3 RESULTS
2024Friday 27th SeptemberOnlinePanel 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 SeptemberOnlinePanel 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 SeptemberOnlinePanel 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 …