Topic: 21st century ever mentioned in 40k history?

[Werwolf Traitor]

Fulgrim was full of old Earth references. Herodotus, Paracelsus, Irenaeus... Fulgrim even casually references Napoleon at one point.

Cool, i gotta get this book, is it still for sale?

[Irandrura]

Yes - the latest in the Heresy series. It's pretty easy to find. Remember, Google first, then post.

[danscan]

I apologize I really didn't mean to open the whole Hitler can of worms, that was just a passing mention there, but now that the can has been opened ...

Isn't there some formula out there that as a message board post gets longer the chances of hitler being mentioned get closer and closer to 1.  It just happened alot quicker here.  Or does it have to do with the Author of StarShip troopers. 

The horus herasy books mention alot of information about the pre-imperial time.  Horus and the luna wolves fight against a huge fortification building STC. In the second book.  Even fighting humans in power armour. 

I would recommend the HH seriers as you do get bits and pieces of the pre-imperial times and they are generally good reads.

[Werwolf Traitor]

Yes - the latest in the Heresy series. It's pretty easy to find. Remember, Google first, then post.

Uhm, youre right, my fault, i was too excited about it.

[Brother Sigorn]

Man,I cant wait to read Fulgrim.I've read the entire Heresy series since I first posted this thread,and can say reading them answered my own question.

I'm trying to get my wife to read the series,she doesnt have any idea about 40k fluff,but I think they are some of the best storytelling whether you play 40k or not.

[Gladewalker]

I don't know. I personally believe that future generetion will consider us a dark age. Consider how we keep records. mainly 2 ways: paper and digital. If it's digital, it's as good as lost. Even if they find a cd 200 years from now (you heard me, a mere 200) it's unlikely that people would be able to read it as it would be incompatinle.

1000 years from now, they would have little idea of HOW the cd works and it would be well and truly useless. in 3000 years, they'd be comming up with theories as to what a cd is based on ancient diagrams uncovered.

Next we have the paper trail. One reason that we have so much information from precious ages is that the writing was done in monuments like the pyramids, on leather and baked clay tablets. Essentially they lasted. Paper doesn't last as long or very long at all.

Now consider this. No paper, no electronic recordings, what do we have? Our monuments. Sorry boys and girls, but we don't really writ on monuments these days. Building are a lot more functiona and economical. And those that do remain? well, if any even that causes us to forget what we have recorded (ie prevents us from continously compiling and updating information on a global scale) occurs, well, I'm thinking the monoments would be pretty wrecked themselves.

You're assuming of course that that information is retained in that format and subsequent generations don't "scan" it into whatever the current form is. I agree that much of it will get lost through the trans-generational winnowing of information. However, SOMETHING will survive. It just remains to be debated WHAT will survive =-)

[Divinity]

An I-Pod!!! (perfectly reasonable)

[Irandrura]

I'm trying to get my wife to read the series,she doesnt have any idea about 40k fluff,but I think they are some of the best storytelling whether you play 40k or not.

I'm actually rather curious about what would happen if you got someone totally ignorant of 40k to read the Heresy novels. Currently, everyone who reads them already knows the story. I'm wonder what someone without any of that backstory would make of it - would it enhance the novels, or the exact opposite, considering the number of references to later events they include?

[Brother Sigorn]

I'm actually rather curious about what would happen if you got someone totally ignorant of 40k to read the Heresy novels. Currently, everyone who reads them already knows the story. I'm wonder what someone without any of that backstory would make of it - would it enhance the novels, or the exact opposite, considering the number of references to later events they include?

I was wondering the same thing,I was going to give my wife some of the details before she read them.I think you would have to,seeing as the emperor is a god to everyone in 40k,and its the total opposite in 30k.I think the details would enhance the reading,but with that said the story is definitely an excellent one and worth reading for anyone who just wants to enjoy  a really good story.

[g00gle5]

Well it just so happens to be your lucky day as I have a friend who I lent them to recently who is absolutely clueless to 40k.
He hates the tabletop as nothing about it appeals to him, however he is a big book reader and as, like you guys, I thought he would enjoy the books just for the story-telling content.

So he read the first three back to front in a day.

When I discussed with him what he liked and disliked about the books it was very interesting. Okay there will be spoilers below here for those that care...

So, as already mentioned, those that are familiar with 40k know pretty much what will happen, he was relatively clueless except for the obvious things - like Horus is going to betray the Emperor at some point. So when we see that somehow Lucius is fighting on the Loyalist side for a bit, we are just waiting for him to turn traitor (he's a chaos special character...) - my friend wouldn't know for sure he was going to.

On the other hand, I was saying how the books deliberately build stronger relationships with the Primarchs who have a special connection to each other - in the first book it mentions that Sanguinius is one of Horus's closest brothers, it also so happens that Sanguinius is killed by Horus himself.

Another aspect of the books which I think is very appealing for the non-40k enthusiast, as I have seen from my friend, is that he isn't tainted by all the other fluff for Space Marines that we will all have read - his interpretation is very pure from the perspective of the Heresy series. He has never read a story about a hundred Space Marines taken on a gazillion Orks, then another story of a tyranid hive tyrant that has single handedly chopped through a detachment of veterans. He has a very clear view of what a Space Marine is and is not capable of.

From the story-telling aspect of the novels themselves, he is enjoying them very much. It has all the right qualities for any set of books: an extremely detailed universe which has grown over years and years with most details well-thought through and expanded upon; believable, life-like characters, the good and the bad; the books have a lot of engrossing battle scenes, but for both me and my friend we enjoy most how they deal with a lot of moral ideas like prejudice, discrimination, religion and even deals with many political viewpoints.

Lastly, the books have a very good balance of macro and micro management and how they intertwine, the micro events all unfolding and building up to be extremely epic climax which the 40k universe is built around.

Just to finish all this up everyday my friend asks me if I have finished Fulgrim yet, just because he wants to steal it off me.

[danscan]

Anyone notice a common theme to the first three books and the flight of the Einstein.  I figured it out by about chapter two of Einstien that it was going to repeat.
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"
 "SPOILER NOTICE"

Betreyal by the young men.  The old men stay loyal but the young rebel.  Maybe the lokken and abbadon my have been alittle different but the rest were the similiar.  Tarist(can't remeber) and Lucius, Gaurla and young guy with the powerfist(I forget and I read it last week), and finially Emperor and Horus. 



These are the first series of books that I have read so quickly.  Normally a novel takes me a month to read.  But I was done the first three in a month.  flight of the Einestien was done in about a week.  And my order for the next two won't get here till October because I ordered the next book in the series along with fulgrim.  I might switch to get them seperately.

[Bumbles]

Well, revolution is the tool of the young, while perpetuation is the task of the old.
Although, to poke a hole in your argument, in Fulgrim it's the young who stay loyal to the ideas of the Emperor's Children while the old are corrupted.
And in Flight of the Eisenstein, Typhon is the captain of the first company, so he's old guard as well.

[Coutelier]

It is quite likely that records of our time will survive somewhere I think... okay, so it's 40,000 years in the future and our real life civilization hasn't existed for nearly that long.  Even so we still regularly refer to the works of 'ancient' writers and philosophers (in our case ancient is just a few thousand years ago of course).

I would imagine that in the future copies of these works will continue to be reprinted again and again, and stored in whatever other medium exists at the time.

Even if somehow every single trace of the present was destroyed on Earth, it's likely that as humans expanded into the stars colonists would have brought digital archives with them; whole libraries of stuff - books, music, movies - increasing the chances that at least some records will survive.

Of course, such ancient works are only likely to be of interest to historians and other scholarly types.  I can't imagine the average Imperial Guardsman cares much about maps of ancient europe or the judicial system of something called the Usa.  Old movies may get restored, but which of them wants to watch something that requires subtitles?

[Kage2020]

You're assuming of course that that information is retained in that format and subsequent generations don't "scan" it into whatever the current form is.

Indeed.  With that said, my favourite reference on this subject is that in the late '80s the English decided that it would be a great idea if they digitised the Domesday Book (or was it the Magna Carta?).  Excellent.  The kind of thing that futurists love -- use the latest technology and preserve such a valuable historical document from future damage.  They spent a great deal of money scanning the document and put it on a fantastic new technology called "laser disc."

Then they left it.  No updating it with developing technologies.

Some bright spark then remembered the digital copy and went, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could use that digital copy we made years back?"  They pulled it out and one of them said, "Erm, this is rather big for a CD.  I'm sure that it's not going to fit in the CD-ROM drive..."

"Err, it's a laser disc.  I think that my grandfather had one of these."
"Yeah, but how do we read it?  I'm serious about this; I'll break it if I try and squeeze it into this CD-ROM thingy."
"Well, we could find the original reader.  It must be around in a dusty cellar somewhere?"
"Great idea!" 

<rumages around>

"Okay, we found it."
"Right.  Let's plug it... Damn.  Non-standard connector.  No problem, we find a wiring diagram and we can throw it into a serial port!"

<sounds of screw drivers, shouts of annoyance, thanks-be-to-the-gods that they weren't doing this in the modern world with the lack of RS232 connectors on most computers that you buy out of the store>

"Why's the screen just whizzing by with all those numbers.  Shouldn't it work now?"
"Erm, no.  Now we have to figure out how the data was put on there, what the data means, and create some form of translator module so that we can read it.  Of course, the resolution is going to be compared to modern stuff but - hey! - it keeps me in a job for the next six months.  Hopefully I'll be able to get in contact with some of the original designers and they're not totally gaga after all this time."
"Errr, Dave.  Why don't we just scan it again?"
"Right, but that defeats the point of doing the scan in the first place doesn't it?"

Etc.

Sorry, couldn't resist. 



Kage

[Necrontyrtitan]

Well...as regards the passing down of information...

Way back when, say 1000 years ago, there were two main ways of recording information. Memory and speech, and writing things down. Now, there were only a few million people around back then, so not much infomation anyway, and most of those people couldn't read or write. Most of the information commited to memory was religious, legendary, or folklore.

 Nowadays, we have pretty much everything stored somewhere, duplicated, available on the internet, vast libraries around the world, petabytes of information. It'll take a global event to wipeout all traces of history, and if that happens, we probably wont be around to be bothered. That said, look how quickly paper computer records, vinyl, cassete tape, CDs, DVDs, etc have been superceded by bigger and faster things. A few years ago we could never have dreamed of 1Tb computers with 4 gig of ram. Boom. 5 years and it's practically standard.

On a similar note, about backward compatibilty, theres a site in the american desert where they're trying to decide on how to let future people/archaeologists/aliens know that very very bad radioactive material is buried there. Obviously, the biohazard/radiation symbol could carry on for millenia, but its not very likely. So they're coming up with things that don't rely on current knowledge. Difficult (try it yourself) but very interesting.

[Lord Commissar Spiteful]

That site is what got me to thinking that we'd have another dark age. Like Kage pointed out backward compatibility makes "newer" technology pretty dodgy. Basically we can understand the ancient egyptians due to the rosetta stone. Now that was 3 languages. If we do a digital eq etc, we'll need the rossetta stone equivalent for wiring, format, language, etc. Not very practical.

Now the thing with this site is that even if it goes perfectly and people understand it 100 %, it will say something like: "warning, buried here is dangerous materials. If you go in you will die."
Now to an archeologist that's like waving a sausage in front of a dog. How many "curses" have they ignored?

Of course, along the 40k timeline, 20/21st century tech is only about 10 000 years old, not 38 000.
This is due to the "stasis" in the 40k timeline from the Emperor to the present (10 000 years) and the fact that humanity has been keeping record up to the age of strife. So basically that 40 000 years would be like 10 000 years for us.

Still wound't count on finding much though.

[jfood]

Considering the Emperor grew up with the likes of Sun Tzu, Plato, Napolean, Patton, Rembrandt etc, I think he would have seen how valuable those ideas were and always will be. True, he doesn't have much to say now, but in the early days of the Imperium, which laid the foundation of all that was to follow, classical knowledge was most likely highly regarded. He is recorded history. While I doubt the average imperial has read 'Hamlet' I'd wager the average space marine has read 'The Art of War'.

[Gornon]

Considering the Emperor grew up with the likes of Sun Tzu, Plato, Napolean, Patton, Rembrandt etc, I think he would have seen how valuable those ideas were and always will be. True, he doesn't have much to say now, but in the early days of the Imperium, which laid the foundation of all that was to follow, classical knowledge was most likely highly regarded. He is recorded history. While I doubt the average imperial has read 'Hamlet' I'd wager the average space marine has read 'The Art of War'.

That could be possible, as he took many of the Imperiums symbols from history, did he not?  The twin headed eagle is from Byzantium and the Russian Imperium correct?  The question is what happened after he was interned?  Did the love of classical knowlage fall into disfavor?  Afterall, the Imperium was devestated and rebuilding.  I doubt those in charge would pay attention to who the Emperor knew a long time ago.  Then add on 10000 more years to bring us up to the modern times and there is even more chance its was lost anyways.

Corax of the Raven Guard apparently read Poe though....

[Marty660]

One thing that has been forgotten so far is oral tradition. For example, the medieval peasants knew (alittle) about the Roman Empire not because they had read about, not because they had seen anything at all proving it, but because they were told about it. Same goes for us when we were young - we knew about medieval knights and stuff when we were 3 because our parents would tell us a story about something like that.
now, of course, such things get completely distorted over time (we've all played telephone, i believe). however, I'm sure that the learned of the Imperium would have some clue as to general facts about our times. I'm sure they would know that by the year 2000, for example, men were making some sort of headway into space, etc...
throw in the emperor, and you know that someone would know that man could blow up his homeworld before he could colonise another.

[Irandrura]

Considering the Emperor grew up with the likes of Sun Tzu, Plato, Napolean, Patton, Rembrandt etc, I think he would have seen how valuable those ideas were and always will be. True, he doesn't have much to say now, but in the early days of the Imperium, which laid the foundation of all that was to follow, classical knowledge was most likely highly regarded. He is recorded history. While I doubt the average imperial has read 'Hamlet' I'd wager the average space marine has read 'The Art of War'.

Is anyone else thinking of that episode of the The Simpsons?
'Now children, who wrote The Art of War?'
'I... uh... damn it, I should know this one... the... Emperor?'
'Very good, Bart...'
'No! You're wrong! You're all wrong!'

On a more serious note, why would the Emperor bother memorising classical texts and preserving them? Seems like a waste of time for him, doesn't it?