Warhams Thoughts

[wolffyluna]

I have recently got back into Warhammer 40k after wandering off for a few years. I still very much love it, but jeez, I am also deeply aware of why I wandered off in the first place. “Why are we like this about the Baalite mutants?” “why are we like this about the Word Bearers’ army auxiliaries?” and “why are we like this about women, in general?” Really makes one treasure things like the Machineries of Empire series, and other sapphic space atrocities, you know?

But also... it's my first fannish love, and I can still see all the things I like about it. The melodrama and the action and the betrayals and the creeping dread of Chaos and the ~Romanticism.

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I’ve started rereading Know No Fear by Dan Abnett, and I’m going to need to fight Mr Abnett.

There’s a bit when a space marine is comparing himself to another marine from a different army:

They are alike – alike in stature, alike in rank; one red, one blue, as though stamped from identical fabricatory presses and then finished in different paints.

As if they were made by similar manufacturing processes and painted different colours, you say, Mr Abnett

“They were alike in looking like toy soldiers, made from the same mould and pulled out the same box, but painted different colours so indifferent gods could stand at the edge of the universe yelling ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!”

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I’m re-reading Fear to Tread by James Swallow. I am enjoying myself, but I am distracted by one of his writing habits.

He keeps expressing distances as “light [units of time].” Which is a normal thing to do as a sci fi author! He just keeps picking absurd units.

A ship is hanging out on the edge of a star system? They’re light seconds away from the star, and apparently in the galaxy’s smallest star system. (For context, the Sun? Is two light seconds wide by itself.)

The Blood Angels have a fancy holographic Space Zoom? The system breaks down once the ships are more than a couple light days away. The Blood Angels apparently have nothing better to do than have Space Zoom calls where you have to wait days for a reply. (Space Email just simply would not have that transhuman touch.)

[sad shake of the head] just never put numbers to anything. be free! don’t give your readers a number. we will never use them for good.

(Though I do forgive him for it, because that book has some pitch perfect Chaos creepiness, and I do like the casual racial diversity + not having a planet of hats + not being weird about "barbarians" going on with the Blood Angels.)