It’s Warhammer 40,000 Time

Forty thousand years from now, a crumbling fascist theocratic empire rules the galaxy, presided over by a God-emperor in a coma. This empire is locked in unending war with sentient fungus who live only for killing, the armies of literal hell, relentless insects that seek to eat all biomass, elves who survive only by torturing other living beings, and a collectivist species seeking to unite all peoples into a “greater good.” This is the setting of Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop war game that has spawned innumberable spinoffs in video games, novels, role-playing games, and comics. And now, Henry Cavill, late of Superman and the Witcher, together with Amazon Prime, is bringing this setting to the small screen. And nerddom is absolutely delighted.

This setting is one of of grim nihilism whose tagline is, “forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war.” It comes out of a particularly British science fiction tradition. It’s the tradition of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, the story of an anti-hero sorcerer-king who serves the dark gods of a crumbling empire. (Twentieth-century Britons seem to have had a thing for crumbling empires, for some reason.) It’s the tradition of His Dark Materials, a fantasy setting in which God is in a coma and an evil, tyrannical church speaks in his name. And yet, this setting has been growing in popularity among Americans, who traditionally prefer their science fiction and fantasy to have recognizable heroes and villains. And now, it’s poised to takeoff into the mainstream. Why? Several developments in science fiction and fantasy, together with those in the culture at large, mean that Americans are finally ready for the grim dark future of Warhammer 40,000.

In the first place, science fiction and fantasy have been in a sixty-year trajectory in which fans place an ever-increasing value on Lore. What do we mean by lore? In fandoms, it’s the story behind the story, all of the background details that make you think that the characters you’re reading about or watching inhabit a setting that could continue when the reader is gone. It’s the map in the front of the book. It’s the appendices of Lord of the Rings. It’s innumerable fan-made” wikis that catalog fictional worlds in detail nearly as minute as encyclopedias about our own world. And Warhammer 40,000 has Lore in abundance. Warhammer 40,000 began as Rogue Trader, a spinoff of Warhammer, a form of “edgy Tolkien” that itself was a spinoff of the British company Games Workshop’s possession of the British Dungeons and Dragons license. In its early days, the setting was cobbled together from various things that the authors thought was awesome. A sclerotic galactic empire of humanity came from Dune. Orks and Eldar were more or less directly ported over from Tolkien. Ditto ratlings, a short, diminutive offsoot of humanity with large, hairy feet and a penchant for theft and skill with a sniper rifle. The insectoid Tyranids who bleed acid could have wandered in off the set of Ridley Scott’s Aliens.

But this tabletop board game, this system of 28mm toy soldiers that hobbyists would paint (in a tradition of British wargaming and collection and painting of toy soldiers), ended up developing a body of Lore. As with any roleplaying game, Rogue Trader started with a background of the setting, but even as the game went from a role-playing game to tabletop war game – in a reverse of the trajectory of the early days of Dungeons and Dragons – the makers of these toy soldiers wrote stories for its setting.

These stories have multiplied: hundreds of books, rule books for each army, the magazine White Dwarf, and various supplements released over the last thirty-five years have built up a vast body of lore about the setting. The story of the Horus Heresy, when long ago the God Emperor’s most beloved son rebelled and took half of the demigod primarchs with him, will, when finished, come to sixty-three books alone. And in an age that cherishes the wiki, the lore of a setting, Warhammer 40,000 delivers in spades.

It’s not just the lore, though. It’s… much about our historical moment. In light of… developments in the politics and culture of the US, writers and critics increasingly seek to make sure that the arts and literature have a moral message lest they propagate harmful ideologies. Marvel’s She-Hulk TV series presents dialog that explicitly and didactically tells the viewer how women are mistreated. Critic Anita Sarkeesian denounced the Licorice Pizza by saying that to portray racism is to endorse racism. And Disney’s Boba Fett series gives us a crime lord who teaches us a valuable lesson about Saying No to Drugs.

Warhammer 40,000 has none of that. Warhammer 40,000 presents us humanity as an evil empire, only without any plucky rebels. Against an oppressive theocracy with the trappings of the very worst elements of Catholicism as imagined by irreligious Brits, you have… the armies of hell, armies that will kill or enslave humankind, armies that will eat humankind, and armies that will torture humankind and eat their pain. (The T’au, a species that lives by values more closely aligned with modern humanity, frequently find themselves wrongfooted to be part of an otherwise omnicidal galaxy overrun with nightmares.) Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of Dungeons and Dragons, has pledged that as part of its efforts at anti-racism, going forward there will be no species that is inherently monstrous. Warhammer 40,000 turns this on its head by saying that every species is monstrous—especially humans.

By presenting a grim dark future in which everyone is the villain, Warhammer 40,000 allows the player to explore the human id, to think about a world whose values and morals are fundamentally alien to our own. By allowing this exploration of the darkness, Amazon’s series will fill a niche left open by the decline of male anti-hero prestige TV over the last half-decade.

Of course, this exploration of darkness leads to the fear that perhaps those who in fact follow loathsome ideologies will be drawn to this setting. So Games Workshop has made official pronouncements that real-world racists and neo-Nazis are in no way welcome in the hobby in order to address the problem that some of them have been drawn to its imagery. The company has furthered efforts to indicate that racists and misogynists are not welcome in other wasy as well. Women soldiers increasingly appear in depictions of the Astra Militarum, the great conscript army that is the hammer of the Imperium of Man. Space Marines, the genetically-engineered super-soldiers, increasingly appear in different skin colors. Guides to painting miniatures now show how to paint different shades of human skin. The resulting uneasy compromise allows players to explore a world of violence, xenophobia – “He who allows the alien to live shares in the crime of its existence” is an official saying of the Imperium – and authoritarianism without endorsing their real-world equivalents..

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— Warhammer Official (@WarComTeam) June 4, 2020

Finally, the world of modern science fiction and fantasy is the world of the franchise. Star Wars is not just a collection of movies: it’s comic books, spinoff TV series, video games, merchandise, roleplaying games, and more besides. Books like the Witcher series beget video games, which beget TV shows. Fans of science fiction and fantasy can experience their favorite imaginary worlds in a myriad of ways, whether to have interactive adventures in those settings or just passively experience adventures across various media.

And thus, our age is an age that’s ready for Warhammer 40,000. A hunger for lore, a desire to explore dark settings free of moralizing, and a media universe of franchises über alles mean that Warhammer 40,000 is finally ready for the mainstream. Welcome, Amazon viewers: “There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”