Hello, I am Brian

[Blucey]

Greetings!

I’m Brian Lucey, one of the speakers in the Sunday sessions.

My main interest is in the lore: the deep, chaotic (sic), messily wonderful universe of Warhammer 40K. Not so much Sigmar, etc. I have never painted a thing.

Part of what draws me to 40K probably comes from the day job. For the next few months, at least, I’m Professor of International Finance and Commodities at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin. This sounds more august than it is; believe me.

Behind that are about 40 years of observing, studying and occasionally being trapped inside dysfunctional institutions.

I grew up in Ireland in the 1970s, when the country was hideously dysfunctional, with a low-grade civil war up the road polluting politics and society and an economy best described as barely. The 1980s, when I went to college, arguably got worse: mass unemployment, emigration, economic crisis and the cheerful background possibility of nuclear annihilation. Glimmers of economic hope began to appear around the Single European Act in 1987, things got great until we went bankrupt, then got ok again.

By the middle 80s I had left college and joined the Irish civil service. I subsequently moved to the Central Bank (on Black Monday, because apparently somebody had a sense of humour) and since 1992 I’ve been in the university sector.

So I have spent a considerable portion of my life thinking about institutions: why they work, why they fail, why obviously dysfunctional arrangements persist, and why organisations develop elaborate procedures for dealing with problems created by their previous elaborate procedures. I’ve published a lot on financial stability and instability, institutions, universities and the innovation economy, yadda yadda yadda. Google Scholar has the evidence for anyone sufficiently determined.

I’ve also spent more than 20 years as an academic editor, including as Editor-in-Chief of several journals. That provides an entirely different education in bureaucracy, institutional inertia and the strange things people will defend because this is how we have always done it. I also spent six years on a university governing board. The Administratum holds few terrors for me.

I’ve always been interested in science fiction, from early editions of 2000 AD through occasional encounters with White Dwarf, although for most of my life I was primarily a reader of mainstream SF.

Then Covid happened, and I fell properly into 40K lore.

Since then I’ve become a fairly substantial consumer of the Black Library with well over 100 books read and rated so far, ratings and assorted opinions at www.brianmlucey.com. Big fan of Dan Abnett and Chris Wraight. I cannot get into Peter Fehervari, despite repeated attempts and despite being told that this is a character defect.

And I’m an Alpha Legion fan. Or am I?

What fascinates me most about 40K is the institutional side of the setting: organisations surviving for millennia after forgetting why they were created; emergency measures becoming permanent constitutional arrangements; bureaucracies acquiring interests of their own; technological and institutional path dependence; and intelligent people trying to make rational decisions inside systems that make rational outcomes almost impossible.

I’ve also begun to dabble in fanfic, and have somehow converted several decades of notes on the state of universities and academia into three related books looking at both through a 40K lens. It turns out that the distance between the modern university and the Golden Throne is sometimes distressingly short.

For some reason, I find all of this strangely familiar.

Looking forward to meeting everyone in Frankfurt.

[Mike]

Hi Brian, welcome to the forum! Really looking forward to your talk in Frankfurt. What sort of SF are you into?

[Blucey]

pfff. I have read them all Mike.. Honestly, for 50y reading anything and everything that comes my way. From Verne though Farmer, all of Heinlein, asimov, Niven + associates...
Right now, beyond W40k, I really like Neal Ascher, the Bobiverse books, almost any decent Alt-History book.