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***minor Horus heresy spoilers within for Last Church ***

So we know that vast libraries of books and media are to be found on the ships of the Great Crusade, as there was one where the Iterators hung out on the Vengful Spirit in the HH books, and there must be references to others in other black library novels.

So I'm wondering what media, novels, plays, tv, movies, music etc would have survived from the current age to the 30k and 40k era. We know there's a series of cataclysmic wars in Earths future history, between now and the Great Crusade, the unification wars, long night, etc.

Would anything have survived? We see that all the Churches were destroyed in "The Last Church" so the Big E wasn't averse to wiping out things he didn't see as useful to his vision, so maybe he got rid of all the Justin Bieber Mp3s... Lol

Would all the Shakespeare have been purged as heretical by the 41st millennium?

So does anybody know of any culture that has survived, or think anything would have survived. Even with the most awful of wars, some novels or paperbacks must have survived, some sheet music, even passed down through memory or word of mouth over the years. Something anything?

There have been mentions of "The Dramaturge Shakespire" in one book, so - distorted as it may be - Shakespeare is still known about.
There's references by one of the characters to The Tragedy of Amletti featuring a 'Lady Ophelia', for example - pretty good odds that's Hamlet.

The original organisation of the Astartes Legions were inspired by - amongst other things "Krom's fragmentary New Model" - which will be talking about the manual for Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War.

Malcador has a fairly wide-ranging selection of art and historical artefacts; he definitely has Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh, and the Rosetta Stone locked away in various places.

There are occasional religious mentions still around - Ollianus (in Know No Fear) describes himself as 'Catheric' and has a crucifix, if I remember right. Obviously he's a special case, but it implies that you might find occasional pockets of religion off earth where the Emperor and the more important imperial figures never went.

As to the Justin Bieber songs - what do you think the 'horrific atonal sounds' that the Emperor's Children proto-noise marines were using to drive everyone in the theatre insane were.....

locarno24 wrote:
There have been mentions of "The Dramaturge Shakespire" in one book, so - distorted as it may be - Shakespeare is still known about.
There's references by one of the characters to The Tragedy of Amletti featuring a 'Lady Ophelia', for example - pretty good odds that's Hamlet.

The original organisation of the Astartes Legions were inspired by - amongst other things "Krom's fragmentary New Model" - which will be talking about the manual for Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War.

Malcador has a fairly wide-ranging selection of art and historical artefacts; he definitely has Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh, and the Rosetta Stone locked away in various places.

There are occasional religious mentions still around - Ollianus (in Know No Fear) describes himself as 'Catheric' and has a crucifix, if I remember right. Obviously he's a special case, but it implies that you might find occasional pockets of religion off earth where the Emperor and the more important imperial figures never went.

As to the Justin Bieber songs - what do you think the 'horrific atonal sounds' that the Emperor's Children proto-noise marines were using to drive everyone in the theatre insane were.....

Oh yeah! I remember the mention of Shakespeare now! And Krom, though it never twigged about Cromwell and the New Model Army, probably because I always associate that with Thomas Fairfax. And the old Thomas Airfix Model Amru joke

Lol I can just imagine those noise Marines causing a stampede in that theatre now to the dolcite tones of Biebers "Baby Baby Baby oooh"

No wonder Fulgrim went Doolally Tap.

Shakespeare, or Shakespire as he is known in the 30k universe only has on or two plays still in existence according to one of the HH books I read recently. Can't think of the title of the top of my head right now...

 General Kroll wrote:
***minor Horus heresy spoilers within for Last Church ***

So we know that vast libraries of books and media are to be found on the ships of the Great Crusade, as there was one where the Iterators hung out on the Vengful Spirit in the HH books, and there must be references to others in other black library novels.

So I'm wondering what media, novels, plays, tv, movies, music etc would have survived from the current age to the 30k and 40k era. We know there's a series of cataclysmic wars in Earths future history, between now and the Great Crusade, the unification wars, long night, etc.

Would anything have survived? We see that all the Churches were destroyed in "The Last Church" so the Big E wasn't averse to wiping out things he didn't see as useful to his vision, so maybe he got rid of all the Justin Bieber Mp3s... Lol

Would all the Shakespeare have been purged as heretical by the 41st millennium?

So does anybody know of any culture that has survived, or think anything would have survived. Even with the most awful of wars, some novels or paperbacks must have survived, some sheet music, even passed down through memory or word of mouth over the years. Something anything?

While BW authors like to make references to classical literature and real-world nations, that's a conceit of their style, not something that would actually happen. The current date, (16M3) is 38,000 years before the events of the setting. That's longer than all of recorded history to date. Nothing from the current era, or before it, will survive that long in any usable format. Books will have long since rotted, digital media will be unreadable, film will have dissolved, and language would have changed to such a degree that even fragments, should any ever be recovered, would be entirely unintelligible.

wouldn't that be 28,000 years before the HH, Psienesis???

45,000 year old cave paintings are still around
things can be transcribed, and placed in stasis...

i do get your point about a conceit of style, but i think the fact that it is only a rare few things that are mentioned, and in a slightly altered form, make for fun little Easter Eggs...
too much, and it would feel played out...

cheers
jah

 jah-joshua wrote:
wouldn't that be 28,000 years before the HH, Psienesis???

45,000 year old cave paintings are still around
things can be transcribed, and placed in stasis...

i do get your point about a conceit of style, but i think the fact that it is only a rare few things that are mentioned, and in a slightly altered form, make for fun little Easter Eggs...
too much, and it would feel played out...

cheers
jah

Yes, 28k years before the HH... which still doesn't change much. Yes, we have surviving cave paintings... but we can only guess at their actual meanings. There's also the fact that we're not trying to transport said caves, through space or otherwise. They are also not, largely speaking, open to the public. Flash photography and such has done irreparable damage to numerous artifacts, and we haven't even been subject to the War with the Iron Men, the Techno-Barbarian Wars, the Heresy, or any one of the other cataclysms that have devastated Terra (and elsewhere) of 40k.

I have to say, I disagree Psienesis.

Whilst we may not understand the subject of the cave-paintings, that isn't really the issue in question. The issue is whether it survives or not and cave-paintings do. Now, granted the paintings have not been subjected to all the events leading up to M41, however most cave paintings have also not been subjected to the Sack of Troy, the end of the Roman Empire, the Fall of Jerusalem, the Western Front, Hiroshima, Chernobyl and the plethora of other destructive acts of mankind has already committed. IMHO, just because many destructive grimdark events occur within the Warhammer 40k setting, does not mean that absolutely everything is lost. If there was a real world precedent for this situation, we wouldn't still be digging up more and more archaeological finds every day.

You mention that flash photography has done such damage to artefacts and undoubtedly it has to some, but that is more down to inexperience than a continuing trend. More and more advanced techniques of preservation come to the fore every year, ensuring our past is preserved. Considering that the Imperium literally runs on relic technology, I guess the one thing they do really well is preserve tech and relics. I rather agree with jah-joshua in that things can always be transcribed or moved to different formats. Cinefilm is transcribed into VHS, which moves to DVD, Blu-Ray, digital copies and so on. Similarly, many people, ordinary people, pass family heirlooms down through the generations which are looked after simply because of the family connection and chances are that even thousands of years into the future people may still be reading their grandfathers grandfathers well thumbed copy of Shakespear as well as I can read the parish records of my 400 year old ancestor from just down the road.

I'll leave you with a list of artefacts that still exist, which we understand why they were made or written, thousands of years after they were created or penned:


I could go on. Suffice it to say, there is a bunch of stuff out there that has survived millenia and is still here and understood.In this case, I think the BL authors are justified in dropping in some fun easter eggs, because it's, IMHO, totally plausible. Even 28,000 years into the future there will still be scholars, archivists and academics preserving artefacts - it's kind of what humans do (Unless you're ISIS of course, in which case you blow up your own damn history on spurious religious grounds)

Somebody (who works for Malcador?) says that the Imperium have almost nothing left to recover about the past, because they have copies of "all three of Shakespire's plays". (or is it five?).

So

Idk, it's like how you say Justin Bieber songs are unpleasant, but do not appear to know anything about them or or have any reason s why. They are all yeah, Al Gore was the real winner of American Idol, we totally know everything about history.

Again, the scale of time, and the level of total devastation, between now and the Age of the Imperium is inconceivably different than anything that has happened in our history of human civilization. The Sack of Troy was bad, it was not War of the Iron Men bad (which drove Mankind to the brink of extinction). It was not Horus Heresy bad.

Remember that Terra went through centuries of Mad Max times, it suffered unimaginable ecological devastation, and several full-scale nuclear wars. It's a conceit of the setting that Mankind has lost almost its entire historic and technological base. Relics from the modern age, let alone the Renaissance, would be nearly impossible to have survived, though I suspect that the copies of certain works, which may continue to be produced until the 24th or 25th century which, iirc, is the era of the first apocalypse that destroys human civilization for a time, might exist in a singular collection.

@Psienesis - I do appreciate that because it's integral to the setting that everything is cranked up to 11, but the core of my point is that it's really, really hard to truly eradicate all traces of the past. Just as the Imperium is digging up STC printouts, it may just be that they stumble across somebodies old personal stash of literature hidden away in an old ruin on some half-forgotten world. Exactly as we discover broken flint axe-heads that somebody chucked onto the midden heap millions of years ago, a bunch of Adepts rooting through the archives on Terra may stumble across a transcribed copy of a Marvel comic - stuff just has a tendency to crop up.

For example. type into Wikipedia 'Vindolanda Tablets' - They're a bunch of Roman letters, manifests and writings, written down on paper thin wooden tablets. They detail a whole bunch of stuff, including an invitation to somebodies birthday party in 100AD, Then they were just chucked away when they were no use anymore. No ceremony, no consideration - just rubbish to be discarded. Yet for all that, 1900 years later they were, and are continuing to be, dug up. In this case you could argue that they should have been destroyed because the 'Barbarians' actively destroyed Roman works during the Dark Ages or they should have rotted in the ground. However, due to chance conditions of the ground and because they were unimportant to 'Barbarian' invaders, they just got buried underground and forgotten until we dug them up.

It's the same, IMO, for 40k. Somebody may have had an old datalog of Shakespeare, put it in a tin and left it in their house. Next day, the Men of Iron storm the city and kill all the humans - but the Men of Iron don't care much for burning the works of a long dead playwright. 10,000 years later an Explorator mission comes along and finds said tin with datalog. Even the destructive nature of 40k is not proof that everything would be destroyed. Look at Hiroshima and the bits and bobs that still survived the blast. Sure, Little Boy and Fat Man are tiny compared to 40k weapons, but Japanese houses were made of wood and 40k Hives are made from reinforced ferro-crete, ceramite and adamantium plating - it's all in context.

Anyway, that's just my personal take on it. However, of interest is the concept of a Digital Dark Age that may come about by the constant progression of technology meaning old file formats may no longer be opened if the software or hardware no longer exists. The UK's National Archives have entered a partnership with Microsoft to try and prevent the Digital Dark Age from coming about - which all sounds deliciously grimdark