The Genestealer Cults faction of Warhammer 40,000 are a playable faction of human-alien hybrids that serve as a vanguard force for the invasion of the locust-like Tyranid hive fleets. That the Tyranids will devour human and hybrid denizens of the planet alike when they arrive ostensibly undermines the cults’ liberatory promises to those oppressed by the fascistic Imperium of Man. Rather than view this as a critique of revolution within the Imperium or a supposed justification of its methods in the face of such an insidious foe, this paper aims to analyse the Genestealer Cults as a legitimate liberating force within the 40k universe as a way to draw attention to the hobby’s own liberating power, structured around a close textual analysis of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Day of Ascension (2022). It utilises a cultural studies framework built on a posthumanist reading of the work of Henri Bergson, Donna Haraway, and Vilém Flusser to argue that the fate of the novel’s Genestealer protagonists ceases to be tragic if one adopts a reading strategy that decentres narrative homogeneity in the 40k universe. In this framework the materialist cognition of unlucky dice, spilled Nuln Oil, and wobbly bases are of equal importance to lore, tactics, and narrative arcs. Far from not taking the game seriously, these at times comical elements of the hobby decentre a conception of the human as a rational individual in favour of one that is entangled in a hive of social, material, and environmental networks. This paper describes how this connection manifests through the shared enjoyment of the Genestealer Cults by player and cultist; an enjoyment only visible when we – to paraphrase Albert Camus – imagine the Genestealer cultist happy.
Author bio
Dr Nikolas Matovinovic is an early career researcher in the school of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His work focuses on the intersection of posthumanist cultural studies and genre screen media and has published work in ‘Games and Culture’, ‘Film Criticism’, and ‘International Journal of Communication’.
