Jerkface posted:

Does anyone know why Matthew Farrer hasn't written anything more? He did the Enforcer books about Shira Calpurnia and I really like them a lot. He reminds me of a warhammer 40k george rr martin, not in creepyness but in the ability to craft an elaborate world that seems to work. I really like the setting with very real rivalries between police, church, nobles, and navy. I'm only on the second now but the whole rogue trader succession thing is great.

hopterque posted:

That's basically the core theme of 40k, as someone posted above.

The reason why technological advancement is clamped down on super hard by basically the entire Imperium is because it has pretty consistently led to awful chaos things happening. So advancement is ruthlessly suppressed by Mechanicum and the Inquisition and the clergy and everyone because nobody wants some guy trying to invent a better lasgun or a knife or whatever getting corrupted by the chaos gods and say starting a cult and taking over a world and turning into a big pain in the rear end.

Baron Bifford posted:

Wow. I'd love to read a book on this. Can you recommend a novel or two where this phenomenon is well explained?

quote:

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-Fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare shithole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is hosed. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find poo poo, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently hosed with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a loving grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The loving Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seeking to kill you.

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better loving please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day poo poo. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

This is why they do not like ANYONE loving with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to gently caress with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall hosed everything up and the Heresy double-hosed it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, they never have, and they never will.

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire loving military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I can guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

Since some still don't get the idea, try this:

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere when you need a book from it, but the book is only a simplified copy. You don't understand the real book, and you don't need to. Nobody takes the real books anywhere because why would you, when there's a whole library there?

Now that library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-loving-where near it. Where the gently caress did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and tears apart the library to stop them using it, only to be destroyed in the process. The library is leveled, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old. It isn't a shadow on the glory of the old, but it is all they have.

Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single poo poo decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a poo poo life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

Baron Bifford posted:

Wow. I'd love to read a book on this. Can you recommend a novel or two where this phenomenon is well explained?

Impaired Casing posted:

Baron Bifford posted:

I love this summary except for the last bit. The Imperium does all this sacrifice and brutality because it is often the best thing they can think of. The 41st Millenium is a dark age, a time of great unenlightment. The rulers are corrupt, callous, and stupid. Contrast human strategies with the Eldar and the Tau, who are far more creative.

Mechafunkzilla posted:

Yeah...the cool part of 40k to me has always been the stories that take place within this batshit crazy world that has been cobbled together from three decades of shameless riffing on established sci-fi properties. Not, like, figuring out what the "truth" is about the various elements of the setting. Generally speaking, that stuff is all mutable depending on the narrative needs of a given story.

Baron Bifford posted:

The Space Marine creation process seems contradictory. The fluff says that the neophyte needs to be an adolescent or the gene-seed implants will probably malfunction, but the Space Marine ostensibly only recruit from the most fearsome warriors in the galaxy. The most fearsome and accomplished warriors are usually adults. There are not many 12-year-old Conans out there.

Fellblade posted:

In the real world the onset of puberty has fluctuated throughout history from between age 12 and 18 due to standard of living, nutrition and stuff. So at least the age part can be 'explained' away.

Baron Bifford posted:

The Space Marine creation process seems contradictory. The fluff says that the neophyte needs to be an adolescent or the gene-seed implants will probably malfunction, but the Space Marine ostensibly only recruit from the most fearsome warriors in the galaxy. The most fearsome and accomplished warriors are usually adults. There are not many 12-year-old Conans out there.

Mikojan posted:

I always figured they recruited children from warrior races or generally resilient lines people. Or very young crminals and hive gangers, conditioned for survival at very early ages.

Kegslayer posted:

I like Abnett and while his prose is great, I find he has difficulty ending a story.

Impaired Casing posted:

I don't really know of any book, but there's a great short thing someone wrote up.


Got it from http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Adeptus_Mechanicus

Arquinsiel posted:

I keep seeing people say that and I used to agree until I read Embedded. He's not ending stories badly, he's just leaving the consequences of the story to another book. Sometimes that book doesn't ever get written. We're used to getting epilogue chapters and "where are they now" Animal House endings these days, but that's not the only way to do things.
That's fun, but doesn't really mesh well with how it's been fluffed out in the texts.

The main thing to remember about the Adeptus Mechanicus is that it's the reductio ad absurdum result of union-busting. That's why there's so much talk of 14 hour work days six days a week and people being literally made into the machines they operate. It's all about Maggie.

Arquinsiel posted:

I understand it, I just don't think it's necessarily fair. To use the most recent example, Salvation's Reach ends BAM right after the action. There's no resolution of losing Dorden or anyone else and no examination at all of if the big scheme actually worked at all.

Because that's for the NEXT book to examine.

Weissritter posted:

Just started on the Gaunt's Ghost series for the first, finished till Sabbat Martyr. I love it, though I am curious:

The Saint seems much more humble and... benevolent than I expected? As an example, after taking out the Baneblade, she asks them to call her by name, talk about how Corbec has achieved more valiant deeds than her, asks if she is rambling. Not to mention her general demeanor throughout the book after she showed up.

Do any other saints show up in other books?

Arquinsiel posted:

Look at it this way: she KNOWS that if she dies she goes to the Emperor's side. She is 100% sure there is life after death. She is also waving around a sword that cuts through siege tanks while wearing power armour that makes the average marine look like he's wearing a bodge job. Corbec is out there fighting the same fight, but without any of that stuff. Thus his faith is stronger than hers and he is more blessed in the Emperor's sight blah blah etc. Also it makes people feel good when she says that stuff.

No other saint really gets mentioned, but her retinue do get named and at least one of them turned up earlier than that, kind of.

Weissritter posted:

Yeah, I had just expected her to be more.. zealous? More pompous, perhaps? Not to take time to speak to the rank-and-file on a first name/nickname basis. She just seems to be as close to a paladin-archetype you can get in a setting like WH40K. I do like the little touches like how everyone who saw her at the parade thought she was looking at each of them directly.

Arquinsiel posted:

I understand it, I just don't think it's necessarily fair. To use the most recent example, Salvation's Reach ends BAM right after the action. There's no resolution of losing Dorden or anyone else and no examination at all of if the big scheme actually worked at all.

Because that's for the NEXT book to examine.

Cream_Filling posted:

Dunno, I think she cleaves a lot closer to the saint archetype. A paladin is supposed to be a holy warrior - a fusion of the earthy, proud soldier with the higher ideals and devotion of the clergy. By comparison, a saint is, well, a saint - an unearthly exemplar, touched by the divine, often portrayed as strangely blissful, selfless, and/or otherwise unconcerned or disconnected from material attachments and normal, human concerns. The fact that she's a war saint is probably because it's 40k, and for many incarnations of the Imperial church every war is a holy war and battle is basically a sacrament.

Cream_Filling posted:

Dunno, I think she cleaves a lot closer to the saint archetype. A paladin is supposed to be a holy warrior - a fusion of the earthy, proud soldier with the higher ideals and devotion of the clergy. By comparison, a saint is, well, a saint - an unearthly exemplar, touched by the divine, often portrayed as strangely blissful, selfless, and/or otherwise unconcerned or disconnected from material attachments and normal, human concerns. The fact that she's a war saint is probably because it's 40k, and for many incarnations of the Imperial church every war is a holy war and battle is basically a sacrament.

Kurzon posted:

Are we using the Dungeons and Dragons definition of paladin or the historical definition (Charlemagne's senior knights)?

ed balls balls man posted:

Urg The Sigilite sounds great, but it's a loving audiobook.

ed balls balls man posted:

Urg The Sigilite sounds great, but it's a loving audiobook.

AcidRonin posted:

They have started releasing the Audio drama's in book anthology form. Like a collection of short stories, they already did one collection.

Urg, the first of the Sigilite's. The Emperors autistic cousin

bunnyofdoom posted:

I wonder if they'll release Aporkalypse now Dead in the Water this way

VanSandman posted:

Tell me more of this Aporkalypse Now, please.

Cooked Auto posted:

Oh and it seems like they're finally making a move to adding their stuff to Android and Kindle.
http://www.blacklibrary.com/digital-editions-preview.html

UberJumper posted:

I finished Eisenhorn, and it was good but i didn't find it that amazing overall. My biggest problem was Abnett introducing way too many characters and under developing the vast majority of them or doing nothing with them. However Tobias Maxiwell was awesome and his death was

Going to start reading Ravenor.