I
'm actually reading Warhammer 40k novels now; I'm so gay. Dan Abnett is often held up as the preeminent writer of the Black Library, and having gotten most of the way through his book Horus Rising, the praise is justly deserved. Abnett understands the themes he has to work with, he understands when to be serious, when to be light, when to be completely gonzo. His character touches are good, his world-building touches better. I've toyed around, in my own gay mind, with ideas for 40k stories myself. I don't really know how it happened, but the originators of the Warhammer universe somehow hit upon an extremely potent brew of aesthetics and themes that I just can't really get enough of, couched in a world that can alternately poke fun at itself and be deathly grim and scary.
Lots of fans and semi-fans of the game and setting like to do a little performance where they chide people for liking the Space Marines, and the Imperium more generally. "Don't you realize they're fascist, xenophobic, violent theocrats?" Yes, obviously, we do, it's fucking awesome. Warhammer 40k does something similar to what great comedy can do -- it gives you permission to think and play in a space that would ordinarily be off-limits in polite society. It allows us to explore, in a safe but still subversive way, what it would mean to think and act in ways that we tell ourselves is abhorrent. I'm a God-fearing Catholic, but I'm no prude about intellectual purity. I think we absolutely should have semi-sanctioned means of entering into transgression, the way that Slavoj Zizek identifies that rude jokes allow us to do.
Furthermore, what makes the Imperium really scary to the hand-wringers is how reasonable it is, in many ways. In a terrible universe like 40k's, violent xenophobia is the only winning strategy; when you have a being like the Emperor, who wouldn't be a fascist? And when you build your spaceships to look like giant Gothic cathedrals, religious zealotry starts to look pretty good. But, if that's still not your style, there are all sorts of bad guys you can secretly sympathize with, from savage brutes, to death-worshipping robots, to pain-artists, to warp-born demon-spawn. I don't know how Games Workshop managed to come up with such a great setting and completely nail the physical aesthetic of the models at the same time, but I'm awfully grateful they did.
Too bad the rules suck. But don't worry, I'm working on it.