Warhammer 40k’s Grimdark Challenge to Humanists
The paradoxical combo of cosmic horror and human progress
When I was in graduate school, I often walked to the main street to take a bus downtown. At a corner of that intersection there stood a Warhammer Games shop. Although I’ve never played them, I’d known about those tabletop games because the associated little intricate fantasy figurines struck my nerdy young-adult self as cool.
Still, I never once entered that shop, although I passed it many times. I feared the shop might work like a used car lot so that once you stepped foot on the premises, you’d be besieged with entreaties to start playing the tabletop game, which would have been a bridge too far for me. Of course, that fear was in any case absurd.
I’d also grown used to ignoring the half of the science fiction section of bookstores that holds the lore-laden franchise novels such as those of the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Warhammer fictional universes.
Yet recently I stumbled on the premise of the Warhammer 40k futuristic universe, a premise that turns out to be philosophically challenging. You see, the idea for this elaborate science-fictional tabletop game’s setting originated in 1987, and the fictional world has expanded with numerous rulebooks, novels, and video games. Indeed, this…
