Inquisitor was a small-scale miniatures game that focused on the activities of small parties of adventurers fighting small parties of Chaos cultists, aliens, and demons. This is a background which, of course, was designed primarily to give an excuse for large armies of miniature orks and tyranids and Space Marines to fight each other, but it’s also formed the setting for a series of other games. Beset on all sides by terrifying alien threats, and from without and within by the insidious threat of the Chaos demons who live in hyperspace and constantly seek to undermine the very material universe itself, it’s not surprising that the Imperium is more than a little crazy. The Imperium has backslid into a sort of theocratic Communist fascist dictatorship then again, none of the other galactic civilisations are especially nice either (with the possible exception of the Eldar, who are going extinct).
Humanity is ruled by the Imperium of Mankind, which in theory serves the immortal Emperor who sits on the Golden Throne and who has secretly guided mankind’s destiny since the Stone Age in practice, the Emperor is incommunicado, having been crippled in the 31st Millennium by the traitor Horus, kept alive by the power of the Golden Throne and the psychics harvested across the Imperium to lend him their life energy. Technology is the subject of fear and superstition, and even the tech-priests who administer it aren’t sure what is genuine scientific knowledge and what is superstitious doctrine. Bad experiences with Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms series during my teenage years caused me to steer away from tie-in fiction, but recently – online and in real life – I kept hearing good things about Eisenhorn, a trilogy by Dan Abnett set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.Ī brief explanation for people who aren’t enormous nerds: Warhammer 40,000 is a miniatures wargame set in the 41st Millennium, in an era in which mankind has reached the stars, colonised them, and then begun a slow slide back towards barbarism. Salvatore and Ed Greenwood lurk behind every corner, just waiting to ambush an unwary canary. If there were ever a perilous realm for the Reading Canary to explore, it’s in the realm of books based on computer games, tabletop RPGs, and wargames. Eisenhorn: A Hardboiled Psychic Detective From the Secret Police The Reading Canary is your guide to precisely how far into a particular sequence you should read, and which side-passages you should explore, before the noxious gases become too much and you should turn back. Series of novels – especially in fantasy and SF fiction, but distressingly frequently on other genres as well – have a nasty tendency to turn sour partway through. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance. This article was originally published on Ferretbrain.
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