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I recently finished Helsreach - good solid bolter porn but not nearly as interesting as the same author's Night Lords or HH books. It does have a killer last line though.



Anyway, it got me to thinking - is there any story or novel in BL's output that you would call anti-war? For the most part the books seem to veer from Boy's Own Adventure (swap out the space marines or imperial guard for british tommies and the traitors or orks for germans and a lot of this stuff would be straight out of old british war comics like The Victor) to gory war porn ala Sven Hassell, to comicbook power fantasies.

Occassionally it also carries some... unfortunate implications. Horus Rising and other works set during the Great Crusade can read like something the 3rd Reich would have approved of - statuesque supermen leading their genetically pure sons in a triumphant genocidal crusade against 'inferior' alien races. It's probably best not to over analyse some of that stuff.

But is it ever anti-war? The only example I can think of is, to some extent, The Armour of Contempt, which has a distinctly downbeat and bitter ending and a sense that the entire offensive was a pointless waste of time and lives.

I suppose my question is should BL try to raise its game and be a bit less gung ho now and again? Would you welcome it? Would you read it?

Dead Men Walking, the Kriegsmen could've left the planet to die, they were on shore leave after some bitter war elsewhere, but



It feels to me that there's not glory, no honor, just a messy death, another number going down­.

If a BL novel doesn't have, at best, a bittersweet ending, where you feel that though a victory (maybe) was gained, but was not worth the cost in lives and materials, then the author fails to express the grimdark setting of 40K properly.

I would say a lot of the novels are fairly downbeat on war itself, highlighting the human misery and suffering that ensues but sometimes they show absolute futility to highlight the often ludicrous, insane and incompetence of the Imperial bureaucracy which is very much a part of the setting; sometimes worlds drown in blood simply because some lowly scribe put a 'P' instead of a 'B' on the top of his form. Whilst not war related, a great example can be found in one of the Necromunda books, where people can die before ever getting their turn to see a spire noble for help, and the protagonist is made to wait whilst numbers are called out even though no-one else except him is there and his number is thousands of places down the queue.

At the end of the day though 'there is only war' and I would say that's where the condemnation comes in (if it does at all, this ain't high literature); even if the Third Reich were to create tales like this, they would ultimately be about a lasting peace, won through these martial acts but the war is a means to end. In 40K war is either treated as end in and of itself (from Khorne Berserks to Istvaanian Inquisitors and on to the Orks) or it is simply without end, no-matter how many wars are won there is no victory, just death and slaughter forever which is not particularly pro-war.

Fifteen Hours.

'Nuff said.

That one too.

Its funny, I think they are kinda are.

Ultimately it is all pointless, and I had a good time in all the wars I fought in, but its still the same surely?

Win or lose, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the human species will happily crack on. Grass will still grow, fish will still swim, thousands of young men have had their lives cut short, does it really matter?

No.

The world keeps turning, I think war basically shows us that we should be anti-war, but even if individually we almost all are, society never is because it is ruled by rich powerful fethers whose own families never have to fight in them. I always got that message from 40k books, they illustrate perfectly that its all very grim and silly.

Actually I'm too drunk for this, Ill come back tomorrow.

40K is anti-war by default.

So yeah, pretty much all stories set within the Universe are anti-war.

Especially when told from PoW of low-ranking frail human (i.e. not a space marine or power-tripping inquisitor).

I would say the best book for an anti-war style would be The Armour of Contempt by Dan Abnett (in his series of Gaunt's Ghosts). Most of the story is told from the perspective of a young guardsmen thrown in the madness of a mass assault against a fortified position. You have excellent part in wich he realise the insanity of war, the fear of death and sees his friends die under the ennemy fire and some to a commissar bolt pistol. The other part of the book focus on the rest of the Ghost and sees them search for civilians in an ennemy occupied town. You have a very touching death scene for one of the Ghost during that operation (a rare thing in Black Library where death, even the violent one, seems to lack any real emotionnal charge). Despite it's qualities, it is a pretty depressing read. The only other book that left me with a similar taste (thow not anti-war) was Hammer and Anvil (the mass funeral was a very good scene).

It depends on point of view. You can interpret 40k universe and its literature as a machist, proto-fascist story (which many people do, and not only the haters, unfortunately), as a pure, over-the-top camp that just takes military scifi tropes to the max (and ends up as gore porn), or as an actual but rather weak attempt at "scifi realism", showing how terryfying the idea of intergalactic war actually is (unfortunately it usually ends up as gore porn again). Abnett's Ghosts series is probably the best example of the "realistic" side of 40k.

Humans prosecute wars. Simply a fact, generally humans will kill one another or find something else to kill. As i interpret 40ks setting if the imperium was beset by peace at all sides it would turn on itself and tear itself apart. No one wants to go to war, war just either finds or happens to people.

There is a good 40K quote the sums up the attitude - "It is not the Horror of War that troubles me but the Unseen Horrors of Peace."

And whilst not a 40K novel, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has this fantastic quote which resonates with 40K - "It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be."

"If ants had nuclear weapons, they would end the world in a week."
- E.O. Wilson

"Sir? The astropaths just all went to sleep, except two who exploded."

"Oh, gak."

Nearly every 40k story is anti-war. No one is better off in these stories because of war. Most are demonstrably worse off.

The best war movies actually have an anti-war message. Ultimately they are about the people fighting the war and not how glorious the struggle is.

Watch Anzio, Too Late the Hero, A Bridge Too Far. Those all show the loss and futility of the thing.

I feel like Loken in the first few Horus Heresy books actually expresses some subtle anti-war messages, because in 30k the great crusade is extremely morally questionable, and all anti-war sentiment is based on the idea that war is senseless and immoral. This is not the case in 40k. In 40k you have humanity fighting for its very existence. To argue that they should stop warring is to argue they should lay down and die because war is coming whether they wish it or not.

In betrayer when Angron tells Russ how deluded he is thinking that the great crusade is some moral endeavor "i'm suppose to impose a TITHE and not call it slavery!"