi, Black Library texts, LitRPGs, etc.. Once I've refreshed the relevant pathways in my brain and once again enjoy long-form reading as a go-to leisure activity, I can get ambitious again. With all that in mind, I’m so far a couple of thousand pages into Alexander Wales’ “Worth the Candle” series and absolutely loving it.

I'll suggest Steel World by BV Larson for the military sci fi. It felt like StarCraft run the perspective of a marine.

I did about twenty audiobooks in a row a few years back.

Black Library texts

You’ve read Ciaphas Cain, right? If so, are there any other Black Library books you recommend? If not, I strongly recommend you do.

Despite being a huge fan of the 40K universe (and an enthusiastic modeler/painter), I've never actually read any Black Library books, just some old Warhammer fantasy stuff from the 1990s. I take it you'd recommend the Ciaphias Cain books then?

Start with Gaunt's Ghosts series. Abnett is a functional and reasonably entertaining writer when given good enough schlock; the plots are nothing special but it's a very vivid and clear-eyed picture of the crapsack universe and the daily life of combat as experienced through elite Guardsmen.

Then you can dabble around a bit more. The Horus Heresy books are a very mixed bag, there are some gems and some lumps of coal all mixed together, but it's still worth it as a whole because that era of the 40k universe is foundational and epoch-making for the entire setting.

Truth be told they’re the only ones I’ve read properly. But they’re good adventures that take themselves seriously enough to be high-stakes but not so seriously that they stray into grimdarkness.

They’re human, in a good way, and they don’t have that ‘licensed fiction’ feeling you can sometimes get. They’re published in 3-book omnibuses and the first is “Hero of the Imperium”.

BTW I’m just getting back into painting myself. Would be happy to swap pics by DM :)

Fire Warrior by Peter Fehervari is an excellent novel, and not just by Warhammer novel standards. Would highly recommend, it's top-shelf psychological horror and military SF.

As opposed to Fire Warrior, the video game, which should not be anyone's first introduction to the franchise.

The whole Horus Heresy series is also pretty decent.

Ciaphas Cain is a good introductory series as well, as long as you recognize it's not the norm. It's very much on the lighter grey side of the grim dark black on black setting, though with enough elements to understand parts of its disfunction. It avoids some of the worst habits of the franchise's tendency towards purple prose or overly in-depth combat sequences, but has its own familiar tropes it can fall into.

If you need a frame of reference, Cain is a more comedic take on the Harry Flashman premise- someone who is a self-described coward and scoundrel who ends up looking the hero. The series is presented as Cain's unpublished memoirs, collected and edited by a close acquaintance, so there's a general contrast between how Cain presents himself, how others in the moment perceive him, and how the audience of the memoirs sees him.

The series isn't a linear narrative, but rather a series of self-contained adventurers, so there's no real issue in picking and choosing. You'll get basically teasers alluding to other adventures, nothing that spoils things.

If you'd like recommendations of where to start-

For the Emperor - First novel, key characters and premise introduced, makes everything else make more sense. Probably the best all-in-one for whether you'd like the series as a whole, especially since this is the starting point for Cain's adventurers with his most-reoccurring supporting cast. If you don't like this book, you probably won't like the series.

Death or Glory - Chronologically this takes place before For the Emperor, but it was written after, so many of the characters introduced there aren't present here, even as this campaign is the basis of various allusions and future plot threads. Because of its more limited scope as 'the thing that really got Cain famous,' it also makes a good starting point. Generally commits the hardest to the question of 'how does a self-described coward become a famous hero?'

Amazing! Thank you.

Drop your thoughts in a Friday Fun thread when you finish, and drop an @ when you're finished. I'd be interested.

Honestly, one of the fun things of being anywhere adjacent to the franchise as a hobby is watching new people get involved.

Entirely coincidentally I have recently started reading this series (I have only the most surface level understanding of WH40K and was looking to dip my toes into it.)

I started reading the series and after a few pages I had to flip back to the introduction to see if Sandy Mitchell acknowledged his debt to George McDonald Fraser, which he did. I resumed reading and have been enjoying it as very light fiction in between the heavier stuff I'm reading. It's an homage and while the characters are similar Mitchell's take is much misanthropic than Fraser's.

It's light but it's not trash, as a novice I've been enjoying it.

The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath is often recommended, and deservedly so. I've known people who aren't even into Warhammer 40k who enjoyed it after the insistence of their more 40k-imbibed friends. The narration by Richard Reed is well done as well.

In short, it follows the feud between a kleptomaniac historian and an acerbic court wizard, except are both immortal space robots of technology beyond comprehension, with massive egos that entirely are entirely comprehensible, which allows incredibly petty efforts to bicker and nettle each other.

There was a moment of contemplative silence.

‘Do you have a statue of yourself, Orikan?’

I collect Necrons, I have to read this!

But the idea of being able to write fiction from a Necron perspective boggles me: I grew up with 3rd edition where the Necrons were mindless, enslaved reapers. Still not keen on the Newcrons tbh, I feel like it ruins their mystique and we already have undead pseudo-Egyptians in the Tomb Kings. But maybe Rath can change my mind.

I initially agreed with you back in the day, but I think in the end the change was for the better, if we are accepting the 40K universe is about more than just the tabletop game. If you want stories based in that universe, every single necron just being mindless is a problem. Like Tyranids, who struggle to be anything but almost a force of nature when written about in novels because there isn't a perspective in there that allows them to be protagonists in their own story.

And from the pov of the average guardsman all the basic infantry necrons are still mindless, remorseless, killing machines, it is only the higher echelons who have maintained sentience (Much like the Tomb Kings of course.)

I'm going to reply to you and @Dean in the same message if you'll forgive me, since your points are similar:

From a practical perspective I agree with you, of course. People making their armies have more range to play, authors have more range to write. And, as you say, the Tyranids already exist.

But.

Oldcrons are a much cooler 'force of nature' antagonist than tyranids. There are thousands of 'eat everything, use biomass to make more of themselves, locust-style insectoid' antagonists throughout science fiction and the tyranids don't really stand out at all. Their aesthetics aren't particularly notable and the Hive Mind has no character or backstory that we care about. They work from a gameplay perspective because they're one of the few melee horde armies you can play and 'kill the synapse beast' is interesting for the opponent. Like orks, they make good video-game opponents. But from any other perspective they're basically dull.

Now think about the Oldcrons. Not only is their aesthetic pretty unique (geometric, black and glowing green, almost surgical) but their backstory as short-lived geniuses who attacked the galaxy in resentment for the comparative wretchedness of their existence and then became enslaved by the gods they themselves called up to win their war is also pretty unique. The only other lovecraftian-robotic adversaries I can think of are the Reapers from Mass Effect. And although the Oldcrons themselves don't have character, the C'tan are pretty interesting characters in their own right. One could imagine reworking the Oldcrons to have the C'tan reinstate the crypteks' personalities for more effectiveness, and that might help too.

Nah. Tyranids may be the less unique horror villain, but they are the better one. (IMO, of course.)

Mindless things that kill you just to kill you are boring horror. There's nothing particularly lovecraftian about dumb robots / terminators that don't have a higher reason to kill you- it's just robots carrying out their programming. You may not be able to stop it, but it's not a force of nature premise either- it's just artifical constructs gone wrong, rather than, well, the nature. The C'tan shards were already really just stronger units that could be defeated with artillery or the hero of the hour, and downgrading them to the equivalent of newcron personalities would further downgrade the urgency. That's not cosmic horror, that's just a resourcing issue- there are a finite number of C'tan shards, and when they're gone they're gone.

Mindless things that kill you to eat you are a greater form of existential horror because it taps into primeval prey-dread instincts. They are a force of nature precisely because of how low-level and base the motive is- they don't kill/value you for mind, or your culture, or because god says so- they're just hungry and you're just meat. It's nature at its most brutal, and disempowering in a way that being overpowered by terminators isn't. Additionally, having the elite units be explicitly expendable and replaceable undercuts the triumph of resistance needed for the dread- it doesn't matter if you kill the swarm lord, the fleets in the dark just produce another, and there are always more fleets in the dark to do so.

Then there's the matter of scale.

The Necron are planetary-engineering scale, and outside of some ill-thought 'GW will never use them' lore-only throw-away items, that's as big as they are. The Imperium cracks planets on the regular, so while a Necron Deathstar-equivalent has narrative weight, it is- again- a resourcing issue.

By contrast, the extra-galactic nature of the Tyrannid approach lets them be depicted at galactic-scale. The Tyranid Hive Mind literally encompasses substantial fractions of the galaxy. The Tyranids aren't a resourcing issue because they can be depicted as bringing in more resources than the setting has to resist with. They're not beyond planetary-scale engineering either- that is how they strip planets of biomass and there's the lore-only flesh-planet-thing that was itnroduced later- but for the presentation of horror-via-scale, the Tyranids trump the Necrons simply by starting from a larger scale.

Then there are the appeals to lovecraftian horror.

Oldcrons weren't particularly lovecraft. Or rather, the only particularly lovecraftian thing were the pariahs and flayers- otherwise it was pretty clean and comprehensible. The necrons were murder-bots, made to murder, subject to greedy gods who plotted against them. Which is contrary to lovecraft's major themes of corruptive breeding between pure and alien, incomprehensible motives for which death/madness were a consequence rather than a point, and gods so far beyond us that the terrifying thing is that they don't pay attention to us and our existence will end as a consequence of their own movements for their own purposes. The insignificance of humanity such that C'thulu doesn't even try to murder us is why C'thulu works as a cosmic horror figure.

Tyranids are far more lovecraftian to many of lovecraft's major themes. This includes the interbreeding and corruption of cults, the organic/fleshy/aquatic imagery, and cosmic-scale indifference. The Tyranid Hive Mind does take a distinct difference in that it has a comprehensible motive- hunger- but that motive is itself aligned to the themes of disempowering 'you are not special' of Lovecraft's gods. The Hive Mind is an incomprehensible mind, and we are just in the way of it doing it's own thing for its own reasons.

The tyranids may not be unique threats, but they are both (a) a better force-of-nature antagonist than the Necrons, and (b) were better lovecraftian-horror antagonists than the Oldcrons.

If he doesn't, I doubt anyone will.

I will say that, personally, I've found the transition to be beneficial for the 40k setting. 40k already has a universal 'force of nature' antagonist, and that's the Tyranids. Oldcrons were just competing for a niche, and the transition has opened space for a number of interesting dynamics that offer an alternative narrative space. There's still narrative space for omnicidal machines, but giving the newcrons personality has allowed them to have, well, personality.

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