7 RESULTS
2025Friday 26th September 2025OnlinePanel 9Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

Machine Spirit Epistemology: Ritual, Reason, and Trust in the Cult Mechanicus and Modern Explainable AI

In the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40,000, the Adeptus Mechanicus worships the Machine Spirit, a divine essence said to inhabit all technology. Though cloaked in ritual and superstition, the Cult Mechanicus enforces a deeply conservative system of knowledge management, system diagnostics, and behavioural control over complex, often poorly understood machinery. This paper argues that such …

2025Friday 26th September 2025OnlinePanel 9Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

The Architecture of the 41st Millennium

This paper discusses the built environment of the Warhammer 40,000 universe through a number of architectural, anthropological, and cinematic theories.  The aim is to underline the uniqueness of this setting, grounded firmly in British popular culture to its status as a global phenomenon.  In addition to this, the paper examines the hobbyists’ engagement with modelmaking …

2025Friday 26th September 2025OnlinePanel 9Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

Al-Farabi’s Attainment of Happiness and the God-Emperor of Mankind

The works of the medieval Arabic philosopher Al-Farabi (c. 872-950) reconstruct the thinking of Plato and Aristotle in a world forever changed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the Attainment of Happiness and The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Al-Farabi quietly presents a radical political program. Al-Farabi’s ponderous opening meditation on epistemology turns out to …

2025Friday 26th September 2025OnlinePanel 9Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

The Stars are Right: Exploring the C’Tan as Lovecraftian horror in the Black Library

Warhammer 40,000 has drawn significant inspiration from American author H.P. Lovecraft and the genre of cosmic horror more broadly. Lovecraft stands as an icon of pulp and horror literature who has inspired countless contemporary works of science fiction and pioneered the genre of Lovecraftian, or cosmic horror. The alien nature and design of the Tyranids …

2024Friday 27th September 2024OnlinePanel 9Warhammer 40k

Intertextuality as a double-edged chainsword – is writing for Warhammer a barrier to narrative invention?

Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist concept of intertextuality applies to the creation of all genres and formats of texts, but when it comes to working within an existing universe such as Warhammer, the relationship with what has come before and, challengingly from wider narrative and character arc perspectives, what may come in the future, takes on a …

2024Friday 27th September 2024OnlinePanel 9Warhammer 40k

The Power of Ensembles: How Warhammer Novels Introduce Worldbuilding and Create Tension through Multiperspective Storytelling

Worldbuilding is an integral part of the science fiction and fantasy genres. A major challenge of these genres is introducing the setting to readers in a way that is natural and doesn’t overwhelm them. This can be done through a reader surrogate character, a character that is either new to the setting (such as Neo …

2024Friday 27th September 2024OnlinePanel 9Warhammer 40k

The Emperor’s Great Crusade, ‘instrumental reason’ and the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’: The Horus Heresy series from the perspective of philosophy of history

One would expect the Horus Heresy series to only expand on background information already available in Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks and codices to create fully-fledged novels. With the first novel ‘Horus Rising’ (written by Dan Abnett and published in 2006), however, the authors began already to add new aspects to the background story. For example, they …