Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I don't believe in deconstructionism's "death of the author" (I feel fine) but I'm perfectly prepared to believe that a reader may have a more insightful and interesting interpretation of the words I wrote than what I was thinking of when I wrote them. So your thoughts are much appreciated.

Reminds me of something one of my uni lecturer's said and whilst it's always interesting to hear someone's interpretation I also wouldn't want to tell someone (you in this instance) what your story is about or what you meant; I don't like being presumptuous like that. Anyway...

Idk, Gogsnik. Sometimes a writer really does need to be told what their story is about, but only when they've done a particularly stellar job of mucking things up. There was this lady in a poetry class I took a few years ago. She insisted that her work was about all sorts of things that were too high minded for her to even describe to us as she interrupted our workshop of her work (which you never do). Eventually we just had to break it to her that all she'd written was essentially "boys suck, girls rule."

Ha, lol! Well obviously there are times like those.

I forget the name of the show now, it was a comedy, about a group of nerds who were obsessed with a seventies sci-fi programme. Anyway, they had come up with all these theories about what it all meant and what the message was in the show and had developed these really detailed and extensive theories but when they get to meet up with the writer he tells them it was all just made up gak and the 'secret codes' were just a bunch of names taken from an indian dinner menu and messed up a bit, so an episode was literally called Vindaloo or some such.

The nerds got annoyed about how this fella was blowing them off and calling them fools and they had a big rant about how what they had come up with so much more than him and also a million times better, so heshould just accept it and be greatful!

I'm convinced that most of the great literary works in history are just like that: fun stories that someone wrote down, which later had meaning ascribed to them by people with too much time on their hands. Sort of like how American lit professors think that Faulkner's every typo or punctuation error was some kind of stylistic genius.

I'm sure plenty of authors had big themes in mind about what their works meant when they wrote them. They just may have been wrong.

 Gogsnik wrote:
I forget the name of the show now, it was a comedy, about a group of nerds who were obsessed with a seventies sci-fi programme. Anyway, they had come up with all these theories about what it all meant and what the message was in the show and had developed these really detailed and extensive theories but when they get to meet up with the writer he tells them it was all just made up gak and the 'secret codes' were just a bunch of names taken from an indian dinner menu and messed up a bit, so an episode was literally called Vindaloo or some such. The nerds got annoyed about how this fella was blowing them off and calling them fools and they had a big rant about how what they had come up with so much more than him and also a million times better, so heshould just accept it and be greatful!

Which is why obsessing over "canon" is a dead end: Sometimes the authors don't know what they're doing, especially when you have multiple creators working on a franchise over the course of decades, as with Warhammer, Star Trek, and the Star Wars "extended universe" (which I ignore, along with the prequel trilogy. Whiny Anakin never happened).

Very true. It's a bit like the idea that, Necromunda or Inquisitor say, occupy their own ditsinct versions of the 40K universe and weren't necessarily part of the Warhammer 40,000 table top game 40K universe.

The line comes when you want to say that orks are pink not green et cetera. Or that a Sister of Battle might become corrupted perhaps... Then you hit up against 'canonicity' for want of a better term and then people will say that this or that scenario is impossible. I suppose it all depends on what breaks your suspension of disbelief and that is completely subjective.

The next installment is up, or the prequel, or something: The Beginning.

 SisterSydney wrote:
I'm sure plenty of authors had big themes in mind about what their works meant when they wrote them. They just may have been wrong.

Ugh, one of the students I assisted at uni did her final paper on "The Fallacy of Intent".

It basically discusses whether a work can be considered successful if the author's original intent is conveyed, or if the intention is even relevant to the final success of the work. It was parsed in terms of Fine Art, but the same thing can be applied to any creative work.

Worth looking up for a read, but completely inconclusive. Just like everything else in fine art. ><

Oh, my father was a professor of fine arts, specifically Italian Renaissance painting. He was oldschool and would tell you when something was great and something was crap (or fake).

And I've posted the final story in the series, Dancing with the Astartes, which ends up being all about the consequences of what happened in this one.

You actualy spared a heretic! What sort of weak willed sod would spare someone serving the dark powers? I also found the lack of backbone in your Sisters & inqusitor quite mind numbing
But then again not everyone likes their grimdark as grim as I do

The Inquisitor is in fact sparing hundreds of heretics -- and by "sparing," I of course mean "sentencing them to a (probably brief) lifetime of hard labor rather than incinerating them on the spot." The planet's a little dinged up and they have a shortage of skilled labor, you see. Also a tiny shred of human decency, which is appalling, I know.

 SisterSydney wrote:
The Inquisitor is in fact sparing hundreds of heretics -- and by "sparing," I of course mean "sentencing them to a (probably brief) lifetime of hard labor rather than incinerating them on the spot." The planet's a little dinged up and they have a shortage of skilled labor, you see. Also a tiny shred of human decency, which is appalling, I know.

Oh the horror! Are you sure he is not himself tainted And human decency have no place in 40k

Well.


About the smoking thing ---- alcoholism reached absolutely epidemic proportions in the Einsatzgruppen in Russia , the police battalions in Poland, and in the Aktion Reinhardt Death camps.
it's speculation of course, a what-if that didn't actually happen ; But so much was this so that I suspect that if Germany had won the war many of these people were going to follow their victims into an equally unenviable and nasty fate anyway.

Of course genocide is implicit in the context of the Imperium of Man and the practical context. That is, if they lose the war they don't just lose status, riches, territory, or get their feelings hurt. They lose EVERYTHING. Their own lives would be the least of it.

Still , I was shocked to see this sort of thing described so realistically and vividly.
I've been wanting ( " wanting " is NOT the right word ) to write the same sort of thing. In my case it's a Commissar in the Kaurava system. She literally loved the Emperor and the Imperium of Man, still does love so much it hurts, she wanted to do good , thought herself a good person.
So far I can't write it though. I start sobbing and shaking and even four or five packs of cigarettes aren't enough.
Objectively it's interesting ; I would have thought that to write on such a topic realistically and vividly would require experience. I guess some people are so smart , imaginative, perceptive that they don't have to learn the hard way in order to understand. If true, then that at least is a cheerful thought, a kind of silver lining.

I think that " Able Baker " is the best possible title, because it is so obscene. Imagine the worst kind of porn. I mean the really, really nasty stuff. That's what this sort of thing is like. Just the image, the picture, is so bad it keeps you up until 4 am 30 years later.

Torres gesture at the end was a good touch. The only thing I know of after doing something like this that would stave off suicide, or a mental / physical collapse of such degree that death would be the result, is love , in the last ditch, the fervent hope that at least someone, somewhere, some day, would have a happy life.

I've read a fair bit about the Holocaust -- I was a history major in college -- and remember reading somewhere that Himmler said good German boys were being psychologically ruined by having to kill so many Jews, Gypsies (Roma), etc. Yes, there's a sickening irony here, and it's shocking how empathy stops sharply at the edge where "us" meets "them" -- but that's been humanity's problem since the beginning.

Now, the victims in this story aren't all innocent: at least some are self-confessed collaborators with an armed rebellion, which would be treason in most political systems, not just the Imperium. But clearly there's no kind of due process at work, and the method of execution is a war crime.

The point of the story is that even the people who commit war crimes are often normal people, who feel love and compassion and still do it. I think that's far scarier than saying anyone who does such things is simply an inhuman monster.