All tagged empire

Lives under empire

Eric de Roulet
Fantasy

Amid the dizzying flurry of political news and global affairs developments in 2025, it might be difficult to imagine why we would need more fiction about imperialism, dictatorships, and the manufacturing of consent for forever-wars. After all, doesn’t our own world abound with examples of powerful countries exploiting and extracting from weaker ones, of autocrats (or aspiring ones) extending their tentacles into every aspect of public and private life, of empires lurching from one war to another in attempt to justify their continued existence, and of supposed authority figures and thought leaders falling in line?

Yet this is exactly what we see in the setting that unifies the stories in One Message Remains, a collection of short fiction by Premee Mohamed.

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future There Are Only Warriors

Kyle Tam
Science fiction

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

So says the opening blurb that accompanies every piece of media related to Warhammer 40,000, encapsulating the core of what makes this media giant distinct. Across tabletop games, video games, and tie-in novelizations the universe seeks to portray a universal truth of the setting—there is little relief to be found in this far off age. Only conflict. However, whether the darkness is entirely grim can vary from author to author, creating a tonal conflict that may make readers uncertain whether the universe should be taken with grave seriousness or be perceived as tongue in cheek. This essay is doing a deep dive into two of the setting’s most notable heroes and the disparity between their depictions in the context of this grim future - Ibram Gaunt from the Gaunt’s Ghosts series by Dan Abnett and Ciaphas Cain from the Ciaphas Cain novels by Sandy Mitchell. I’ll look at how these contrasting approaches have created a fuller universe, as well as how they have vaulted the faction of the Imperium of Man directly into the spotlight of the series as a whole.

What Lies and Threats

Abby Roberts
Fantasy

J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist, not a scholar of myth. He admitted as much in “On Fairy-Stories,” an essay originally given as a lecture in 1939. Nonetheless, “On Fairy-Stories” shows Tolkien was knowledgeable about myth scholarship of his and preceding generations and had drawn his own conclusions on the origins and functions of myth. For Tolkien, myth was the process by which human beings comprehend and describe the world around them: “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”

Tolkien had begun writing The Lord of the Rings at about the time he delivered “On Fairy-Stories.” His ideas about the cognitive role of myth play out in the novel.