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Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers et al never made any secret about where the inspirations of 40k came from. It's a melange of 80s Punk/anti-Thatcherism Britan, Dune, 2000AD, Michal Moorcock, LoTR and numerous other influences, all cast into something of its own.

Some of these are more obvious than others (the Dune influences for instance), with the Sardakur as Space Marines, of warp travel and 'navigators', and of galaxy-spanning crumbling empires. You have the more subtle, underlying and satirical influence of 2000AD and the Judge Dredd setting as well, although that disappeared towards the tail-end of 1st edition when the 40k universe started taking itself more seriously.

What I will say is that the setting has evolved a lot since then (it's nothing like as derivative as it once was).

As an interesting side-point, as the OP has in this case (disregarding the 'carbon copy' comment) it's funny that every now and again I'll come across a bit of sci-fi or fantasy literature which you can see may have been influential. Just reading To Die in Italbar, by Roger Zelazny, in which the main protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to a priest of Nurgle or similar. I'd say almost certainly that one probably influenced Brian Ansell concerning that part of the Chaos pantheon (although the nature of the disease/healing is much more subtle than in the case of Fantasy/40k)

Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers et al never made any secret about where the inspirations of 40k came from. It's a melange of 80s Punk/anti-Thatcherism Britan, Dune, 2000AD, Michal Moorcock, LoTR and numerous other influences, all cast into something of its own.

Heh, you said "melange" in a "40k ripped off Dune" thread.

This isn't news.




It is an admitted fact that Dune was a heavy inspiration for 40k, among many other sci-fi settings. Dune is to dark Sci-fi what LotR is to High Fantasy.

As other posters have pointed out, it should be news to nobody that 40k borrows heavily from Dune. For fun, it's worth pointing out that the 'feudal future' trope had become an established outside of 'proper SF' by the 1970s.

There's a wonderful 1978 Doctor Who story, The Ribos Operation, that invokes a very Dune-like setting (and then ~because budget~ scales it down to stories of desparate conmen on a primitive backwater world).

(Who writer Robert Holmes evidently liked Dune; Ribos, Kroll and Caves are Dune restaged in respectively polystyrene corridors, a marsh and a quarry.)

A lot of what we consider tropes made by Dune actually existed for decades before Dune was written. Dune is just the most widely known and influential work utilizing them.

Creativity in fiction is much like creativity in cooking, in that it's more about how you arrange and prepare the ingredients rather than the ingredients themselves.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Creativity in fiction is much like creativity in cooking, in that it's more about how you arrange and prepare the ingredients rather than the ingredients themselves.

word

 Nurglitch wrote:
Creativity in fiction is much like creativity in cooking, in that it's more about how you arrange and prepare the ingredients rather than the ingredients themselves.

The first lesson anyone learns after reading enough books is that Ecclesiastes was right.

There is nothing new under the sun. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have fun with it.