The other day someone asked me why I didn't care for the new 40K lore and preferred to tell stories in an alternative 40k universe without Guilliman, the bigly Marines or the giant warp storm running through the galaxy. They politely asked if it was the reduction in the level of 'grimdark'. But that's not the case at all. Instead of going on at length in a possibly negative way about what I don't like, I thought I'd talk about what I love about 40k. And I do love it, very much. It's probably my favourite science fiction (let's not quibble over definitions) world.
Part of it, of course, is the models, the imagery, even the game. I love poring through books like The Emperor's Will for inspiration. I love the peculiar fusion of the medieval, the futuristic and the gloss of Gothic and Baroque traditions. I love the image of scribes with bionics scribbling in dusty tomes with quill pens, whilst incense burns and supercomputers murmur in the background. But in order to have these things, you need the lore of 40k. A lore which is just so beautiful.
The 40k universe is a secular universe which has inadvertently dumped the supernatural on itself. The early 40k universe developed, I've no doubt, out of the same tapestry of chemistry which our own world did. Sentient races evolved through natural selection and the passage of aeons. Man conceived of God, and so God was. This is true in two ways: the first and most obvious way is that the unconscious impulses of man created the chaos gods in the warp. Less obviously is that the Emperor himself, a compound of God, Christ, Mohammed and numerous other monotheist figures, is a hyper-evolved human being, created by the desires of humanity for a better incarnation of itself (this story is eloquently told in Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned, 1990). Mankind created the God that they wanted to believe was real, and the gods that they feared were real. Both were the essence of human potential, the inevitable clash which the two sides came into was, as with almost everything about 40k, some facet of Man vs Himself in grand scale. 40k is almost completely about the human race, far more than even Warhammer Fantasy. The Xenos are interesting players, but they are secondary to the saga of humanity, and the war within humanity. Nature and chaos, survival or destruction. Man as monster and saviour. In this universe, God and the Devil are different components of humanity, and ultimately it is up to humanity to choose between them.
I think that there's a really interesting parable in 40k about the dangers of absoluteness. The Emperor is unparalleled in knowledge, but He still has human failings. After the Dark Age of Technology, He determines that perhaps a crude, simplistic imperialistic society based on an unquestionable 'Imperial Truth' is the best way to safeguard humanity until he can avert the most destructive aspects of their oncoming evolutionary stage. With this in mind, he founds an empire on militant secularism, enforced through firebrand orators called 'Iterators'. If there's something alarmingly like a reverse theocracy in the depictions of the 31st millennium, it's because it is. The Emperor's mistake was perhaps to underestimate the inquisitive nature of his fellow humans. Imperial Truth could not, ultimately, prevail because it wasn't entirely true. It was a lie with the best of intentions, but a lie nonetheless. In absolute terms, it became impossible to stop everyone from finding this out. Horus, despite his acknowledgement of warp entities and his classification of them as dangerous Xenos breeds, is ill prepared for the way that they can get at his deepest fears - because they are a part of humanity. He turns upon the Emperor, a combination of a Luciferian rebel and a wayward son. And we all know how that ended. The Emperor takes on a Christ-like quality at this point, sacrificed to save humanity from evil. He sits on a throne rather than a cross, but the parity is remarkable (he even has a massive wound in his gut). He then watches over humanity from afar.
When the Imperium resorts to fanatical theocracy, we see the danger of absoluteness from another side, one which we're probably a bit more comfortable with. A monstrous combination of Catholicism, evangelicalism and Wahhabism's worst traits, the Imperial Creed is obviously oppressive and intolerant, fuelling the very superstitious fears which will power the Chaos Gods. But... but... it's more complicated than that, of course. Because 40k is refined and intelligent. The message is not 'religion bad' any more than the Imperium's foundation makes it 'atheism bad'.
The Imperial Creed is a tyrannical, hateful religion from what we know. But that being said, it does have certain empowering tendencies, as demented as we may find them: implicit within the raging call to arms is a tacit implication of the power of men to change the universe. The human form is celebrated as divine, and the nature of sin is one which direct action can tackle, rather than purely on the spiritual shield of a single deity1. By focusing enmity on non-humans, the Imperial Creed does seem to have eliminated most of the idiotic prejudices of the modern world (I've never read any real evidence of sexism, human racism, homophobia or anything like that).
And this is one of the many joys of 40k. There are no simple answers. It's easy to classify it as a miserable, hopeless universe, but I think that ignores so much of the material. Yes, it's a scary place. But humanity is still strong, still vital, holding onto millions of worlds in the face of unimaginable horrors. People are capable of profound feats in 40k. For ten thousand years, mortal humans have literally confounded the will of a pantheon of evil gods. And they are still there. Massive invasions of Orks, a six-pack of Hive Fleets, Thirteen Black Crusades, an empire of jumped-up little blue people, insomniac Necron dynasties and more Chaos invasions than you can shake a stick at have flung themselves at humanity, and it's still there. Yes, it's grim and it's dark, but it's hopeful too. There is an energy, a defiance in the human race of 40k which simply will not die. Another question on the back of that, though, is... should it?
The Imperium is a pretty nasty organisation when viewed from a distance, explained in the lore itself as 'the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable'. From a survival perspective, it can be argued that the Imperium needs to be that harsh. But this leads to two further questions. First, does survival justify such a level of murderous and hateful behaviour. Is survival an end in and of itself? Will the Imperium be justified in some theoretical future where humanity outgrows it? Secondly, can it be entirely irredeemable if it produces good men? You wouldn't call Ibram Gaunt an evil man. This question leads us to uncomfortable but necessary questions about whether our political opponents (wherever we stand on that issue) might be more human than we tend to think.
What are the answers to these questions? Truthfully, I don't know. And that's what's so appealing about 40k. It is very complex. Every answer spawns two new questions. Some of the answers are unacceptable or uncomfortable. There is no simplicity to any situation in the 40k universe. I dislike it when people say 'there are no good guys' because I think that's pretty lazy thinking. Better to say that it requires significant scrutiny in every situation, and you might not get a good answer then. Better to say that the 40k universe is full of people trying to make their way in difficult times. And that's why is seems so real: because the muddy, complex moralities of the 40k universe land very close to the real world. The more you think about it, the more questions you find yourself with.
It's a world which both endorses and critiques religion and secularism. It's a world which examines fascism, communism, oligarchy and to a degree democracy and finds fault and more unsettlingly sometimes positivity in all of them. It's a galaxy of mysticism and astounding scientific advancement. It's a saga where the most sophisticated weapons are used and yet the deadliest fighters often use swords and axes. There are so, so, many themes and aspects of the 40k universe that you can never easily boil it down to 'him good, him bad'.
And this is why I don't like the new lore so much. One of the key tacit admissions of the 40k universe is that superhumans ultimately failed. Space Marines and Primarchs plunged the galaxy into madness. Custodes retreated in bitterness back to Terra to brood over broken dreams. The Emperor Himself, though he ultimately took on an incredible self-sacrificing responsibility, paid for his dangerous experiment in almost the worst way he could. The Imperium is run by flawed, mortal humans. The High Lords are humans. The sector governors are humans. The monolithic might of the Guard, the Navy, the Inquisition and the endless trillions of souls who make up the population of the Imperium are human. And for a hundred centuries, beset by horrors from every side, they have kept it together. That's one hell of an endorsement from the writers. And Space Marines, as autonomous bodies within the Imperium, had their own agency and could be appreciated on the simple but appealing theme of their righteous might. So when I read that Roboute Guilliman had come back and taken over and that his cure for the universe's ills was even bigger superhumans, I decided that GW and I had to agree to disagree. It seemed to me to rob humanity of agency, implying that some kind of greater-than-human superhero was required because humanity couldn't hack it. It felt a bit like a replay of the Warhammer Fantasy problem, where the Empire was trampled underfoot without much of a fight, the world was destroyed and the only thing which could save humanity was an army of huge golden Space Marine analogues. Now, let me be clear: if you love the Primaris Space Marines and Guilliman and the giant warp rift and all that, I have zero problems with that. I'm glad it improves your hobby. I have no problem with GW. They have a product, they want to take it in a direction which I mostly agree with but disagree with the lore aspect. So my 40k universe is a little different, and the saga of the Imperium of Man will go on.
1 This is a massive bugbear I have with Christianity. The concept of original sin is profoundly non-Biblical, inasmuch as God already issued punishment for the sins in the Book of Genesis when he cast man from the Garden of Eden, see Genesis 3:17-23. And don't get me started on how this passage could be read as being very friendly to women as it could be said to infer that Adam loved Eve more than God. Theology grumble over.↩
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